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. Shall I propose a new genre? Serial failers?
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 — a writer with whom I normally disagree — wrote a blisteringly accurate 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 occisor serialus.
We are fascinated by serial killers, in some degree, just because we’ve been numbed by a steady diet of violence from entertainment and “news” media. How many mass shootings this week? How pedestrian does the violence of a 1950s film appear? Media escalationism. Like heroin or porn — that thing where it takes more and more extreme to stimulus 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.” Manufactured monoculture, like a sick dog, eating its own psychobabble vomit. 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 murder of a total 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 profiling enterprise 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 [did] 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 variety of lying, manipulative, criminal loons. The“researchers” credulously soaked it all up and “organized” their “information” using their own made-up, off-the-cuff psychobabble taxonomies.
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 investigative 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. See above.
I’ll shift this now to unpack perhaps the most iconic serial killer film out there, with an excerpt from Tough Gynes — a book I wrote about female characters in film who become honorary men. The chapter on Silence of the Lambs was titled, “Clarice Has Three Daddys.” Neither Thomas Harris — the author of the book Silence of the Lambs — nor Jonathan Demme — director of the film version — were really focused on the legitimacy of profiling. Lector toyed with profilers, and Clarice Starling found the film’s villain by stumbling over him in a gumshoe investigation, following hints given by Lector himself.
Clarice herself is pursuing an asexual identity for a socially conservative purpose. Clarice is certainly vulnerable to sexualization and the male gaze, as is emphasized in scene after scene in the film; but her resistance to that sexualization is the point of view of the director and audience . . .
Clarice overcomes her own vulnerabilities by becoming an honorary male. This “reversal” is what allowed many people to see a feminist thread running through the narrative. I will challenge that, even as it makes a certain sense, in part by pointing out (a book spoiler here) that Harris himself, in the final Starling-Lecter encounter with the novel Hannibal, has Clarice become Lecter’s lover and new killer companion who will dine with him on the “free-range rude.” This final book scene in which she reaches feminine adulthood by being for-the-phallus was dramatically altered for the film version to conceal this disturbingly anti-feminist development in the written series from the film audience.
This is not that surprising, however, when one begins to tug at the threads of sexual confusion in Silence with Lacanian tweezers. No less a Lacan acolyte than Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has claimed that Lecter himself is a Lacanian, and that Silence of the Lambs is really a dramatization of Lecter’s psychoanalytical intervention with Clarice, Lecter helping her work out her own symbolic impasse with regard to her recurring fantasy about saving the lamb, so that she can move on and become identified (as she finally does) with the Father/Phallus/symbolic authority. Hey, Lecter is, after all, a European psychiatrist.
With regard to The Father, note that Clarice’s character loses her mother before she has an organized memory of her. “My father was everything to me.” Raised by her father, she then takes on two more father figures/mentors during the film, Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter. What do they help her to do? Catch the monster, who is monstrous because he is a man trying to become a woman . . . by disguising himself in skinned women.
In a mirror image, Clarice is a woman trying to make it in a man’s world . . . which she accomplishes by becoming like-a-man, a combination of her three alternative-father figures, her Dad the All-American policeman (her first model), and the antagonists, Crawford (teaching her the trade) and Lecter (giving her self-knowledge and therefore insight). How does she accomplish her transformation? Ultimately, with a gun (penis) that destroys her antagonist/mirror who is gazing at her through the night goggles, getting ready to shoot her with his gun (penis)
Hey, I can do psychobabble with the best of them.
Peace.