«This thesis examines written, audio-visual and musical representations of real-life British serial killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady (the ‘Moors Murderers’) and Peter Sutcliffe (the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’), from the time of their crimes to the present day, and their proliferation beyond the cases’ immediate historical‐legal context. Through the theoretical construct ‘Northientalism’ I interrogate such representations’ replication and engagement of stereotypes and anxieties accruing to the figure of the white working-class ‘Northern’ subject in these cases, within a broader context of pre‐existing historical trajectories and generic conventions of Northern and true crime representation. Interrogating changing perceptions of the cultural functions and meanings of murderers in late–‐capitalist socio–‐cultural history, I argue that the underlying structure of true crime is the counterbalance between the exceptional and the everyday, in service of which its second crucial structuring technique – the depiction of physical detail – operates. Applying the theories of David Schmid and Lisa Downing to a new range of figures and artefacts I demonstrate ways true crime can expose and explore the unequal power relations inherent in capitalism, both constructing the figure of the criminal as – and uncoupling that figure from a mythology that renders them – falsely ontologically separate from normalised forms of violence.» [Résumé]
Format: Thèse
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The Cinematic Boogeyman: The Folkloric Roots of the Slasher Villain
«This doctoral thesis complements earlier scholarship by Marina Warner concerning the Boogeyman as a figure representative of monstrosity and otherness by assessing these topics through an interdisciplinary lens. Employing a methodological approach that incorporates research from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and film studies, I analyse the Boogeyman within the context of the traditional fairytale and the modern horror film, and thereby reveal the key facets of this figure in the Western cultural imaginary. Specifically, I demonstrate that the villains of the contemporary slasher film (a subgenre of the horror film) are cinematic manifestations of the folkloric Boogeyman through a comparison of their physical and psychological attributes. Examining the archetypal properties of these characters, I argue that the traits that characterize the Boogeyman are the result of the fact that he is a composite of three archetypal forms: the collective Shadow, the Terrible Father, and the Death-Demon. I address three key questions: (1) what particular physical and psychological qualities are associated with the Boogeyman; (2) how the persona of the Boogeyman is constituted in the public consciousness; and (3) what moral, philosophical, and psychological role does he serve in Western culture. Over the course of this thesis, I demonstrate the fact that the Boogeyman represents the amalgamation of three archetypal components. Firstly, he embodies the role of the collective Shadow and functions to personify violent and anarchic characteristics that are repressed by the community and projected onto monstrous figures in the popular consciousness. Secondly, he is a manifestation of the negative attributes associated with the archetypal Father (referred to in literature as the “Terrible Father”) who punishes individuals that defy hegemonic values. Finally, he is a cultural embodiment of the Death-Demon, a conceptual figure that personifies anxieties related to death, and the degeneration of the body. This thesis provides a comparative analysis of a series of case studies that clearly illustrate the characteristics synonymous with the Boogeyman in the Western cultural imaginary. I begin with an examination of Bluebeard, a homicidal villain featured in Charles Perrault’s 1697 collection of fairytales titled Histoires ou contes du temps passé. In her seminal text No Go the Bogeyman, Warner posits Bluebeard as a clear example of the folkloric Boogeyman due to the fact that he is physically grotesque and morally repugnant. In Perrault’s story, Bluebeard is a villain who marries and then murders a series of women for disobeying him, and subsequently stores their bodies in his private chamber. Extrapolating the salient characteristics of Bluebeard as the folkloric Boogeyman, I assess these traits under an archetypal lens and demonstrate that Bluebeard/the folkloric Boogeyman is a manifestation of the collective Shadow, the Terrible Father, and the Death-Demon. After determining the archetypal properties of the folkloric Boogeyman, I highlight the presence of these same qualities in popular villains from the contemporary American slasher films of the 1970s and ’80s. Specifically, these characters include Michael Myers from Halloween (1978), Jason Voorhees of Friday the 13th (1980), and Freddy Krueger featured in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Through my analysis of these terrifying figures, I situate them within a larger archetypal context of monstrosity and simultaneously establish their role as cinematic manifestations of the folkloric Boogeyman. This examination reveals the placement of the Boogeyman within the cultural imaginary as a violent disciplinarian who reinforces moral boundaries through sadistic acts of violence and paradoxically brings both chaos and harmony to the collective by preserving social borders. By extension, I demonstrate the link between the slasher film and the fairytale, both of which serve a didactic function, imparting hegemonic values to the public concerning sexual politics, social propriety, and moderation.» [Résumé]
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Making monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the social construction of the serial killer
«The social construction of the serial killer is discussed with particular reference to Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer’s representation–texts include magazine and newspaper articles, transcripts of television talk-shows, books, movies, jokes and trading-cards–is contextualized with reference to serial killers of the last decade or so, and to the ways we have previously created the idea of monstrosity. Attention is paid particularly to Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and their movie versions which perhaps more than any other texts inform our contemporary construction of the serial killer.
The study discusses the roles that we desire the serial killer to play, as well the roles that we play, those perhaps we play for him. Identified in his representation are both elements of denial (denial that he has any connection with “normality”), and of celebration (of his perceived transcendence of “normality”). Part One, which begins with a chapter on the FBI’s power to define contemporary criminal monstrosity, focuses on how our serial killer stories attempt to preserve and police ideas of “order” and “civilization”. Dahmer is sometimes represented as a “hate killer”–as a homophobe, as a racist–but it is hate whose source, we insist, is asocial, not of the world we know. Thus inscribed with the power of unspeakableness, of meaning suspended, unheeded, he is estranged, but it is estrangement accompanied by wonder and delight. Describing our explorations of the serial killer’s world, Part Two suggests that we are not always horrified by what we see, and that, seeking the “truth” of the serial killer, we can find it in the discourse with which we seek it. Transcending boundaries between order and disorder, civilization and savagery, the monster we construct represents sanctioned powers: powers of masculinity, of conquest.
The study concludes by arguing that we should be questioning what we consider normal and/or natural about the serial killer construction, and that we need to interrogate the relation of fantasies of male violence, of racial and sexual purity, of closure, to our dominant culture and its fantasies.» [Résumé]
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Blurring all boundaries: The postmodern narratives of multiple murder
«The most comprehensive explanation for the serial killer’s current cultural notoriety has to do with a narratological combination of folkloric “threatening figures” and inherited Gothic story-telling conventions as reworked over the years into the postmodern era and packaged for mass reconsumption in pseudo-demonic forms derivative of popular conceptualizations and form legends of werewolves and, especially, vampires. That the serial killer inhabits the vampire’s metaphorical territory so easily is no accident: the cultural representation of multiple murder, whether presented as fact or fiction, changes its guises from generation to generation but is not new to our recent history. The current popularity of so-called “serial killer” narratives can be explained as the latest twentieth-century redressing of the ongoing human fascination with tales of sensational, multiple murders. The “serial killer” as defined by the FBI during the American 1980s and passed into the mass-media instruments of popular culture is thus a confabulation of Gothic/Romantic villain, literary vampire and werewolf, detective fiction conceits, frontier outlaw, and folkloric “threatening figure.” All of these are mythogenic reworkings of the multiple murderer, whose seemingly random but idiosyncratically meaningful, ritualistic invasions of bodies senses as a metaphor for and an invocation of the generalized, boundary-leveling violence of apocalypse itself.
Given this generalized narrative trope, I wish to analyze it as it specifically functions in several “serial killer” narratives of the pseudo-wartime atmosphere of the American 1980s and 1990s, specifically Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon and his 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs (as well as Jonathan Demme’s film version), John McNaughton’s 1986 film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman, Dominic Senals 1991 film Kalifornia, and Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers. I will also include another wartime multiple-murderer text, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 American film Shadow of a Doubt, to argue that this film marks a pivotal moment in the supposed transition from modernism to postmodernism. Since these texts were not created in political isolation, I will demonstrate that the serial killer’s recent popularity in this country satisfies not only our human craving for the reassurance of universal myth but also owes a great deal to an American version of neo-conservatism: a social movement which, in essence, seeks to revivify the ideology of capitalism through its appropriation of radical progressive discourse. A sense of destability naturally accompanies times of social upheaval, which the near-hysterical affirmation of capitalistic ideology in the wake of the end of the Cold War certainly qualified as. The function of the serial killer threat in such a macrocosmic project is to paradoxically legitimate the dominant culture in a multi-tiered fashion, but the inherent boundary-transgressing nature of the Gothic horror formula itself, upon which these fictional treatments rests, also radically subverts the status quo it purports to cherish. The end result is ontological destabilization: a key postmodern project.» [Résumé] -
The serial killer as postmodern anti-hero and harbinger of apocalypse in contemporary literature and life
«The so-termed Postmodern era which ensued in the years following World War II has brought marked changes in the quality and nature of both literature and life. By definition indefinable, the postmodern era is one of rampant consumerism, chaos, and decentralization; it is also the era during which serial violence and the serial killer became household terms.
Although postmodernism did not necessarily cause the recent rise in serial violence, serial crimes may be yet another aspect of a world that has become uncomfortable with labels, categories, and, in short, order. Serial killers may be perceived as individuals whose crimes reflect their overpowering need to exert power and control over a world which offers them few chances to enjoy these appurtenances.
This dissertation argues that the serial killer represents an extreme response to the changing modes of thinking that have accompanied the postmodernism. The first chapter examines postmodernism, serial violence, and the linkage of the two, offering definitions and scholarly commentary. The second and third chapters, respectively, treat Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho and Thomas Harris’ pair of novels, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. In each of these novels, the serial killer is depicted both as a consumer and as a potential agent of apocalypse. The conclusion offers closing statements about the prognosis for humanity.» [Résumé] -
Structures of violence: Representations of serial murder in postmodern America
«“Structures of Violence: Representations of Serial Murder in Postmodern America” combines structuralist techniques and feminist theory to disclose the ideological implications of the serial killer as cultural icon. I begin by arguing that the novels portraying such killers form a coherent literary genre, then show how fictional representations of the serial killer differ from serial homicide as understood by forensic psychology and the FBI.
The next four chapters focus on specific works that define the genre. Chapter Two examines the deep structure of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs within a frame of mythological criticism. Chapter Three uses feminist criticism regarding representation and violence to argue that the revolutionary impulses found in Patricia Cornwell’s award-winning first novel Postmortem are re-absorbed by the conservative nature of the genre-in her later career.
Chapter Four argues that Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho was controversial primarily due to the skill with Ellis manipulated his readers by triggering reading habits common to pornography, horror fiction, and advertising copy. Ellis’s claim that it is intended as social critique of the Reagan era is then tested. Chapter Five examines Dark Matter by Garfield Reeves-Stevens to show how the genre builds on the high art traditions of transcendence and the sublime.
I conclude by placing the genre within historical and critical contexts. I show how changes in American class and gender structures since World War II lay the groundwork for the popularity of the serial killer. I then demonstrate how these changes intersect with changes in the American legal system. I close by building on Ernest Mandel’s history of the crime story and Franco Moretti’s interpretations of the symbols of the vampire and Frankenstein’s monster to argue that the serial killer as a fictional icon is a figure specific to consumer capitalism, and a collective answer to the challenges to individual subjectivity produced by postmodernity.» [Résumé]
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Les Tueurs en série : représentation d’un monstre contemporain dans la culture populaire américaine depuis 1969
«Cette thèse tente de décrire et d’analyser les tueurs en série américains, réels et fictionnels, ainsi que la place qu’ils occupent dans la civilisation américaine depuis 1969. Le travail de recherche privilégie l’étude des modes de représentation de la culture populaire et tente de dégager les traits saillants qui en ressortent. Pour tenter de comprendre le rôle social de ces meurtriers, à la fois héros et monstres contemporains, un bref historique des personnages violents de l’histoire américaine est nécessaire, étant donné qu’ils se situent dans la continuité de ceux-ci. En outre, ce sont tous les personnages qui gravitent autour du tueur en série, enquêteurs et victimes en particulier, qui font l’objet d’un travail d’investigation. Le tueur en série se révèle être bien plus qu’un personnage violent, étant donné que des liens forts l’unissent à la société de consommation, à ses principales caractéristiques et aux interrogations que celle-ci suscite. Ils semblent tenir lieu, finalement, de grille de lecture fort intéressante de la modernité.» [Résumé]
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Performing psychopathology: Crime scene photography, forensic aesthetics, and performative knowledge in the contemporary serial killer narrative
«This dissertation explores the performative potential of the contemporary serial killer narrative, describing the narrative and aesthetic characteristics of the genre. I isolate the influence of crime scene photography and forensic science as the central disciplines currently influencing the aesthetics and ideology of these imaginative works. I discuss the formation of the male profiler and female forensic investigator in Thomas Harris’s novels Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs and their film adaptations, focusing on the confluence of forensic knowledge, profiling, and James Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic and mimesis. In approaching the construction of the pathological environment, I look at Spike Lee’s film Summer of Sam and Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho as psychotopographies, pathological social spaces where interiors become increasingly blurred with exteriors. To explore the nature of the forensic aesthetic and its influence on the construction of the serial killer as an artist, I consider the performance of sin, attrition, and the refraining of the crime scene as an art object in David Fincher’s film Se7en. Through a close reading of narrative devices and film techniques, I arrive at the conclusion that the contemporary serial killer narrative is not only inherently performative, but also infinitely valuable for describing the preoccupations, tensions, and anxieties present in American culture; these imaginative works offer troubling and provocative performances of the social for mass consumption.» [Résumé]
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Creating cultural monsters: A critical analysis of the representation of serial murderers in America
«Serial murder and serial murderers have been the subject of considerable attention in fictional crime shows (e.g, the various versions of “Law and Order” and “CSI”) and movies (e.g., “The Silence of the Lambs”), as well as in the print media, since the term and profile for “serial killer” were developed by the FBI in the 1970s. White, American men are frequently identified as being over-represented as serial murderers, but no adequate sociological explanation has yet been developed for this. Biological and psychological explanations are deficient, and the cultural context generally has been ignored in previous studies. Informed by a framework drawn from cultural sociology and gender studies, this study employs a qualitative content analysis of biographical narratives, newspaper articles, and legal documents regarding 15 serial murderers –nine who appear to characterize the “typical” serial murderer and six who each represent a variation of one of the prototypical characteristics — to identify the ways in which the American cultural milieu fosters serial murder and the creation of white, male serial murderers. A model is offered to illustrate the workings of culture and help explain the development of serial murderers in the United States. People utilize cultural values to construct lines of action according to their cultural competencies. American cultural values — especially as they emphasize competition and individual achievement; white, male privilege; and hegemonic masculinity –along with the emotional appeal of crime commission appear to contribute to the development of serial murderers by making serial murder an available and desirable line of action for some men. There appears to be more diversity in characteristics of serial murderers than popular profiles suggest, and implications of the exaggerated and apparently inaccurate representations of serial murder by the media and FBI are considered. In addition, commonly employed definitions appear to describe characteristics most associated with white, male serial murderers in the United States and exclude other cases of multiple murder and serial offending. Representations of serial murder reinforce and perpetuate the power structure in American society and related values, which sustains an environment for extreme violence and creates a cultural blindness to some perpetrators.» [Résumé]
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Watching men: masculinity and surveillance in the american serial killer film 1978-2008
«This thesis explores the depiction of masculinity in the American serial killer film with a particular focus on the articulation of surveillance. I trace shifts and trends in films made between 1978 and 2008. Drawing on existing analyses of the serial killer panic, I argue that cinema swiftly assimilated FBI rhetoric which influenced the development of the serial killer as a cultural figure. In particular, I highlight the profiler as a crucial element of serial killer discourse. This thesis tracks the development of this figure within American cinema, investigates the influence of this character on portrayals of the serial killer, and argues that the killer and profiler are constructed as opposing agents of surveillance. Using a chronological approach, I investigate the films shaped by this historical moment, splitting them into time-specific cycles in order to understand the cultural shifts affecting their development. I argue that a fascination with surveillance is a factor in the continuing power of the serial killer, exploring the different ways in which surveillance is thematised in the films. Highlighting the gendered nature of surveillance, I contend that the films support gender norms, with the killer often functioning as a violent example of the suppression of non-normative expressions of gendered identity. Including discussions of both mainstream and niche films, I show that the serial killer is distanced from normative masculinity in ways which allude to the Gothic and to gender, class and race prejudice, constructing the status of the serial killer as a special, inscrutable individual removed from power structures. The thesis argues that cinematic representations have embraced certain elements of FBI rhetoric, emphasising the exceptional surveillance skills of the profiler. As a result, the serial killer is frequently depicted as an extraordinary figure requiring elite expertise. I consider the ramifications of these portrayals and discuss the moments at which patriarchal power structures underlying this form of violence are both concealed and exposed.» [Résumé]