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Why do some people kill? Getting into the mind of a murderer is lucrative business for the entertainment industry. On Netflix, there’s literally a hit series called The Mind of a Murderer. Recently, Netflix made waves with a cerebral action-flick directed by David Fincher that takes us into the mind of a professional assassin.
The Killer begins with a lengthy internal monologue, as the titular character ruminates on his job. He’s appallingly blasé about his horrific occupation. He tells us, “I’m not exceptional. I’m just…apart.” What is so stunning about this opening, which is narrated over the tedium of watching the Killer (that’s the only name we get for him) prepping for a hit, is that we can relate. Who doesn’t feel “apart” sometimes? Who doesn’t have a job that can be tedious?
The hitman also wants to let us in on a secret. There is no rhyme or reason to the universe. “One is born, lives their life. And eventually, one dies.” He notifies us that while every second “1.8 people die,” another “4.2 are born into that very same second. Nothing I’ve done will make any dent in those metrics.” Translated: in our overpopulated world, the Killer might even be doing us all a favor. At least he’s not inflicting any lasting population damage.
The hit goes bad, however, and the Killer has to make a fast escape. He is pursued across the globe, finally prevailing over other assassins paid to kill him. The movie ends on a philosophical note. The Killer wants us to know that he’s not really an exceptional person after all. He’s not one of “the few.” He’s “one of the many.”
The Killer taps into our postmodern moment of alienation and ennui. Fincher gets us to root for a cold-blooded assassin, who convincingly tells us that there is no good or evil, only tedium and gainful employment. For that matter, there’s no heaven or hell, just the “cold, infinite void.” We may not agree, but we can see his point in our darker, more cynical moments.
Netflix’s offering offers popular audiences what they have always craved—an answer to the question, Why do some people kill? The Killer suggests that, for some murderers, it’s not personal. It’s just business. It’s another job in a vast and indifferent world. We can get that.
Lots of pop culture producers have let audiences into the heads of murderers, sometimes to great acclaim. Who can forget Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” ruminating over his hatred for an old man’s filmed-over “vulture eye”? This unhinged hero wants us to know that he is no “madman”—it’s just that detestable eye that must be forever closed. We leer at his frustration.
In more recent times, Truman Capote successfully got into the heads of two killers. In his classic In Cold Blood, Capote sought to create “a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel.’” With oft-poetic language, he closely follows the crime, capture, and execution of two killers at midcentury. At the same time, he revolutionized journalism. He made a real, and gruesome, incident into a page-turning potboiler.
Capote probably offers us the most literary—and haunting—treatment of the killer’s mind. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith are rough customers. Dick is manipulative and calculating, with a mutilated face from a car accident. Perry is small and also damaged (a motorcycle accident), and prone to violent outbursts. The quadruple homicide the two men commit on a midwestern prairie is given less attention than their motives. They raided a prosperous farm family in search of money and, finding none, killed them all. Why?
During their trial, Capote reports that a psychiatrist diagnosed one of the men as schizophrenic, and the other as having deep-rooted antisocial behavior possibly originating in a brain injury. But the author implies that the real problem is a bigger one.
In an interview, Capote suggested that the two murderers revealed the “real” America. Our country, he thought, had become a "desperate, savage, violent” place, one in “collision” with the “sane, safe, insular” place we hopelessly yearned for. Audiences then and now understood Capote’s fear of national decline. Like The Killer, Capote’s In Cold Blood touched a popular nerve.
But can we the audience, who are not homicidal, ever really get into the mind of killers? Part of the allure of movies and books that try to do this is the fact that we know that they are not us. Perhaps this is the assurance that we crave. We can flirt with darkness, but we are essentially separate from the Other. We are safely "normal." Perhaps this is the reason we keep going back for more.
References
Capote, T. (1965). In Cold Blood. New York: Random House.
