Psychopathic Fame Monsters

I’ve been trying to write a screenplay about a gay serial killer for quite a few years now–since the mid-90s, in fact–but it isn’t easy: For some odd reason, most financiers tend not to think of it as a project that positively reinforces the homosexual agenda. The trick is to make a movie that is, if not exactly sympathetic to the serial killer, then at least sensitive to the circumstances and psychology that have led him down this horrifying, psychopathic path, acknowledging that a certain monstrous potential may be buried inside of all of us.

One of the best examples of this template is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, based on many of the details of the more working-class, real-life serial killer Ed Gein, whose story also inspired many other horror movies, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Silence of the Lambs. Like Gein, the title character, Norman Bates, is an introverted, isolated mama’s boy and repressed homosexual whose mind has been twisted by a smothering, sexually possessive mother. (Like I always say, “smothering” is just “mothering” with an “s” in front of it.) Mrs. Bates preaches against the evils of intercourse (much like Carrie White’s mother in Carrie), convincing her son that all other women are whores, then sends him into Oedipal overdrive by contradictorily taking a lover herself, propelling him into a jealous rage. Norman fatally poisons both his mother and her boyfriend, then later takes on her persona through dissociative identity disorder and murders a random woman, Marion Crane, whom he perceives as a whore, partly owing to homosexual panic, the basis of all good horror films. It’s an amazing bit of psychological legerdemain, but one that we can somehow relate to, if only unconsciously, having gone through an Oedipal stage ourselves (at least according to the grandfather of the horror genre, Sigmund Freud).

Another obvious example of a movie with a certain sympathy for its title serial killer is the Patty Jenkins film Monster, about Aileen Wuornos, a lesbian drifter who was convicted of murdering six men and eventually executed in 2002. Wuronos’s childhood was even worse than Ed Gein’s: her father, a schizophrenic convicted of sexually molesting children, committed suicide in prison, while her grandfather, who raised her, beat and sexually assaulted her. She was raped by a friend of her grandfather’s at 14, and subsequently gave birth to a baby that was put up for adoption before she was kicked out of the house, forcing her to support herself through prostitution. In her case, the rage is directed toward the father figure that has repeatedly brutalized her. As a woman who endured countless incidents of sexual assault and violence in her life (including, it would appear, at the hands of some of her victims), Wuornos has become a warped feminist anti-heroine of sorts, a symbol of the victimization of women by an inherently misogynist society. It’s another staple of the horror genre that is, sadly, too often presented more as entertainment than critique.

Wuornos had a feature film and two documentaries (by Nick Broomfield) made about her, but neither she nor Gein, who you might call “old-school” serial killers, grew up in an era that fostered the additional narcissistic desire to become famous through their insane acts. This seems to be the psychopathology of a potential new emerging school of murderous psychos: fame monsters. They’re the product of a culture that has blurred the line between fiction and reality, and that has created a new beast that will do anything to become a celebrity.

Don’t get me wrong—Ed Gein was truly a monster’s monster. A search of his house turned up a lampshade and nine masks made of human skin, nine vulvae in a shoebox, a belt made from female human nipples, and other grotesque mementos. But his unspeakable acts were the result of sexually compulsive behavior confined to a demented, private, interior world—a grotesque perversion of normal childhood development within the nuclear family unit, an insane corruption of what Freud called “family romance.” (Gein most likely murdered his own brother, and chose female victims who resembled his mother, whom in his demented mind he tried to become.) The prospect of a new monster, however, that projects its sick fantasies onto the world stage as an end in itself is what you might uncomfortably call taking it to the next level. (This discussion obviously doesn’t include the psychos who use the alibi of war, like Hitler, or that creepy Norwegian multiple murderer, a different category of monster.)

Several people on social media have suggested that I should make a movie out of the Luka Magnotta story, the Canadian cannibal psycho killer currently monopolizing the media’s morbid attention, but I don’t know if I can relate. Before getting to the abnormal—or more to the point, all-too-normal—psychology of Magnotta, I should mention that he was a former stripper who went by the name of Angel when he danced at Remingtons, Toronto’s oldest male strip bar, so as a semi-regular for years I’ve no doubt seen him perform. My friend Nina Arsenault, the well-known transsexual performer and artist whom I’ve collaborated with a number of times, dated Magnotta briefly ten years ago, and he was apprehended by the police in Kreuzcolln a block away from where I often stay in Berlin. So the whole story strikes a bit uncomfortably close to home.

At first I rejected the idea of using his story as the basis of a movie out of hand simply because as a narcissistic attention-seeker he seems really annoying. After a tiny bit of research, he does appear to have many of the earmarks of the “old-school” serial killer (it’s assumed that he may have killed more victims)—like Gein, he came from a broken home, he was ostracized for his effeminacy as a child, he was abused by family members, etc. But this kind of victimization that is internalized and then unleashed against the world is now also filtered through another, more popularized psychopathology—the new narcissism of fame and self-mythologizing: He has created his own “reality show” version of himself (culminating in a snuff film), in a sense writing and directing his own story before anyone else had a chance to. Making a movie about him might just be redundant.

It’s interesting that Magnotta and another demented young Canadian (always remember, Canada is the new Evil Empire), Travis Baumgartner, the 21-year-old aspiring cop who recently murdered three fellow security guards in Alberta, both developed their own twisted, self-obsessed, and not-very-sexy personae on Facebook, both viewed themselves as potential “stars.” (Baumgartner called himself a “10” and wrote, “I wonder if I’d make the six o’clock news if I just started popping people off.” The internet is now plastered with pin-up photos of the aspiring model and “porn star” Magnotta.) Both also described themselves as being a “people person.” (It might be a good time to redefine the term.) But the sad thing is, both of them seemed to be playing a role unconvincingly, and largely just for the attention. That doesn’t make a good movie; that makes bad reality TV.

Next Week: I talk to Nina Arsenault about Magnotta, styles of narcissism, and what makes good or bad monsters.

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