It’s still far too early in the aftermath of the lethal game which James Holmes played out in an Aurora, Colorado multiplex to get more than a shadow of a read about his motivation, his master narrative. Psychoanalysts possess a native madness to interpret – it’s in our blood. A few details have emerged about Holmes, but hardly enough to piece together a coherent picture of his inner life, or the external circumstances which might have precipitated his murderous scenario.
At this point I can only address some aspects of the Aurora massacre relevant to popular culture, and share some free – very free – associations. The Joker from the Batman mythos leapt immediately to mind after I first heard about the Aurora debacle before Holmes’ capture: not the comic book character; not Caesar Romero’s Joker in the TV series, nor Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the 1989 Batman film. But Heath Lodger’s Joker of The Dark Night, the second movie of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
Subject to correction, I recall that the Joker’s hideous smile was attributed in the 1989 film to his tumbling into a vat of chemical waste, which somehow incited a yen for murderous practical jokes. (I believe his criinality was already well entrenched.). In the comics, then in his screen incarnations, he became Batman’s arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty to the Caped Crusader’s Holmes, as it were.
Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the most astonishing portrayals of pure, manic malevolence in cinema history. At one point in The Dark Night the Joker elicits a tincture of pity by describing how, as a child, his sadistic father carved out Joker’s appalling rictus with the same knife he had just used to murder his mother. Later on, Joker says that he disfigured himself with a razor blade to show his wife, scarred hideously in a fire, that he still loved her, only to incur her disgust and rejection. Not only did one realize the second tale was yet another perverse joke: Joker’s entire character was an ongoing improvisation.
In effect, Ledger’s Joker comprised a huge, grotesque cipher. The central truth, the raison d’etre of his existence was his appetite for anarchic violence. In this context, I am reminded of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s interpretation of Iago. After reviewing possible reasons for Iago’s evil, those offered by the character himself (Othello passing him over for promotion; bedding his wife), then the arguments of previous critics, Coleridge coined the term ‘motiveless malignity’ to describe a wickedness so profound as to lie beyond interpretation, unknowing, indeed uncaring about its origins. Iago simply delighted doing awful deeds for the sheer sake of doing them, absolutely sans remorse. His final words before being lead away to slow execution are: “Demand me nothing: what you know you know./From this time forth, I never will speak word.”
Coleridge’s Iago embodies the essence of primal misrule, as does Ledger/Nolan’s Joker. (The Biblical Hebrew for this ultimate chaos is tohoboho). Both have committed the most sinister, repellant acts, dare us to contemplate their motives, and mock us for doing so. It’s alleged tthat Holmes, surrendering to police without a struggle, called himself the Joker (on a note of caution, most of what we’ve heard about Holmes is still ‘alleged’.)
I have to wonder – again, pure speculation – if Ledger’s Joker lurked somewhere in Holme’s fantasy world: Joker the anarchist; Joker the rank enemy of puny law and order; defier and defiler of the social contract; Joker who, no matter how you tried to constrain or label him always eluded definition; always escaped your clutches literally and figuratively; always left you guessing, with the world murderously exploding around you.
One further hears – this isn’t ‘alleged’ – that Homes had protected himself with full body armor (including throat and groin armor). Although his purpose in all things is unknown as I write, it’s reasonably plausible that, unlike the Columbine duo, he did not want to be killed. It’s been theorized that he hoped to escape by blending in with the SWAT team after the shootings. At any rate, he gave himself up without a strugle: has a darkly riveting story to tell; has enabled the possibility of telling it, to police, psychiatrists, a courtroom, future biographers, et cetera. Will he want to tell it himself, or will he have others narrate and interpret it, de juris or de facto?
Will he, in effect, surrender his voice to the police, lawyers, psychiatrists, and other assorted ‘experts’ who will predictably descend upon the ‘case’. It would be the ultimate malignant provocation to only offer Iago’s silence (“From this time forth I never will speak word.”) while the world dances madly around his actions and motives. Somehow, I don’t think this likely.
Holmes narrative will be unfolded, but whether Holmes himself will ever speak his truth; or indeed what constitutes the truth behind the apocalyptic devastation he wrought, who can say. One contemplates the rather disconcerting possibility that there may be both a great deal we will learn about him, and still know very little.
Other free associations. I wonder if it’s only the Batman narrative – – notably its retelling by Nolan, inspired by Frank Miller’s great comic-book re-invention –which has informed Holmes actions. The booby-trapped apartment seems to straight out of the film, Speed, for instance, and that’s only the most famous booby-trapped apartment in action cinema.
Holmes’ macabre ‘performance’ contains plentiful referents to other action pictures – inter alia the swat-team uniform; a gas grenade rolled onto the floor preceding pandemonium; shots first fired into the ceiling, followed by serial, willy-nilly mowing down of innocents – this stuff is native to many classic action films – e.g the Die Hard and the Matrix franchises. The action genre, replete with comic book (or comic book-ish) superheroes and supervillains, may be deeply embedded in Holmes’ intrapsychic story. I am also reminded of David Fincher’s Fight Club, in which an angry army of disenfranchised men are recruited to detonate the society which has trashed them.
All is so much surmise. I don’t think we’ll have the answers soon, as the apparatus of the criminal justice system closes in around Holmes, and the engine of forensic psychiatry begins to hum. It’s recently been discovered he was involved with a psychiatrist, but the nature of his treatment, if indeed treatment occurred, is unknown. Predictably, experts often with dubious expertise are rushing to diagnose him, ignoring the ethical directive of the American Psychiatric Association to pass no judgements on those one does not know at first hand (and if one did, in therapy, consent would have to be given except under very special circumstances. Tarasoff, anyone?)
I recur to the issue of anarchic violence. Anarchist political movements have been with us for at least two centuries, of many different stripes. Advocating violence has been crucial to the regime of some movements; others pointedly eschewed violence. But there’s also a species of intense personal anarchy, which at base advances no real explanation about its motives beyond contemplating, Iago-like, the world’s utter ruination for its own sweet sake. A connection to anarchist philosophy may be tenuous in such spirits, or may not exist at all.
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Finally, I submit that there’s a different anarchic spirit which has been gathering force in America for decades. How the Aurora massacre relates to it I cannot begin to fathom. It is light years away from radical anarchist agendas. It is embodied in the gradual, relentless breakdown of the American social contract, manifested by a diminishing concern for, and withering away of social, governmental, communal structures which have traditionally comforted us through the toughest of times.
I sense the deterioration has been evolving at least since the Reagan era, with its recommendation of trickle-down, hands-off social/economic policies. I will not address this far more subtle anarchistic thrust here. Its’ causes are complex, its’ enablers eminently sane, inhabiting radio and TV programs; boardrooms , war-rooms, and the highest reaches of government. I tremble for its consequences to my children and grandchilden.
The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats surely had this massive social breakdown in mind, when he wrote The Second Coming in 1919, amidst the catastrophic European aftermath of World War I:
“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with passionate intensity…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Jerusalem, waiting to be born.”