On Monday morning, Oct. 7, a 13-year-old boy was shot in the chest as his mother dropped him off in front of his middle school in Bowie, Md. The boy was the eighth victim in a series of sniper-style shootings that have left six dead and two seriously wounded in the suburbs of our nation’s capital over the past week. The victims all were shot while performing ordinary tasks of everyday life: fixing a car, mowing the lawn, doing groceries.
Shell casings found near the murder scenes have confirmed that the shots were fired from the same high-powered rifle; witnesses reported a white box-truck at multiple murder locations. While police investigators have countless leads, they are nevertheless baffled by the killer’s unorthodox style and elusiveness. Furthermore, the incessant media swarm that now surrounds the shootings has severely hampered the investigation, the police claim. Tuesday evening, WUSA-TV Channel 9 reported that the killer had left a taunting note for detectives in the woods near the latest shooting-the message, “Dear policeman, I am God,” written on a Tarot card. Incensed Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose accused the television station of reporting evidence that needed to remain confidential in order to give investigators a better chance at apprehending the killer.
Last Friday, Red Dragon, the third installment in the Hannibal Lecter film trilogy opened across the nation and grossed $37.5 million over the weekend. The film traces the investigation of a series of gruesome murders performed by a serial killer that targets ordinary families as they sleep in their homes. While it may seem simply a sick coincidence that art and reality have mirrored each other this past week, it’s far from the first time this particular phenomenon has occurred.
In February 1991, two weeks after the release of Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer murdered his fifth of what was to become twelve victims in Milwaukee, Wis. In the months following the film’s release, Dahmer’s psychopathic tendencies accelerated dramatically, and he killed seven more young men before his arrest that July. Like Lecter in the films, Dahmer dismembered and ate his victims, and this parallel in the two contemporaneous stories, one fictional, one true, led to a previously unheard of media spectacle surrounding the disappearances and Dahmer’s eventual arrest.
In the more than 20 years since the advent of cable television and the founding of CNN, and further since the development of the Internet, the line between entertainment and news has blurred to the point of non-existence. The O.J. Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the disappearance of Chandra Levy, even the 9-11 tragedy all became 24-hour media brothels, frequented by tabloid and legitimate news outlets alike. Perverted into spectacles by the media, stripped of all their value as real news, these scandals were probed and mined for all the sensational entertainment they could provide to shock and titillate audiences. But news today must be shocking to keep ratings up-it must entertain in order to maintain its audience, because today it’s not just competing with other news but with all other media.
Since time immemorial social conservatives have lambasted pop-culture, and its Hollywood purveyors in particular, for debauching our collective morals, corrupting the youth and contributing to a culture of depravity and violence. Likewise, the Hollywood culture machine perpetually shoots back that art merely imitates life, and furthermore provides a socially useful outlet for violent and aggressive tendencies in our culture. On the other hand, the news media have claimed social value and gained status as the fourth estate on the basis that it provides people with real information that informs our lives as citizens in a democratic society. This claim to social value becomes particularly trenchant when decisions are being made that affect our lives, like decisions that would bring about war.
And yet, in the Washington Post over the past week, coverage of the sniper shootings dominated. Viewing local television news of the shootings, one is struck by the eerie feeling that we are watching a movie. Many people reported the same feeling watching news coverage of the World Trade Center attacks last year. It looked like a movie. Many people thought it was, at first.
Whether last week’s release of Red Dragon contributed to any psychopathic motivation for the shootings this past week is a moot point. What is truly disturbing and puzzling, though, as news-cameras today shoot witnesses to the killings, getting footage for their round-the-clock coverage of the spectacle, is whether or not this “coverage” informs anyone about their decisions as a citizen. How does it help our democratic society to know that this serial killer left a Tarot card with the figure of death on a white horse next to a spent shell casing on a matted down area of ground in the woods 150 yards from the front of Benjamin Tasker middle school in Bowie, Md. where a 13-year-old boy was shot in the chest? That’s not news, but spectacle. That sounds more like a movie to me.
Eric Nazar is a senior in the college. He resides in a penthouse apartment, but still showers at Yates.
