Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture

Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture. Mark Seltzer. New York: Routledge, 1998. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks identifies "ambition" as one of the driving forces of narrative. The self, Brooks writes, "creates a circle,. mainly in front of itself, attempting ever to move forward to the circumference of that circle and to widen it, to cast the nets of the self ever further" (40). Considering that Brooks thinks of plot as a combination of repetition and variation, driven by complex and intense desires, it would be appropriate, in more than one way, to think of Mark Seltzer's new book, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture, as ambitious. With great sophistication and virtuosity, Seltzer's study of popular culture widens the circle of inquiry on the subject of serial murder-theoretically, historically, and rhetorically. First, Seltzer's ambition is to capture contemporary culture as a vast and complex system, structured by ideologies that often fragment into impossible oppositions and maddening ambiguities. Obviously, this project requires a wide range of reference points, the most crucial and typical of which are the figure of the serial killer and the spectacle of serial murder. "Serial killing," Seltzer writes, "has its place in a culture in which addictive violence has become a collective spectacle, one of the crucial sites where private desire and public fantasy cross" (253). As prominently as the serial killer might figure in the book's title, he is but a specific symptom of the general breakdown of boundaries, albeit on the extreme outward boundary of human behavior. In negotiating a sense of identity in this destabilized social environment, the serial killer sets the precedent for the rest of us. Tragically, however, he fabricates the self through the endlessly repeated violent enactment of what makes the culture, according to Seltzer, so toxic in the first place. In him, we see cultural forces converge and cultural boundaries erected, erased, and redrawn. Public and private, individual and collective, self and other, and bodies and machines-they all merge into what Seltzer calls "the pathological public sphere. " In the spirit of transgression, Seltzer touches on a wide variety of phenomena which he reads as indicative of what he calls America's "wound culture," a culture that provides identity through the "convening of the public around scenes of violence.the milling around the point of impact.the public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound" ( 1 ). As symptoms of this culture, Seltzer calls on examples like the zombified demeanor of fashion models on contemporary runways, the infamous "Holmes Castle" in the Chicago of the 1893 World Exposition, Lew McCreary's underrated novel The Minus Man, the writing of, among many others, Stephen Crane and Horatio Alger, and the 1996 national election, which Seltzer characterizes sardonically as a "contest about trauma and wounds; the shattered and already posthumous war veteran-dead man talking-and the make-love-not-warrior whose tag line is `I feel your pain"' (22). Equally acerbic and strikingly acute insights are reserved for the nation's current TV favorite, ER, which is "pure wound culture: the world, half meat and half-machinery, in a perpetual state of emergency. …