Homicidal Tendencies : Increasingly Captivated by Crimes, Real and Fictional, We’ve Made Murder Grand Theater--and Perhaps a Search for Ourselves

I am interested in our interest in murder. Specifically, I am drawn to the increasingly blurry borderline between real murder and fictional murder, between murder as news and murder as art, between event and story. Works like Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song,” Errol Morris’ “The Thin Blue Line” and Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer” define our era. In the course of drawing on real murders to feed our wish for narrative, they also comment on our preoccupation with murder stories. Even the movie “The Silence of the Lambs,” garishly and self-proclaimedly theatrical as it was, seemed eerily connected to reality, referring backward to the 1950s crimes of Ed Gein, a killer who skinned and stuffed his female victims, and more surprisingly, forward to Jeffrey Dahmer, whose cannibalistic antics hit the little screens only a few months after Hannibal Lecter’s reached the big ones.

My delight in Hannibal Lecter, or in Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, and my more guarded, more disgusted and perhaps self-disgusted, but still admissible, curiosity about Jeffrey Dahmer do not set me apart as an eccentric in late 20th-Century America. On the contrary. We all seem to be interested in murderers these days. They are our truth and our fiction; they are our truth as fiction, and vice versa.

If I want to answer the question of why we are drawn to murder, I must begin by asking myself why I am drawn, or at any rate how. I’m not sure when I first became interested in the subject of murder and its renderings. I know I followed with great eagerness, as did hundreds of thousands of others, the serial publication of “In Cold Blood” in the New Yorker during the late 1960s. At about the same time, I read “Anatomy of a Murder” and decided on its basis that I was going to become a lawyer. (Luckily this decision was later rescinded.) But I was not yet a regular reader of murder mysteries, nor a willing viewer of any movie on TV that featured a serious murder plot.

No, I think my intense, some might say obsessive, interest in the topic came later, when I was in my early 20s and the century in its mid-70s. Perhaps the initiating experience was an adult education literature course I taught after-hours on the UC Berkeley campus with my friend and fellow graduate student Katharine Ogden. Intended to attract university employees during their non-working hours, the class also contained a range of other students, including back-to-school housewives, elderly immigrants and one rather sullen young man (though he was probably older than Katharine and I were at the time) who announced that he was taking the course only because “my P.O. made me.” In our innocence, we had no idea what he meant; only later did we determine that he was referring to his parole officer.

About four weeks into the class, this student--who used the nickname “Crip” and signed his papers “Eugene ‘Crip’ Taylor” like a politician or a prizefighter--turned in the most remarkable document I’ve ever received from a student. (Eugene Taylor is not Crip’s real name; I have changed it to protect his privacy.) In response to our assignment that they each write some kind of memoir or fictionalized memoir, Crip produced a 30-page epic poem in free verse, consisting of nine views of the same story told by nine different people affiliated with an Oakland ghetto family, either by blood, marriage or friendship. The central plot involved an armed holdup of a drugstore in which one brother--the most innocent of the gang, practically a bystander--was killed by the stray bullet of a friend, as a result of which another brother, rather than the guilty friend, took the rap and went to jail for the killing.

It was an Oakland “Rashomon,” with one or two of the voices coming from beyond the grave; or it was an Oakland “The Sound and the Fury,” with a Jason Compson-like stepfather who figured meanly in some of the teen-age children’s early “chapters” and then came in to present his viewpoint more sympathetically in a later chapter of his own.

Astounded by this epic, Katharine and I decided to have Crip read it aloud to the other students in the class. He read it well, and they, too, were stunned. After a moment of appreciative silence, they began raising their hands and asking him questions about what had happened “since then” to the various members of the family. There was no question in their minds that this was a real story, no doubt--despite the multiple viewpoints, the voices from beyond the grave, the poetic structure, the obvious artistry of the whole piece--that Crip could provide factual answers about each person’s fate. Which he proceeded to do.

“And what happened to the brother that went to jail?”

“Still there.”

“And what happened to the friend?”

Did Crip pause for a moment before answering, or do I only imagine that now? “I’m the friend,” he replied.

This time the silence was deeper and more pronounced than before. It contained elements of shock, and embarrassment, and awe. In front of us, in our own classroom, sat a self-confessed murderer, if he could be believed (but none of us doubted him for a moment)--a murderer who was nonetheless, or therefore, an extremely talented writer. The silence lasted uncomfortably long, and then one of the students politely broke it with an obviously artificial question about literary technique. But it was Crip’s final remark about life in Oakland that stayed with me. “You got to remember,” he said, “that when you’re out on the street there, it doesn’t feel like real life. It’s like you’re in a movie all the time. That’s how you think about it--like you’re a character in a movie.”

About 15 years later, I offered a literature course called “Murder” to undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz. Between my first teaching experience with Crip’s class and this later venture, a number of developments had taken place in the murder industry, including the publication or presentation of at least a third of the works I was using in the course (Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song,” Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” and Morris’ film “The Thin Blue Line” among them). Following the 1976 lifting of the Supreme Court’s ban on capital punishment, the death penalty had been readopted in a number of states, including California. And, in general, interest in murder as both a terrifying social phenomenon and a source of grisly entertainment was burgeoning.

At my first meeting with the predictably oversubscribed class, I explained why I thought murder was a good way into the discussion of literature. “It raises all kinds of questions about sympathy and identification,” I said to them. “After all, we’re all here because we’re interested in murder, and yet no one in this classroom is actually a murderer.” Amid the polite laughter, I saw two of the students--well-dressed, suburban-looking young men--exchange a covert glance. Leopold and Loeb? I hardly think so. But it did make me think back to the time I’d taught Crip’s class, which in turn made me feel chastened about assuming who “we” in the class were.

Whodunit: even that murder-mystery moniker suggests the extent to which questions about murder are usually questions about identity. The issue is not just who committed the crime, and what kind of person one would have to be to do that; it is also a question of who would be interested in such a crime, as either news or entertainment, and what that interest says about us. At the end of my Santa Cruz course, one of the students said: “I’ve really enjoyed the course, but I’m worried that it’s hardened me. I mean, I don’t know how seriously I take murder anymore.”

“Yes,” I agreed with her, “that’s the risk. If you start looking at it as art, you move away from the thing itself.”

But part of the problem, I have come to feel, is that one never can get at the thing itself. That is the fascination of murder as subject, and why it lends itself to all kinds of renderings, from the true-life to the highly artful. It is also what makes murder so difficult to write about. Murder is an inherently frustrating subject because it keeps moving away from us, evading us. We want to ask big questions; more than anything else, we want to get the answers to big questions. Yet all we can get at, finally, are the details. The details are all we can grasp.

Our interest in the details is not just an indication of our sleazy character. It also signals our admiration of craft, which can only be admired at the level of detail, where small signs and acute discriminations matter. An interest in murder crucially involves the admiration of craft--the craft of the murderer himself (this is why all “Columbo” episodes focus so lovingly on the initial design and execution of the murder plot) as well as the craft of the detective who exposes him. A recent newspaper article on the good, new TV series “Law & Order” describes how one of the chief actors in the show, Chris Noth, followed around some Manhattan police detectives to observe their technique. Noth and the officers visit a suspect’s apartment, but the interrogation initially reveals nothing.

Later, Mr. Noth recounts, on the way downstairs, one of the detectives said: “ ‘I can’t get over the fact that I smelled death up there. Let’s go back.’ ” The punch line, of course, is that they found the body in the apartment.

“The detective smelled death,” Mr. Noth says, admiringly.

Noth admires the detective’s craft as we, watching the show, admire Noth’s: both his craft as a detective, conveying what he learned from the real policeman, and his craft as an actor, embodying that knowledge and making it real to us. And whether watching or reading a murder story, we also admire the craft of the author who has shaped that story. This too, like our admiration for the actor-detective, manifests itself simultaneously on two levels: on the one hand in our involvement in the story, our immersion in its thrills; and on the other hand our detached, critical admiration for the intellectual achievement of a tightly knit tale.

One of the reasons we try to view even a real murder as theater--a grand tragedy, a significant event, at the very least a plot constructed by an author--is to remove some of the terrifying randomness from it. A mundane murder is not only inexplicable; it is inexplicable in a very unsatisfying way. By lifting the murderer himself out of the realm of the ordinary, we give the plot some grandeur, enable it to inspire us with some degree of terror and pity. If the questions surrounding the murder remain unanswerable, they are at any rate unanswerable in a large way, like the question “Does God exist?” or “Is the true nature of man good or evil?” Unlike “How did he dispose of the murder weapon?” and “Can we believe her alibi?” these larger questions can be satisfying even if unanswered; in a way, their unanswerability is their answer. So, faced with a situation that has no straightforward answers to the mundane questions, our tendency is to raise the discussion onto this higher, tragic plane.

Elizabeth Hardwick, in her novel “The Simple Truth,” has one of her characters mock another for exactly this kind of theatricalizing attitude. The novel is about two people, Anita Mitchell and Joseph Parks, who meet when they are attending a murder trial as curious onlookers. But curiosity is hardly a sufficient word to cover the depth of their interest. They both, though each for different reasons, find themselves sympathizing with the accused murderer (a poor Iowa farm boy who has killed his rich girlfriend), and they both deplore the possibility that he will be found guilty by the parochial Iowa jury. “You seem to think of this boy as having committed a sort of ritual murder,” Anita’s friend March says to her at one point, “like the horde killing off the father in primitive times. For such an act there is no punishment that can be found in lawbooks. The act exists on another level, a mythical, magical level. It has to be; it’s the very nature of man to act in such a way and he cannot come to his own maturity in any other fashion.”

Anita denies this characterization heatedly (“I don’t think anything of the sort!”) and so would any of us in her place. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t adopt some form of the “mythical, magical” thinking March describes. It’s easy to mock in its simple-minded, reductive form--that’s the nature of simple-minded reduction--but anyone who ever views a real murderer as the lead actor in a tragedy is guilty of this kind of thinking. Intelligent people do it all the time--indeed their intelligence, in the form of their literary sensibility, is partly what makes them do it.

When Janet Malcolm first meets Jeffrey MacDonald, the convicted murderer of “Fatal Vision” fame, she notices the grace with which he deals with being handcuffed and then uncuffed. “Meeting a visitor under these circumstances would not seem to offer much scope for a soigne entrance,” she comments in “The Journalist and the Murderer,” but MacDonald somehow managed to get through the humiliating ritual as if he were an actor swiftly shedding his costume before greeting friends in the green room, rather than a prisoner coming out of solitary confinement for a few hours.” Mailer’s Gary Gilmore is also a consummate actor, as reported by several of the other characters in “The Executioner’s Song.” “It was as if each of his personalities took a turn,” thinks one of Gilmore’s lawyers, listening to a tape Gary made for his girlfriend Nicole, and the lawyer “thought it was like an actor putting on one mask, taking it off, putting on another for a new voice.” The journalist Larry Schiller has a different take on Gilmore’s theatrical abilities, as displayed during a legal hearing: “Schiller was now twice impressed with Gilmore as an actor. He did not rise to this occasion like a great ham actor, but chose to be oblivious to it. Merely there to express his idea. Gilmore spoke in the absolute confidence of this idea, spoke in the same quiet tone he might have employed if talking to only one man. So it became the kind of acting that makes you forget you are in a theatre.”

The marvelous irony of that last sentence turns on the idea of having to “forget you are in a theatre” when in fact you are not in a theater. But in a murder trial the courtroom becomes a theater. This is particularly true of well-publicized murder trials like Gary Gilmore’s or Ted Bundy’s. “What did he see in the intermission--you had to call it an ‘intermission’ rather than a recess, they were creating such TV theatre--but this fellow Schiller sitting in one of the chairs that belonged to the attorney general’s staff,” Mailer has prosecuting attorney Earl Dorius thinking. Ann Rule, in “The Stranger Beside Me,” brings this figure of speech to the surface: “The trials and hearings of Ted Bundy had become akin to a Broadway play, its long run ended, replaced by a road company. Only the star remained in the lead role, surrounded by a new cast.” Later in the book, analyzing the TV miniseries “The Deliberate Stranger”--filmed with Mark Harmon in the Bundy role and broadcast while Ted was still alive on Death Row--Rule intelligently points to the way the trial actually converted Ted into a lead actor, a star. “Ted Bundy had begun his 20s as the man I knew, the socially inept man, the man who felt he didn’t fit into a world of wealth and success,” she says. “It was the latter-day infamous Ted who was smooth and charismatic. Infamy became Ted. Only as his crimes made black headlines did he become the Ted Bundy portrayed by Mark Harmon.”

Ted was not the only victim of such confusion. We who were out there in the audience, safely viewing Bundy’s crimes through the medium of television docudrama, had fallen prey to a kind of delusional voyeurism. We may have thought we were seeing hidden truths, getting the real inside story, feeling what it would have been like to be there at the murders; but we were really getting nothing of the sort. We were getting a Hollywood story.

Film is itself an alienating, distancing form that allows us to watch without risking any self-involvement. Antonin Artaud, the iconoclastic French theorist of theater, complained in the late 1930s of movies “murdering us with secondhand reproductions . . . which, filtered through machines, cannot unite us with our sensibility.” His response to this alienating effect, and to theater that he described as “transforming the public into peeping Toms,” was the Theater of Cruelty, which was not, as he put it, about “the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies . . . but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free.” Artaud’s theater--unlike either the movies or the “naturalistic,” “psychological” theater of his time--was supposed to involve the audience’s emotions directly, making observers into participants, disarming voyeurism by converting polite drama back into violent ritual.

If theater, after Artaud, began to draw on the ways in which it was uniquely “live,” then film, in turn, focused on its own deadness, its own capacity for secondhand relayed experience. “Peeping Toms . . . murdering us with secondhand reproductions . . . no longer shown anything but the mirror of itself.” Artaud’s phrases could be a summary of Michael Powell’s classic thriller “Peeping Tom,” in which a camera-carrying murderer shows his victims, as their final sight, their own deaths in a mirror. It is this horror of theirs that he catches on film for his own peculiar satisfaction, and as we sit in the darkness of the movie theater watching our own horrors and satisfactions mirrored on the screen, we are not in the best position to fault him.

The sadistic movie-maker and the voyeuristic filmgoer become central subjects of the murder thriller from Powell onward. This tendency cuts across genres, from the low-budget naturalism of “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” to the high-tech outlandishness of David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome.” In “Henry,” the eponymous murderer and his disgusting sidekick Otis videotape their murders as they commit them, and the most distressing scene of the film--the slaughter of a whole family--is shown to us in this secondhand form, as a home movie of death. In “Videodrome,” the James Woods character is driven into homicidal madness by the manipulative sex-and-death films he plays for himself on his videotape machine. If you rent this movie and watch it alone on your own VCR, as I did, you will discover that its most frightening, as well as most compelling, quality is its self-enclosed circularity, combined with its unbroken continuity with our own world. We, too, are in that loop.

“Peeping Tom,” “Henry” and “Videodrome” are the film equivalents of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. They take as their subject not only the seemingly predetermined cruelties of everyday life--the sense in which “we are not free,” as Artaud says--but also the coldness of the rendering medium. They are about our own distance from the events that purportedly horrify us.

The distancing effect of film has begun to influence even our perspective on real life. “It’s like you’re in a movie all the time,” my student Crip had said. By which he meant “You’re always performing for an imagined but unseen audience” and also “Nothing seems real.” In “The Executioner’s Song,” Gary Gilmore says about the second murder he committed, “I felt like I was watching a movie or, you know, somebody else was perhaps doing this, and I was watching them do it . . . . “ The self-conscious distance of movies has become the self-distanced movie of life.

Mailer’s book self-consciously occupies the borderline, that blurred domain that lies between real and fictional murder. And, as a “true life novel,” it takes advantage of its in-between status to examine the final unknowability of murder. It gives us more than we could ever have expected to know about how Gary Gilmore killed his two victims, who he was at the time of the murders as well as before and after them, how he dealt with his own crime and punishment, what his friends and relations thought, and so on. But the book doesn’t pin down, in any final way, why these murders took place, or even exactly how Gary felt about them; it lightly mocks the people, like the jailhouse interviewers, who tried to get answers to those questions. It helps a great deal that Mailer had the freedom of fiction in which to maneuver. And--a corollary feature--it helps that Mailer didn’t know Gilmore, that he had to imagine him instead.

This is why the Ted Bundy of “The Stranger Beside Me,” whom Ann Rule knew for years, is so much less persuasive than the Gary Gilmore of “The Executioner’s Song,” whom Mailer never met. It is not just that Mailer is the superior artist, though he is, but that Rule is the more responsible journalist. She refrains from going beyond the facts and gives us a partial portrait of Bundy, the equivalent of an extremely thorough police file. Mailer makes Gilmore up wholesale, and thus satisfies our desire for a level of knowledge that only fiction can provide.

Fictional murder seems more credible because more can be known about it. The author, the artist, can create facts and explanations to fill the gaping hole of our curiosity. Yet fictional murders must also give us some sense of the unknowable--some acknowledgment that certain dark corners remain permanently obscure, that even the tightly knit tale has some loose ends--if they are to be persuasive. Murder is mysterious; even if we know all the who-what-when facts, the distance between our own lives and the act of murder leaves a space where mystery creeps in.

We seem able, though, to accept the full complexity of a mystery only in a work of fiction. From life (even the kind of transmuted life that we get on news programs about Jeffrey Dahmer and Court TV reports on the Menendez case), we expect a Definite Answer. When the murder is a real-life murder, we want to know everything. And that desire is inevitably thwarted. So we closely follow the next murder story, and the next, and the next, each time trying to make all the gory little details add up to one solid, impermeable truth. But we are left, each time, only with our own unappeasable ravenousness.