[Bleedingwhiteash] New post at Nott Road Blues

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Posted by Michael Jas. Murray:
De Profundis Clamor Ad Te

   I cursed the light, forget the day/Turned and went another way.
   -Nott Rd. Blues
   I recently saw a trailer for yet another film dedicated to a brilliant
   serial killer bent on playing cat-and-mouse games with law
   enforcement. I find these types of films especially troubling, because
   they distort the public view of a type of mental illness, much in the
   same manner that films like A Beautiful Mind provide a warped picture
   of schizophrenia.
   The archetype of the brilliant serial killer probably finds its roots
   in the Zodiac Killer, one of the few high-profile signature killers
   who successfully eluded detection and apprehension. Zodiac made a name
   for himself by killing victims indiscriminately, using a myriad
   weapons and disguises in what he considered a âgame.â There was no
   overt sexual aspect of Zodiacâs crimes; in the intricately coded
   messages he sent to the press and law-enforcement, he claimed to kill
   simply because it was âso much fun.â From Zodiac descended the
   cerebral, often asexual, murderers found in such movies as Saw and
   Seven. These men are presented as the products of diseased, albeit
   genius, intellects whose spirits, rather than bodies, have grown
   corrupt. As such, they attain a strange sort of satanic majesty; they
   are fiends whose crimes attain a sort of sublimity worthy of an almost
   grudging respect.
   Of course, what people so often forget about Zodiac is that the prime
   suspect in the case was not some shining, rebellious Lucifer but a fat
   child molester who spent time locked up in Atascadero, an asylum for
   the criminally insane. It is also forgotten that many profilers
   theorized that there was in fact some occult sexual aspect of Zodiacâs
   killings. Much as Berkowitz murdered, and later used his crimes in
   masturbatory fantasies, many believed Zodiac used his attacks to fuel
   his fantasies.
   In a sense, we get a much better look at the serial killer with films
   such as Silence of the Lambs. Although Lecter is presented as
   brilliant and eloquent, the viewer is never allowed to forget the very
   visceral motivations for his brutal acts. Lecter devours the flesh of
   his victims, hinting at a cataclysmically sick sexuality that shows
   itself in his baiting of Starling. Lecter may have a brilliant psyche,
   but he is consumed by the Flesh rather than the promptings of the
   Spirit.
   This is why I find the âbrilliant serial killerâ archetype so
   disturbing and distorting. Unlike the character of Lecter, characters
   such as the villain of Seven help us forget that the murderer has
   fallen prey to a corruption of the flesh, of a diseased sexuality. It
   is to this that we must look if we are to ever understand the mental
   illness which leads to these types of murders and, perhaps in time,
   devise ways of healing those afflicted with such sickness.
   In a certain sense, men like Dahmer and Berkowitz are people who have
   lost their souls. Not the atomic soul of the Cartesians, which I feel
   is a flawed model. After all, cogito ergo sum, âI think there I amâ
   leaves some serious questions unanswered. Although this may seem
   self-evident, what does the speaker mean by âIâ? A Self of this type
   could very well be that of the solipsist, the Self that exists apart
   from the Other. Such a Self may as well be all that is, robbing the
   ego of its distinction and, thus, its very essence. The Self cannot
   exist apart from an experience of the Other.
   The sickness of murderers like Dahmer is a corruption of the very
   visceral mind. The brain simply has become terribly sick, the libido
   has become restrained and wounded, and the result is a body that
   cannot reach out to other bodies. When such a sickness festers for
   long enough, the soul, that aspect of the psyche that recognizes and
   relates to others, flees the flesh. A disoriented husk is left behind,
   but the body does not remain devoid of spirit for long. It is when
   isolation has given rise to a sick sexuality that an unclean spirit
   enters in.
   A sick body saddled with a sicker spirit is nevertheless an organism.
   It wants to survive, it wants to feel alive. It wants to touch the
   Other. The illness allows for this in a perverted sense. Thus Dahmer
   reaches out to the Other and makes the Other a part of himself not
   solely through the sex act but through cannibalism. Berkowitz murders
   his victims and imagines they have become a part of him. Even Zodiac
   claimed to kill so that he could procure souls to serve him in the
   afterlife. The diseased body wants to live within the flow of the life
   energies, and the unclean spirit directs the body in the only manner
   it knows how. In a sense, the unclean spirit âhealsâ the sick
   individual by providing alternatives to normal human interaction that
   satisfy the needs of the flesh. A man once in torment becomes calm and
   fulfilled, at least for a brief while, as he embraces the dead flesh
   of his victim and imagines that he is embracing another soul as well.
   In an even more ironic sense, sometimes this unclean spirit can place
   the killer back into the realm of the living, the realm of cyclic
   life, death and birth. Eddie Gein was abhorred by the women of his
   hometown and he entered the asylum a virgin. After his crimes were
   publicized, he received letters from numerous women who begged him for
   a lock of his hair. Dahmer, who murdered because he was terrorized by
   the thought of being abandoned, received love letters from both men
   and women. Both promised to follow him into the very visceral hell
   into which he had fallen. There were people who would have rather died
   than abandoned the once-alienated Jeff. One of Natureâs most perverse
   qualities is that, there are ways in which an unclean spirit can make
   an ugly man beautiful and a weak man strong. Why else would the
   doctors who committed me have had numerous armed guards on hand to
   admit a man twenty pounds underweight?
   The peace provided by the demon, the unclean spirit, is only granted
   to those who give into its seductive song. Those who struggle against
   it, refusing to succumb to the spirit that has come to dwell within
   them, suffer terrible torments. The problem with the mental health
   system is that it has no way of actually dealing with these devils.
   The best the system can offer is restraint, both physical and
   chemical. It reminds one of the Gadarenes demoniac, the man infested
   by a Legion of demons, who was bound in chains and left to die in the
   wilderness. Granted, my own hospitalization shocked me for a brief
   while, calming some of my more violent feelings, but it was a
   temporary fix. Much like a demoniac exorcized by an incompetent
   sorcerer, my devil left only to be replaced by seven more far worse
   than the first.
   In the Old Testament, Saul is tormented by an evil spirit sent by God
   himself. If it is God who sends the evil spirits as well as the good,
   who are we to call out to for relief? Who will hear us as we cry out
   from the Abyss?