SOURCE: Viegener, Matias. “Men Who Kill and the Boys Who Love Them.” Critical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (spring 1994): 105-14.

[In the following essay, Viegener examines the American fascination with psychosexual murderers and the portrayal of homosexuals as calculating, deviant criminals, drawing attention to Frisk and Jerk for examples of the pathological, anti-social gay killer. Viegener contends that Cooper's depictions of sexual violence are not a strategy for transgression, but suggest the extreme limits of experience, self-identity, and intersubjectivity.]

The homosexual killer sits at the juncture of two great social obsessions, homosexuality and criminality. The homosexual criminal has a long history, epitomised in life in the case of Oscar Wilde and in representation in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Jean Genet made this perilous equation the centrepiece of his life's work, such that criminal desire (specifically the desire to steal, though also to kill) is not only the analogue but the very constituent of homosexual desire. In this essay, I'd like to site the work of gay writer Dennis Cooper within this tradition of homosexual pathology, linking sexual or gender difference to criminality and illness. In taking up this spectrum of destructive desire, or lustmord—murderous joy—Cooper has not only won the opprobrium of the gay community (for his nostalgia for the pathologised homosexual) but he also undermines the very basis of contemporary gay culture's identity-formation both in terms of representation and of self-image. This subject has been simmering in much recent gay culture, such as Tom Kalin's film Swoon, Todd Hayne's Poison, Fassbinder's Querelle, and in the more mainstream Apartment Zero and Silence of the Lambs. At its core is a quest for limit experiences that surpass the safety of bourgeois sexuality and a resistance—through forms of violence—to unified subjectivity.

Of all the specimens of criminality, the serial killer, heterosexual or homosexual, receives the most intense exposure in the media. He, for so he is gendered, is unlike all other criminals in that his acts are never marked by necessity; he is the only criminal whose motives are without self-interest. Since ‘motive’ is a fundamental category for convicting criminals, serial killers are a conundrum for the legal and medical professions. Incapable of ascribing ‘natural’ criminal motives to these killers, we are directed by sociologists, policemen and even true crime books to the theoretical fringes: sexual pleasure and desire are presented as the best tools to interpret their crimes. Madness is usually judged by a model of medical dysfunction—criminality as disease—much as homosexuality was once addressed as an infection or an illness. More tailored to examining the individual than his context, professional discourse can only see madness as analogous to cancer or disease, rather than as a culturally programmed dialogue.

Serial killers are spoken of as the ‘aristocrats’ of crime reporting, strangely admired both in the prisons and in the media. Better educated and with a higher IQ than most criminals, their methods are usually coldly systematic; they are able to manipulate social, media and police interactions and psychological profiles generally rate them high in ambition. Both popular wisdom and analytic culture face a profound aporia in explaining the serial killer. If sanity is primarily judged in our culture under the precepts of illness, i.e. by disorders of thought or affect, or by the incapacity to function, these killers are profoundly capable. Most of the killers in the research seem highly nuanced in their interpretation of the signifiers of desire, identity, gender and sexuality.

Crime has been the province of three major disciplines, sociology (an academic discourse), criminology (within the framework of legal and penal systems) and pathology (as determined by the medical and specifically psychoanalytical professions). These institutions are supposed to bring meaning to the crime which is beyond mere moral condemnation or superstitious fancy. One of the current sociological interpretations (Leyton, p. 14) is that sex crimes are a consequence of class difference and that murderous desire is always focused on members of the upper-middle class (ignoring the fact that many women who are killed are prostitutes, and that killers generally seem to kill within their own class and race). The most prevalent is the feminist view that considers all sex crimes as driven by hatred for the female; they are at the structural core of patriarchal ideology (Caputi, Morgan, Brownmiller). Men killed by men are assumed to be feminised, despite much evidence that it is their phallic status (autonomy, desirability) that is literally and symbolically attacked. What emerges most profoundly in the studies is that their statistic bases are always inadequate, and that all of the theorists have an underdeveloped sense of the textual nature of sex crime, of murder as a form of writing. My project here is to establish that murder is always a media(ted) act, with its partial object being the representation of desire and representation of murder itself.

It is no understatement to say that American culture is both violent—the USA has the highest homicide rate in the industrialised world—and fascinated by violence, whether in the form of the gratuitous spectatorship of highway fatalities, sensationalised reporting or aestheticised representations of violence. As Edmund Burke says in his essay on the sublime, ‘we delight in seeing things, which so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed’ (p. 47). Our culture famously regulates the representation of violence far more than violence itself. Writing on Genet, Sartre says that ‘it is the specter of murder, even more than murder itself, that horrifies people and unlooses base instincts’ (p. 485). Actual instances of social violence are generally presented to us in mediated form, as highly mediated objects, and we learn to read them aesthetically—take, for example, the Holocaust, or more recently, the Gulf War.¹ Rather than focus on the way in which representations influence behaviour and experience, which seems to be how both conservative and liberal critiques are pointed, my course will be to look at how acts of violence are a kind of reading of crime and of the nature of desire.

The more I've read, the less I find serial killers interesting at all. They are surprisingly banal. It is the fascination with serial killers which is interesting. My interest is less in drawing a psychological profile of such a killer than in what his representation tells us about the construction of the homosexual. What motivates our fascination with him? In what ways does this figure countermand the positive identity politics of the post-Stonewall generation? Can he be said to be attacking (with vastly different agendas, from within the gay world and from the homophobic straight world) precisely this fixed identity?

Dennis Cooper's novel Frisk opens and closes with a series of five snuff photographs, a kind of haunted frame; this prologue and epilogue are titled with an infinity sign, signalling their positions as the beginning and end of the narrative universe. The first five are what haunt the first-person protagonist Dennis throughout the novel; they culminate in the victim's crater-like anus, ‘as if someone had set off a bomb in his rectum’ (p. 27). Though these photographs are later alleged to be staged, they haunt the narrator so profoundly that his only resolution in the end is to restage them. The specularity of this frame, centred around the image of the damaged anus, forms a ‘small tunnel entrance, too out-of-focus to actually explore with one's eyes, but too mysterious not to want to try’ (p. 4). This opening and closing plays on the very nature of illusion and its role in constructing both our desires and our representations of them. Desire is always preceded by representation and acting on our desires—destructive or not—is an aesthetic production: we create our objects of desire. Frisk is centred on an elaborate feint, in which Dennis the narrator deceives his ex-lover and friend into believing he's begun to actually murder young men (one of their favourite fantasies); thus the whole text starts to limn how narrative constructs desire.²

The serial killer's relationship to representation calls into question representation itself. Sexual murders (probably because they are so publicised) are among the crimes most likely to inspire copycat killings and false confessions. Serial killers, most memorably Ted Bundy, often report (to the media, of course) that pornography and/or violent pornography have inspired their crimes. Their media careers are marked by excess, by a spectacular nature that forces even the reserved, anti-sensationalist New York Times to revel in details such as Jeffrey Dahmer's frying ‘his victim's biceps in Crisco vegetable shortening’. Tabloid murders have often been the only way in which homosexuality has entered public consciousness. Rarely has the notoriously homophobic New York Times tried to render this explicitly what it is that homosexuals actually do.

What is the significance of sexual violence, as it emerges in both popular discourse (e.g. the Jeffrey Dahmer case) and the gay artist's work? Dennis Cooper focuses on homosexual gay violence with a singular vigour; his stories centre on disaffected suburban male teenagers, with their apparent inability to connect either to a normative heterosexual family or to the existing gay community. Steeped in sex, rock, drugs and violence, these recalcitrant narratives often culminate in images of murder or disfigurement against a backdrop strangely denuded of women, parents, teachers or policemen. Often excoriated by the gay community, Cooper's work is centred on the abject homosexual. Sexuality is no longer a positive self-affirming act, but a profound disruption of identity and psychic comfort. Both in Cooper's imaginary and in popular representation, the sex killer is the apex of disaffection, the killer who ‘chopped what was beneath him until no owner could claim it’ (‘A Herd’, p. 14).

Imagine wanting to speak of language and identity, of psychic mechanisms of masochism, homosexuality, subject and object, identification and desire; imagine wanting to speak of all the abject potentialities of existentialism, and to choose to do so in the language of the average Californian teenager. To do this because the intellectual language of the adult world seems even more evacuated than that of the everyday, and to do so while also avoiding the temptations of allegory—of using simple terms to tell transcendental or moral lessons. Dennis Cooper's style avoids polysyllabic words and subordinate clauses; most of his sentences are declarative and one finds hardly a latinate word. The style flattens all affect; the spiritual emptiness of this work is cast against a faint backdrop of the television as a distant spectator to the character's black mirror of desire. Cooper's characters are mostly inarticulate, their words peppered with ums, ‘etc.’, ‘like …’ and ‘whatever’. There are few metaphors and no elaborate descriptions—except in the case of sex or death—and the writing might be said to bear a relationship to American minimalism except for Cooper's absolute disdain for the kind of petty-bourgeois content of minimalism.

In the general alienation of Cooper's teenager, sexual stimulus is modulated into information, rather than desire. Explaining why he wants a hustler to leave his shit unflushed in the toilet, he tells him that the ‘information’ will ‘create a mental world … uh, wait. Or a situation where I could kill you and understand …’ (Frisk, p. 69). Desire for the other becomes the desire to know the other, to see past the limitations of ‘skin’. The narrator of Frisk, the first person ‘Dennis’, describes his perfect type, hairless, pale, thin:

My usual. Now I'm at the part in the fantasy that always fucks me over. I want him, specifically his skin, because skin's the only thing that's available. But I've had enough sex in my life with enough guys to recognize how little skin can explain about anyone. So I start getting into this rage about how stingy skin is. I mean, skin's biggest reward, which is sperm, I guess, is only great because it's a message from somewhere inside a great body. But it's totally primitive.

(p. 53)

Dennis sits and scribbles in his journal, masturbating, ‘but inside my head the most spectacular violence is happening. A boy's exploding, caving in. It looks sort of fake since my only models are splatter films, but it's unbelievably powerful’ (p. 54). The representation of violence is inseparable from violence itself; slasher, splatter, snuff or horror films (Nightmare on Elm St, Friday the Thirteenth) are among the only cultural touchstones in Cooper's fictional universe. Cooper's characters are post-punk aesthetes whose aestheticism consists of finding a few reliable guideposts to get them through the night of everyday life. The scenario in a typical Cooper narrative always involves male adolescents in a world without adults or women. As in the world of Bataille's Story of the Eye, the adults are ineffectual or absent, forming an empty backdrop to the world of adolescent desire. Its severe minimalism, anti-melodrama, an almost-camp seriousness, and anti-bourgeois, vanguard apocalypticism are all inflections of the punk movement.

In Cooper's short story about serial killer Ray Sexton, ‘A Herd’, a similar kind of alienated desire is focused on magazine stars. They ‘were Ray's angels, freed from the limits of IQ and coordination … Teen stars’ perfections haunted him, and a vague resemblance to one or another could, more often than not, be gleaned from the face of a boy he had killed … A boy chained up or tied down, in the midst of whatever torture, might turn his head sideways and an idol's look would appear in one feature or another. … More often, he wouldn't see any resemblance until the boy died … Then what Ray had done took on meaning' (‘A Herd’, pp. 10-11).

It is only death which provides the ultimately empty object on which to cathex one's desires, but this death takes the physiognomy of the television character imprinted as the object of desire in the first place. This object is oddly blank, like Garbo's face on the Sphinx, which Roland Barthes describes as a blank screen, a profound selflessness which engenders desire (p. 70). This central concern of Cooper's allies him with a major concern of many postmodern theorists. Planted in a hyper-real culture without a space for resistance, negation, or political change, writers and artists endeavour to unveil a real which escapes simulacra. Foucault holds fast to a notion of counter-discourse which recovers subjugated constituencies, and, in other registers, Deleuze's rhizomatic and nomadic wanderings over and under codification, and even Baudrillard muses on secret knowledge and seduction. These might be subsumed into Lyotard's retrenchment to the sublime, as they dematerialise the subject within the fantasmatic pleasure of the text, and as they are ultimately anti-narrative and demonstrate a dissolution of language and representation itself. However, I believe that Cooper is both never outside representation and rather polemical in his position regarding identity and (homosexual) desire.

In the recent novella Jerk, Cooper's text unfolds over four levels of discourse. Accomplice killer David Brooks speaks to us ‘live’ about his experiences ‘as a drug-addicted, psychotic teen murderer in the early seventies’. On the second level he hands the audience a file of two ‘non-fiction’ stories, which introduce serial killer Dean Corll and his other accomplice, Wayne. Corll soon articulates the central impasse of the ‘intellectual’ murderer: how can one really know one's object? The inner life of the victim, his sensations, remain inaccessible. Is the victim ever ‘ours’? Corll asks his accomplices. ‘They're not ours … not even dead.’ This disquisition is answered by a Mephistophelean knock on the door: a teenager fascinated by Dean's dark magnetism. Like the other victims, he virtually offers himself. These are figures whose life is so empty, death seems possible, the most ultimate experience. ‘The worst that could happen’, says one, ‘is nothing.’

The third discourse emerges in David's puppet show, given to us in script form. Here the freakish turnaround occurs in which Dean Corll begins to speak as the voice of his victim, ‘Dean-as-corpse’. This provokes the conceptual crisis of the story: identity becomes so permeable that it is merely an act of will, as permeable as fabric. Dean tries to overcome the innate distance between killer and victim by projecting the victim as one of his television love-idols, the boy from Flipper or Dennis the Menace. This resolves the problem of interiority, since television stars have no inner lives, as Dean explains: they are only what is onscreen, pure surface. This mimicry, the ultimate act of making the corpse into a puppet, provokes Wayne into killing Dean and finally, after a third murder, David into killing Wayne. But this is not a conventionally moral judgment about the limits of murder. It is as much, as in all of Cooper's work, about the limits of representation. An appended ‘paper’ from a student in a course on ‘Freudian Psychology as Refracted through Post Modern Example’ forms the fourth layer of discourse. In an analysis of David's puppet show, the student diagnoses a loss of meaning at the core of the show, that the closer David tries to convey the events, the more distant their meaning becomes. Intelligence gives the feeling of mastery over things, but one nevertheless cannot possess those things.

While being logically arrayed, none of these four levels of discourse are privileged over the others. They form a kind of elegant double (triple or quadruple) mirroring, a kind of Jacobean play-within-a-play. During the puppet sequences, David's job is also to film the murders in Super-8, which becomes yet another layer of simulacra. The third murder is inspired by viewing these films, and the final death—David killing his fellow accomplice and lover, Wayne—occurs when he throws the camera at Wayne's head. Jerk is thus a meditation on the nature of illusion, desire and representation, and on their manifestation in the real world, as identity.

These murderers are guilty not just because they kill, but because they overidentify with their desired prey. Their sadism is a form of masochism. In his 1915 ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, Freud constructs a three-step process to explain the relationship between violence and desire. Masochism is descended from sadism by a process of reversal: all the subject's instincts include aggressive components which are directed upon its object. In a secondary stage, both the object and the aim change: the impulse to mastery is turned upon oneself and turned from active to passive. Finally, the impulse returns to an object in the world, and another person ‘has to take over the role of the subject’ (p. 232). Freud is not content with saying that masochism is a reversed form of sadism, since he still maintains that sadism is a projected form of masochism, as the sadist could not take pleasure in other's pain without having experienced masochistically the link between pleasure and pain. Within psychoanalysis, this argument is further elucidated; for our purposes, what is vital here is that Freud holds to the primacy of sadism.³ The suffering is ‘enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identification of himself with the suffering object’ (p. 235).

If identification is at the core of Freud's ambiguity around sadism, it is also at the genesis of Cooper's characters' self-destructions. Their emptiness is self-driven, a search for a limit experience which (like ecstasy, horror, rage, hunger, fear, repulsion) is always located at the boundaries and orifices. But these limits are not the typical ‘heightened experience’ of realism or classical tragedy; they are abject. Julia Kristeva points out that they are precisely those things which break down distinctions, an abjection within which looms ‘one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable’ (p. 1).

If anything, Cooper's work is anti-psychological, opposed to any depth model. By literally showing us what's inside the body, and entering through the anus, he demystifies interiority. By reproaching the exterior/false against the interior/truth, he also takes on the identity formation of the mainstream post-Stonewall gay community. Cooper's work inhabits the stereotype of the pathological homosexual as an aesthetic strategy against endemic homophobia, though to him the gay community as it exists is also deeply homophobic and normative—in particular in framing the ideal homosexual relationship in the terms of mutuality.⁴ What Cooper's novels do not resemble are the critical anti-homophobic work of much of (the eighties) gay activist art. His novels invoke characters who seek loss and oblivion, who are ‘beyond good and evil’ or ‘neither good nor evil’, as Foucault put it. They are also beyond the oppositional strategies of activist art, which in this context become interpreted as merely reactive and over-rationalised.

The homosexual is suspended within a certain paradox: as manifesting either an excess of passion (which is more commonly held and somehow more forgivable—one sees this in apologies for gay promiscuity) or a strange conscious dispassion, a moral sang-froid which enables him to cross boundaries the ‘decent’ human upholds.⁵ Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is exemplary in this respect. The homosexual couple is manifestly repressed, over-controlled, and they see themselves as beyond the law, outside the limits; their amorality is a kind of Nietzschean anti-morality, which compels them to kill a schoolmate as a living proof of their superiority to the common laws of civilisation. When not seen as the subject of criminal passion, the homosexual serial killer is more generally represented in the media as a calculating psychopath. This is the terror of the serial killer: not his excess of passion, but his dispassion, his systematic strategies. This paradigm of sexuality evacuates the notion of sex as fulfilment, as truth or comfort; sex becomes an inadequate expression, a site in which power relations are deployed to negate an inadequate fixed identity toward a kind of existential anti-truth.

All existentialist writers begin with the premise that the ontological dimension (Being) has been forced out of consciousness by the institutions and systems of a society that overvalues rationality. However, Cooper is no existentialist. His interests are no more in authenticity than they are in transgression; his novels are if anything a meditation on the inability to transgress, both literally and figuratively, on how it is impossible to murder someone without losing one's identity through an invasion of representation—all the murders that came before—just as it is impossible to ‘really know someone’. Thus his subject at base is banality, not transgression.

And if banality can be ‘overcome’, or displaced, it must be through what Bataille has termed expenditure. A rationalised cultural economy is limited to activity which is either productive or self-preservative, while expenditure reflects the thrall society has in loss, ‘in catastrophes that, while conforming to well defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions, crises of dread, a certain orgiastic state’. Expenditure is linked to the logic of sacrifice, and examples of it include ‘luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality’ (p. 118). The stress in Bataille which so aptly applies to Cooper is that it considers the problem of surplus, of what a society does with its surplus resources: the circular ritual of destruction in Jerk is a form of unproductive social exchange, ‘generous, orgiastic and excessive’. Moral retribution would require a form of social rationalism, a coherence of the subject over narrative space. Cooper's novels are not moral tales. His notion of heterogeneous experience is on the order of the Marquis de Sade: one which disrupts the demands of the utilitarian, of an ordered and rationally productive society. Heterogeneity in this sense is a form of madness, since it evaporates the distinctions of interior and exterior central to the subject, thus demanding the dissolution of the (in this case homosexual) subject.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin (‘On the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’) comes to mind here: the aestheticisation of violence is the avant-garde of the aestheticisation of politics.

   One might argue that the Holiday/Rodney King tape escaped this dynamic; much was made of the crudeness of the video format (a kind of aesthetics of authenticity) as essential in provoking such a strong, i.e. violent, response.

2. Elizabeth Young argues that at the centre of Cooper's work is the sadomasochistic anal taboo, around which he defies prurience and rejects obscenity ‘in favor of clarity and understanding’ (236). It seems to me that this disregards the element of the subject central to Cooper's fiction.

3. Deleuze resolves the problem of masochism in psychoanalysis by the invocation of a sadistic superego and a masochistic ego; pp. 123-34.

4. See David Bergman, p. 40. While discussing Joseph Allen Boone's interpretations of American quest romances, he notes therein an ‘elevation of mutuality—rather than polarity—in the male bond [which] presents a conceptual alternative to the gender inequality institutionalized by marriage in heterosexual relations’.

5. Both terms of this paradox are homophobic, of course. Most gay artists and writers defend or excuse the excess of passion (and seek normative patterns for it), while relatively few defend dispassion.

Bibliography

Roland Barthes, ‘Le visage de Garbo’, in Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957).

Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, trans. A. Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

David Bergman, Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-representation in American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).

Jane Caputi, The Age of Sex Crime (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Press, 1987).

Dennis Cooper, Frisk (New York: Grove, 1991).

Dennis Cooper, Jerk (San Francisco: Artspace Press, 1993).

Dennis Cooper, ‘A Herd’, in Wrong (New York: Grove, 1992).

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Deleuze and Sacher-Masoch, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1989).

Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’, Standard Edition, vol. XII.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia, 1986).

Elliot Leyton, Hunting Humans: Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers (New York: Pocket Books, 1986).

Robin Morgan, Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York: Norton, 1989).

Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1963).

Elizabeth Young, ‘Death in Disneyland: The Work of Dennis Cooper’, in Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveny, Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction (London: Serpent's Tail, 1992).