Serial killer (and the criminal profiling con)
Inspired by a recent article from Julia Yost on the grift of “recovered memory” and its correspondence with my own piece on “The half-life of batshit,” and in conjunction with my sustained interest in the cultural phenomenon of the police procedural, I am now compelled to throw a grenade into the popular and overworked entertainment trope of the serial killer versus the criminal profiler.
The trope is, in my view, pop-psuedo-science, which has become common cultural currency nowadays thanks to its spread through entertainment media and its wide acceptance among the digitally-expanded commentarial idiocracy. Watch any episode of Law & Order SVU for a heaping helping of this bullshit, or anything about “criminal psychological profiling,” another lucrative and infinitely elastic grift.
Yost, in her piece, cites Phillip Reiff, the author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic, someone who deserves a lot more attention in this period where psychobabble has combined dangerously with biopolitics.
There is a reason this trope has spread so quickly, especially since the wild success of the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs, of which most serial killer versus profiler narratives have been knock-offs. The reason for its spread as a story line is how well it fits the standard formula now for story structure, one adhered to so religiously by an army of twenty-something trust fund babies acting as literary agents, that little else gets through — three-acts . . . setup, conflict, resolution, broken into points . . . hook, plot point, pinch point (or inflection point), mid point, pinch point, plot point, resolution. This narrative structure is driven by a central conflict, and that conflict send a protagonist through a series of crises, based on protagonist goals, motivations, conflicts, and tensions. Serial killer versus profiler is one of the cheapest and easiest routes to building said story structure, first because people can use pop-pseudo-psychology to create and enhance these components in a life-and-death setting, second because the public has been indoctrinated to believe the pop-pseudo-psychology behind the story, and third, because people are fascinated by the fictional and media-recursive sub-species, serial killer.
It’s not because of the real threat of personal danger we are fascinated by “serial killers.” The most dangerous people to you — statistically speaking — are family members — a fact that the “true crime” genre extravagantly exploits. But the serial killer has become a highly successful stock character; so the question is, why?
Of course, there is no simple universalizing answer to that — the book and film financiers just look at the returns and keep doing what they do until it quits working — just as there is no species called “serial killer” that can be behaviorally taxonomized the way I can with, say, yellow perch or house finches or rat terriers.
There has always been a fascination with murder — Cain killed Abel, no? Why is it that perfectly peaceful people with a low tolerance for gore will consume tomes by the grandmotherly writers Ruth Rendell or P.D. James that always begin with “a body?” James, during an interview once, remarked — with a wicked eighty-year-old grin — that she writes refined bucolic settings . . . with an exceptionally high murder rate. I myself — as a Christian pacifist — am an inveterate fan of crime fiction, which almost always features “murder most foul,” though I’ll admit I’m more drawn to the darker stuff than the “cozies” of James and Rendell. (Police procedurals are just a sub-genre of crime fiction.)
The fact is, love, power, sex, and death are our main narrative preoccupations, as literary history will attest, and there are as many motivations for an attraction to murder stories as there are consumers. But let’s look now at The Serial Killer.
Thomas Harris’s fictional Hannibal Lecter was a composite, as was the active villain of the yarn, “Buffalo Bill.” Ed Gein, Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy . . . they all were incorporated into the narrative, though Lecter was rendered particularly formidable with his superhuman intelligence and his Lacanian psychoanalytical acumen. In the final Lecter novel (which the film version erased), Agent Starling became identified with “the phallus” in Lecter (and became Lecter’s lover), whereupon he was revealed to be not merely a serial killer but a kind of Nietzschean ubermencsch, the Zarathustran authentic man.
We are living through a media-fueled and escalationist post-Nietzschean period in corporate cultural production, where serial killers (still treated as a kind of species) have also become the protagonists in popular stories (Dexter, e.g.). Hey, when the profit margins start to fall with people’s inability to be shocked, we can flip the script and milk the flip.
Real “serial killers” are only marginally alike; and here I’m defining my terms — serial killer meaning someone who kills a series of strangers in a setting other than war. Their alikeness is just that, killing a bunch of strangers. In any examination of those who actually fit this invented category, their backgrounds, motives, and methods are all uniquely combined to such an extent as to render the category useless. Which renders “criminal profilers” useless. They are media-justified mountebanks.
Let’s not forget that Lawrence Pazder — who testified repeatedly as a “Satanism expert” during the Satanic panic that he helped start — met his future wife and co-conspirator Michelle Smith just five years after the release of the blockbuster film, Rosemary’s Baby — a fictional horror story of a Satanist coven that helps the devil breed with a drugged bourgeois housewife to engender the Antichrist. “Devil worship” was a cash cow.
So are serial killers.
Mindhunter is just the latest “based on a true story” account of the supposed efficacy of “serial killer profiling,” a story in which the screenwriters played fast and loose with the actual events and heavily fictionalized the characters. This fictionalized “history” of the FBI’s “Behavioral Science Unit,” on which The Silence of the Lambs and the perfectly idiotic Criminal Minds was based, fails to note the fact that this unit has a record of serial failures. Out of 184 cases in the 1990s, the BSU “profilers” were involved in solving exactly five.
To this day, there is not a single scientifically rigorous study that supports the idea behind the BSU and “criminal profiling” generally, that one can impute the psychological (and even historical and demographic!) characteristics of an offender from what’s know about his or her (nine percent of American “serial killers” were women) actions on a crime scene. The idea is ridiculous on its face.
In 2007, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a blistering piece for the New Yorker in which he detailed the fact that FBI profilers got the race and social status of perpetrators wrong more often than they got them right. This shit is nothing more than the conjectures of a bunch of self-important, self-appointed “experts,” which hasn’t stopped entertainment media from portraying them as wizard-like guardians standing between us and Homo serialus.
We are fascinated by serial killers, in some degree, just because we’ve been numbed by a steady diet of violence in our entertainment and in the news. How many mass shootings this week? How pedestrian does the violence of a 1950s film appear? This is what I meant when I said media escalationism. I’ve compared it in the past to heroin or porn — that thing where it takes ever more or more extreme to feel that same rush.
I often wonder if this doesn’t have something to do with actual serial killing, a variegated phenomenon I suspect has to do with rush-escalation (and often drugs and porn), alienation, and a media-heavy culture that valorizes attention-seeking. The profiling fraud draws on what Reiff called “the triumph of the therapeutic,” with its metastatic psychobabble. I mean, how many “serial killers” have chosen to kill they way they do based on their own exposure to this trope?
So-called serial killers are not, as commonly portrayed, intellectual giants. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly smart. He was manipulative; but the reason they had such a hard time catching him (and the rest) had little to do with their supposed brilliance, and a lot to do with how hard it actually is for actual cops — also not known as society’s braniacs — to figure out what happened when someone takes some rudimentary steps to conceal the killing of a stranger. The CSI trope that “forensic science” (don’t get me started) can lay out all the clues — Sherlock Holmes style) — and follow them unerringly to a perpetrator is likewise fictional. Most crimes are solved because they are obvious, there are witnesses, they are unplanned or poorly planned, or by dumb luck. Stories to the contrary are the exception, not the rule.
As psychology Professor Michael Karson put it, “You can’t find a needle in a haystack with a pitchfork.” You can find it with a magnet, he notes, but the only magnet available today is DNA . . . not profiling.
The fictional version of the serial killer is what the psychobabble enterprise of profiling is built upon. Watch any of these “experts” on your favorite true crime program and be prepared for the most vapid incoherent hindsight expositions you’ll ever hear from a bunch of over-coiffed, attention-seeking morons. I could pull people off the street that could give more interesting and cogent “interviews.”
In a 2007 study, profilers were compared to regular detectives and non-police in their predictions about offenders based on similar evidence, and “Profilers do not decisively outperform other groups when predicting the characteristics of an unknown criminal.” College chemistry majors outperformed the profilers. In 2002, University of Liverpool researchers conducted a study of the question, “Is offender profiling possible?” Their conclusion? Uhhhhh . . . nope.
In fact, what profilers have accomplished, apart from attaining generous salaries and honoraria, is a net negative effect on investigations — that is, misleading the cops and wasting their time. That’s partly because — let’s go back to Mindhunter and their interviews with “serial killers” — the research they did was based on interviews with a bunch of lying, manipulative criminals, which these “researchers” credulously absorbed.
Profilers are today’s psychics, only instead of palm reading they rely on vulgar “trait theory,” with its reliance on the notion of inborn personal “traits,” barely permeable to the environmental influence — a psychological “school” that proved, likewise, to have no real predictive value. But they understand self-promotion very well, and so profilers and the the BSU and all the rest, with the able assistance of entertainment genres, trumpet the occasional success and bury the expansive catalogue of flubs and abortions.
The term “serial killer” was coined by Robert Ressler, a member of the FBI BSU, in 1974. Ressler, an ex-Army MP, and a relentless self-promoter. Among his most touted cases were Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Chase, and John Joubert. Dahmer was caught not by profilers, but by one of his potential victims punching him in the face and escaping. Bundy was caught when he panicked at seeing a police car and trying to outrun it in a Volkswagen (so much for his elevated intelligence). No profiling involved. Chase was caught after leaving bloody handprints all over the house of his last victim. Joubert was caught when a school teacher started writing down his license plate for suspiciously loitering in his car, whereupon he threatened her and she called the police. Yes, Agent Pressler was involved in the investigations, but contributed absolutely nada to the arrests and captures. He did, however, write a series of books in which he built himself up as an expert on “serial killers.”
One of the markers of a pseudoscience is unreproduceable results. With that, I rest my case.