The Cult of the Killer: On Murder-Celebrities (Time of Monsters, Part 7)

(A warning note before I proceed: This piece discusses people responsible for the deaths of other people. I am not celebrating them – quite the opposite in fact – but there is a discussion of them and I wanted readers to be aware of that before they decide whether to proceed.)

There is a certain resonance between today’s topic and figures like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle — the pop cultural vigilante no doubt led to the emergence of the real reflection. However, with the transition to the real world, actual politics began to intrude.

I write this the day after Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three charges in regard to the death of George Floyd. This event was both good and insufficient – it is good that a police officer was held accountable in this one instance, it is bad that justice is not served by the system in general, leading to events such as this (and as many people have noted on social media, many Black victims still have yet to see anything like justice). This has led me to consider the issue of violence, something that I’ve devoted some time to thinking about recently, especially after my recent column on the phenomenon of German volunteers on the republican side of the Spanish Civil War.

I am not generally enthusiastic about violence, though it’s more complicated than simple opposition. At some point I’m going to write on it, though I’ll have to frame some thoughts worth reading before then. Suffice to say that I convinced my father to let me leave cub scout camp shortly before we received firearm training (the presence of several hundred daddy long-legs in the tent I shared with two other boys, the terrible food, and the driving rain probably helped).

When I was very young, I got into a large number of fights, and received counseling about my aggression. Needless to say, I never viewed myself as the aggressor, but this didn’t really matter. I don’t really remember my thought process from before counseling, though – and I honestly don’t really get the attraction that many people seem to have to doing violence.

So I’m a bit at a loss when I look at the news and see certain phenomena. I imagine it’s something like how an asexual individual feels when they see something hinging on sexual desire, a sort of: yeah, you could, but why would you?

This is all a bit of a long walk to say that I think it’s incredibly fucked up that we have murder-celebrities. I don’t think that this is something that a healthy society should have.

I think that an examination of the case of Christopher Dorner is necessary for any discussion of policing in America. That’s beside the point of today’s post, though.

By this, I mean individuals like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse (the latter mentioned obliquely twice, here and here): people who became celebrities because they murdered the “right” people. Almost universally, these people are hailed as heroes by those on the right wing of American politics. The closest left wing parallel I can think of is Christopher Dorner, who is dead and is only arguably any kind of icon for any portion of the left.

But people like Zimmerman and Rittenhouse are treated as celebrities. Zimmerman, at least, seems to think that he is based on his behavior on twitter before he was banned for revenge porn (which is bad, yes, but as far as I understand it he was regularly threatening violence, and there was no question that he had killed someone, so…).

To be clear, this isn’t a widespread phenomenon, but I think that it’s worrying that these people who are famous for killing other people are handled in this way. They receive the social benefits of celebrity, even if only from a small portion of the population, and it seems to me that this isn’t really the sort of thing that goes away on its own. I can easily see a future in which, for example, those who don’t have any particular stance on a protest might open fire on people for the same reason that people record videos of themselves doing the newest online “challenge” – as a way to gain clout and fame. In much the same way it functions elsewhere, there will obviously be decreasing returns on this, but as we head towards protest season (and, dear god, we live in a society where it is coherent to talk about protest season) I fear we’re going to see attempts at this.

The reason is simple: behaviors that people want to see more of are rewarded, behaviors that people want to see less of are punished. This may take the form of official, legal rewards and punishments (cash rewards on the one hand and fines and imprisonment on the other) or it may take the form of informal, social rewards punishments (free drinks and other gifts, or simple positive attention versus public shaming and expulsion from a shared space). The lack of official punishment and the presence of informal reinforcement creates an incentive to do violence. People are encouraged – so long as they’re the “right” people – to kill – so long as they kill the “right” people, or do so in a way that can be spun like that.

It probably doesn’t need to be spelled out, but just in case it does: the “right” people for these two to kill were either black or pushing for the rights of black people. This is especially true when it can be made deniable that these people were killed for this reason. Considering American history, this is sadly not surprising.

Alongside Travis Bickle, we need to acknowledge the effect of the Western genre, concerned as it is with the violent imposition of individual will on a hostile environment.

I’ve spoken in the past about how we live in a culture that is weirdly enthusiastic about death. We’re blasé about deaths due to climate change, and we ignore those killed by the actions of our economic system (whether it kills through overwork or exposure to a deadly virus). Of course, we hate the effects – how could we not? – but a thing is as it does, and while we might hate the effects, we love the causes far more. The cultural product of this exterminist ethos is the murder-celebrity: the famous killer.

This is almost always a normal person plucked up from some obscure position and made famous by the forces that drive the culture war: they’re attacked by one side because of what they have done, and celebrated on the other for no reason other than that they have made the first side angry.

This is a very strange position to occupy within the social world: Rittenhouse and Zimmerman are the only examples I can think of, but one person who achieved celebrity for this reason is too many. As far as I can tell, the apparatus of right-wing outrage only produces these celebrities under certain, specific conditions:

1. They must be obscure figures before the inciting event.

2. They must not be law enforcement officers.

3. They must be confronted by a politically-marked individual and behave in that situation as if they are a police officer, asserting an authority that they do not possess (they are “copized” individuals, similar to the “copized” media I commented upon last summer).

4. When this (non-existent) authority is not respected, they respond with deadly force.

5. They are made into an object of fascination by the media, and are given a platform on which to speak.

6. Punishment for violating the law does not materialize, thus signaling the implicit approval of the law for what they have done.

In short, it is similar to the sort of celebrity that mass shooters achieve, while mass shooters tend to be taken alive and tend to be protected, they don’t tend to get platformed any longer (I had to look up the name of the Christchurch shooter – he killed for publicity, but was thankfully denied it), part of this might be a certain amount of distaste on the broader public. For example, the perpetrator of the Charleston Church Shooting proved to be too unpalatable for the wider public (he was, after all, a Neo-Nazi, but this was also in the final year of the Obama administration).

Isn’t it great that this is a recognizable headline to all of us?

It isn’t the most important question, but I wonder why some killers are considered media-worthy and others aren’t. I think it’s because of a widespread, but obviously incorrect, sense that they were justified in their killing – something I notice is that both of these individuals were essentially pretending to be police in the course of the killing, possibly lending them a measure of the aura of invincibility that we have culturally created for the police.

One might point to figures like Elliot Rodger or the Columbine shooters as broadly similar and there is the same general kind of nauseating aura about them. However, in both cases the subject of the phenomenon is dead, there is still a kind of cultus about them, but I wouldn’t label it a celebrity. Rittenhouse was unofficially endorsed by Black Rifle Coffee Company, and it’s rare that an accused murderer gets a brand endorsement deal (the owner has disavowed the photo, but retractions rarely get as much attention as the incident that inspires them.) While I could imagine the young neo-nazis sucking down bad coffee from “tactical” mugs, the thought of Elliot Rodger clumsily dancing on a reality show is enough to make you start drinking to make the mental images go away. Think of these individuals less as “murder-celebrities” and more as near-misses. Largely, they failed to achieve what Rittenhouse and Zimmerman did.

A big part of why that failed is that these three are simply grotesques: there can be no veneer on what they did that it was anything else. Meanwhile, there is a segment of the population that acts like the “successes” here are the white hats in a western movie – civilians determined and brave enough to take the law into their own hands.

The most important question, though, is how do we make sure there are fewer – preferably none – of these individuals in the future? I don’t know exactly. My instinct is to say that the perception that the police – and especially those who behave as if they have been deputized – are somehow legally invincible must go away. If we are going to be a society of laws, then there cannot be a class of people exempted from those laws.

Image taken from Patrick Wyman’s Substack, specifically the article “Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry and American identity”, an excellent read.

Another important thing, I believe, is to attach these people’s crime to them as a permanent badge of shame – referring to the one with the title “accused spree killer,” and the other with something along the lines of “the skittles killer.” These are simply off the top of my head, but it’s important not to attach the name of the victim to them, I feel. It would be an indignity for the deceased to be forever tied to their killer, after all.

However, none of this is a perfect solution, because I think this is indicative of deeper problems. After all, would a healthy society be as enamored with death as our own?

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