Facing evil.

• Author: Kennedy, Joseph E.

HIGH-PROPEL CRIMES: WHEN LEGAL CASES BECOME SOCIAL CAUSES. By Lynn S. Chancer. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 314. $38.

NATURAL BORN CELEBRITIES: SERIAL KILLERS IN AMERICAN CULTURE. By David Schmid. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 327. $29.

It is no earthshaking news that the American public has become fascinated--some would say obsessed--with crime over the last few decades. Moreover, this fascination has translated into a potent political force that has remade the world of criminal justice. Up through the middle of the 1960s crime was not something about which politicians had much to say. What was there to say? "Crime is bad." "We do what we can about crime." "Crime will always be with us at one level or another." Only a hermit could have missed the transformation of crime over the last couple of decades from a non-issue to a "hot button" that politicians from both parties have learned to push with the frenetic energy of video game players competing for the highest score. If the mantra of "tough on crime" has faded into the background of political discourse a bit since the 1980s and 1990s, it is only because the "tough on crime" philosophy has achieved the status of dogma--that which almost no politician would take issue with. How and why the American public became so fascinated with crime and so supportive of punitive policies remains something of a puzzle. (1)

Perhaps punishment has increasingly become a communicative realm in which society wrestles with intractable issues of social identity, sometimes in a less-than-fully-conscious way. Seeing punishment as dramaturgy, as a drama that serves a morally instructive role, is nothing new, of course, but the idea here is that the dramaturgical dimension of punishment has grown in importance over the last few decades. The public attends to stories of crime and punishment as never before because they satisfy a felt need for morally instructive stories. Punishment has become, more than anything else, an ongoing national morality play.

Within the last year, the University of Chicago Press published two books that explore different dimensions of the public's current fascination with crime and punishment. Natural Born Celebrities explores the growing celebrity status of serial killers in American society since the nineteenth century. Exploring the treatment of serial murder in film, TV, books, and print media, the book ranges from the treatment of serial murder in nineteenth century true-crime pamphlets to contemporary websites devoted to Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the like. The second book, High Profile Crimes, explores the public attention given to a series of cases that enjoyed sustained media treatment during the 1990s: the O.J. murder case, the Rodney King and Reginald Denny assault cases in Los Angeles, the Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith rape trials, the racially motivated slayings of African Americans in the Bensonhurst and Howard Beach cases, and the Central Park jogger case. Each of these books helps us better understand the dramaturgical dimension of contemporary punishment.

Exploring the roots of the public's interest in serial killers provides a case study of a long recognized but not sufficiently understood dimension of punishment: the way in which the public projects its fears about the health of society onto certain archetypal criminal offenders. (2) In Natural Born Celebrities, David Schmid (3) argues that the public's fascination with serial killers is best understood as an attempt to work through fears that serial killers are products of some aspect of social change. That attempt involves a balance of sorts between indulgence of fears that serial killers are in some way representative of society and reassurance that they are ultimately uniquely monstrous.

Lynn Chancer's High Profile Crimes (4) reveals how we "talk our politics" through punishment. Specifically, the book explores the ways in which celebrated cases become cultural and political battlegrounds involving various social causes. At the heart of this exploration are issues of race and gender. The enormous emotional energy that such causes mobilize gets channeled into the legal system's either/or, guilty or innocent, winner-take-all framework. Such one-sided resolutions always prove unsatisfying and leave one side--and sometimes both--looking for the next case to mobilize around. Ultimately, Chancer suggests that in "cause-ifying" our cases and in "case-ifying" our causes, we have done damage to both the resolution of the particular case and the progress of social causes.

After discussing each work in turn, I will briefly argue that all of the phenomena described depend upon a common feature of our cultural landscape: an abiding concern with moral relativism. We fear that we have lost the capacity to recognize, confront, and "face" evil. It is in response to this fear that the ongoing national morality play of monstrous offenders meeting harsh punishment has been staged. (5) The public's fascination with serial killers and with certain types of high profile cases illuminates important, although different, dimensions of this response.

1. THE CELEBRITY OF THE SERIAL KILLER IN AMERICAN CULTURE

   One might be tempted to dismiss interest in serial killers as simply a morbid obsession with the grotesque. This interest ranges in its forms from the concentrated obsession of some who bid for serial killer memorabilia on websites purveying hair and other artifacts of notorious serial murderers, to the more general interest in fictional and factual accounts of serial killers in movie and book form. From Truman Capote's critically acclaimed account of murder on the Great Plains, In Cold Blood (1965), to Ann Rule's bestselling account of Ted Bundy's crimes, The Stranger Beside Me (1980), to Hannibal Lecter's popularity in the movie and book forms of The Silence of the Lambs (6) along with its various prequels and sequels, interest in serial killers is undeniably wide-ranging and enduring. The strength of David Schmid's exploration of the public attention given to serial killers is that it moves past simple explanations of morbid curiosity into a more penetrating inquiry about the nature of the public's interest.

   There has long been a somewhat standard account of why we are fascinated with certain types of criminals generally. Our fascination with criminals reflects contradictory impulses. We are simultaneously repelled by the deviance of their crimes, but we also experience a vicarious thrill at the freedom from social constraint that they experience.

   Serial killers, to be sure, push the limits of such a theory. It is one thing to feel a sneaking sense of admiration for a Tony Soprano figure who combines charm and other attractive human qualities with a readiness to kill the people who get in his way, but in exactly what sense of the word can any normal person be "thrilled" by Ted Bundy's ritual slaughter of numerous women? Yet Ted Bundy has had numerous books, websites, movies, and documentaries devoted to his exploits, and the next serial killer du jour will probably enjoy the same.

   Schmid transcends the standard story about vicarious escape from social constraint by situating his account of the public's interest in serial killers in a larger story about the evolution of celebrity in our society. He defines celebrity as being primarily about visibility and distinguishes it from fame, which he considers to be based in some way on merit. "[T]oday the famous are the visible, rather than the talented" (Schmid, p. 9). In support of this point, Schmid discusses a study that noted a striking change in the biographies appearing in popular magazines between 1901 and 1941. The earlier biographies were all about "idols of production," heroes from "the productive life, from industry, business and natural sciences." (7) Biographies during this period included no sports figures, and the few entertainers included were presented as "serious artists." Almost all of the biographies from 1941, in contrast, were of "idols of consumption," people related to spheres of leisure activity such as entertainment or sports (Schmid, p. 20). Schmid argues that this change in the objects of public attention opened up a space for the criminal celebrity. "Once fame is characterized primarily by visibility rather than achievement, however, it no longer makes sense to distinguish between good and bad forms of fame" (Schmid, p. 9).

   Schmid is not saying that notions of merit or morality became entirely irrelevant to celebrity. Rather, Schmid argues that there was an acute need for both positive and negative role models for the millions of people who migrated from rural areas to the cities during this time. The public used celebrities to work through complicated and contradictory moral impulses during this period of transition. Celebrities, such as movie actors, channeled both negative and positive emotions. The same could certainly be said of certain types of "heroic criminals," who alternately could be seen as either deviant or expressing widely shared rebellious feelings against authority.

   It is an interesting point. Around the turn of the century, as millions of Americans embraced new ways of life, normative standards were undoubtedly in flux. Was a robber baron who amassed wealth through monopoly power a criminal or a super successful participant in the new economy? Was a hard-drinking silent-film star who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior a deviant or someone who had freed himself from the oppressive mores of rural, churchgoing America? Closer to the point, was a stylish gangster who provided alcohol to the masses during Prohibition really a criminal or simply a different type of entrepreneur?

   The moral ambivalence of celebrity status may have served a necessary function. As entire communities of newly arrived urban...