The Charismatic Serial Killer Archetype, Part 2:
American Minds & American Movies

Previously, on BrotherBored…

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about how the post-credits teaser from “Venom” (2018) caused me to think about the frequent appearance of the “Charismatic Serial Killer Archetype” in popular fiction. That post was laden with media references to this archetype so that I could give you a sense of how popular media is interconnected. The interconnection exists because the creators of new works are influenced by old works. In my opinion, “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) was one of these influential works; that film established or solidified many traits of the Charismatic Serial Killer character through its depiction of the character Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

The thesis of this series is that the Charismatic Serial Killer is a popular character because he is “cool.” I will gradually explain how I reached this conclusion and why it disturbs me.

But for now, I need you to come with me to a realm of thought that is more abstract. Before I analyze this specific character archetype, I first want to tell you about the connection between sociology and narrative art in general. Once you understand how I think about narrative art in general (which I will do here in Part 2), it will be easier for you to understand my detailed points about serial killers in movies (forthcoming in Part 3).

“Hold on to your butts!”

Discovering the Hidden Recesses of the Mind

Each person has a certain way of thinking. This thought process is a product of that person’s upbringing, experience, training, education, and so on. In this regard, every person is unique. Understanding how another person thinks is no easy task.

Sometimes, a person is willing and able to explain why they think something:

• “I heard it on the news.”
• “That’s how my mother raised me.”
• “I’m not making that mistake again!”

But even when a person is sincerely trying to explain how they reached a certain thought, there is inevitably some component of their thinking that they fail to articulate:

• “I heard it on the news.” (The news I listen to is accurate; my understanding and recollection of what I heard on the news is reliable.)
• “That’s how my mother raised me.” (My mother raised me well / one should follow one’s upbringing; My understanding and recollection of how my mother raised me is reliable.)
• “I’m not making that mistake again!” (The current situation is analogous to my previous experience; the results of my previous experience are representative; my understanding of ‘what went wrong’ last time is accurate.)

The universal phenomenon of unspoken assumptions endlessly confuses people, even when they are openly and honestly trying to communicate with each other. We do not all share the same assumptions, and it is difficult to perceive each other’s assumptions (the obvious consequence of not talking about them). This problem is why we have idioms like “It goes without saying….[and then you directly state what allegedly did not need to be said, just in case].”

Perhaps the single most important benefit one can gain from a formal education is the skill to recognize and articulate assumptions like this (in yourself and other people). What makes my writing (including this post) informative and comprehensible is that I put forth tremendous effort towards self-understanding and clear communication. I gained the ability to think and write so clearly mostly through education, both formal and self-directed.^[1]I can’t give all the credit to my formal education, because, in addition to that, I teach myself a lot of things and read educational materials constantly. I am always trying to improve my ability to think and communicate clearly. Anyone can do this — you’re doing it right now!

But not everyone is so educated, and anyways not everyone wants to share their thoughts. Some of these hidden assumptions are really difficult to discover. A person’s inner thoughts could be hidden from you:

• By indifference (as with my examples)
• By deception (there are a lot of reasons to keep your true thoughts concealed)
• By self-deception (virtually everyone decides to act like they believe convenient lies until they eventually forget that the beliefs are false)
• By ignorance (most people do not even try to understand how they think, so they couldn’t possibly explain their thought process to others)

Self-deception and ignorance can easily create a belief that is so well-hidden, even the belief-holder does not know that they have this belief. In such  situations, you will never understand how the other person thinks if you take their self-analysis at face value. Their self-assessment, however honest, will be inaccurate. For example, author J.K. Rowling seems to consider herself a kind of anti-bigot, but the writing in Harry Potter reflects prejudiced thinking.

When confronted with these situations, a person’s true thinking is difficult to perceive — but not impossible! I have lifelong experience playing board games, for example, and many of my favorite games require you to understand (as best you can) an opponent who is trying to obscure their thoughts from you.

Here’s the basics for understanding a person’s hidden thoughts:

• Imagine everything you can that would explain that person’s actions. “That person’s actions” includes their actions in telling you about their thoughts (the statements might not be accurate, but you might figure out what is motivating them to say the statement regardless).
• Consider every fact you know about the person. This includes not just the thoughts that they’ve revealed to you in words, but also all their personality traits, physical traits, previous actions, life story, and so on — anything at all you know about the person.
• In your own mind, construct a model of that person’s mind. If your mental model correctly accounts for everything you know about the person, you might be able to guess at their hidden thoughts (and future actions!).

In my opinion, this concept is quite simple — it’s just not very easy to do. To become skilled at understanding the hidden thoughts of other people, you have to:

• Have a genuine curiosity about all the other people out there in the world.
• Possess the means and motive to become a worldly person.
• Spend time with people you don’t know and who are not like you.
• Have an open mind as to all the different ways that people might think about things.
• Rigorously study the human condition; i.e., learn about philosophy, psychology, art, economics, sociology, and so on.

This is the project of a lifetime. If you are genuinely interested in developing this skill, I highly recommend playing competitive board games like Diplomacy.^[2]For an introduction, try reading some of a journal I wrote about playing gunboat Diplomacy. In the journal, I showed a clear understanding of the thinking of players who could not speak with me and whose identities were concealed! Playing competitive games is a great way to develop this skill because you force yourself to think hard about the secret thoughts of other people (including people you may have never met before).^[3]Games-playing is also a low-stakes, friendly situation. That makes the competition an ideal training ground.

Now that you might be a little bit intimidated about understanding other people on an individual level, let me present you with a staggering question: how can we investigate the thinking of an entire society?

Let’s find out!

Sociology and Abstractions

Sociology is among the broadest and deepest fields of study, encompassing:

the social causes and consequences of such things as romantic love, racial and gender identity, family conflict, deviant behavior, aging, and religious faith. At the societal level, sociology examines and explains matters like crime and law, poverty and wealth, prejudice and discrimination, schools and education, business firms, urban community, and social movements. At the global level, sociology studies such phenomena as population growth and migration, war and peace, and economic development.

(from “What is Sociology?“).

A complete sociological understanding of a large society like the people of the United States is not really possible for an individual human to achieve. I don’t mean to imply that this is something tragic or alarming. What I want is to acknowledge the limitations of human knowledge-acquisition so that you feel motivated to learn efficiently. To overcome some of the limitations of a human being’s ability to understand a huge field of knowledge like sociology, we have to take shortcuts. One of these shortcuts is to render complicated, diverse data points into abstractions.

For example, one human being cannot realistically watch — let alone fully understand — every movie ever made.^[4]It can take years of study just to fully understand a particular film! But by simplifying movies into categories a person can achieve some approximate knowledge of movies that the person has never even seen. This way, a person can come to understand film in a general way without having mastered all possible knowledge on the topic. For example:

• Genre. If you understand a film to be in a genre like “crime-thriller” or “fantasy,” you have an idea of what the story might be about, the tone, whether there will be special effects, etc.
• Intended Audience. When a movie is described as being a “kids’ movie,” “blockbuster,” “critics’ choice” or “chick flick,” you get an idea of what will be in the movie because of what such an audience would want and expect from a movie targeted at them.

The vast majority of people are capable of this kind of understanding. Indeed, I think most people usually understand the movies that they haven’t seen (and the ones they have seen for that matter) through categorical abstractions such as genre.

Abstract ideas make it possible for the puny human mind to think about things that would otherwise be impossibly vast to ponder. To be sure, all categories and simplifications like this are a mental shortcut. The abstract ideas only exist in our minds as an approximation of reality, in the same way that a map can be a useful approximation of a physical location.

“I have approximate knowledge of many things.”
(Demon Cat must have graduated from college)

So although it is impossible for us to know (let alone fully understand) every single American in an individual way, we can come to understand them in an aggregated way. In this series, I am undertaking to explain the popularity of the charismatic serial killer character, which requires me to enter into the mindset of thousands of artists and millions of consumers who I have never met. I believe this is possible and reasonable; it just requires a lot of abstract thought. I think we can handle it. Let’s keep going!

Society’s Hidden or Unspoken Values Are Expressed Through Its Art

There is a connection between sociology and art criticism.^[5]Art criticism is a part of aesthetics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the meaning and appreciation of art, beauty and good taste. The connection is the idea that one can understand a society by understanding the art that it creates.

I’m about to show you a syllogism that I want you to understand. Maybe you will think this point is obvious; almost everyone I meet seems to believe the claim intuitively. Nevertheless, as usual, I think it is worthwhile to make my thought process explicit. Even if you already believe this syllogism, your self-understanding might be improved by my explicit acknowledgment that this is how you and I both think.

1. Artists and their audiences are part of a society.
2. The works of art created by and for that society reflect sociological facts about that society.
3. Therefore, understanding the art of a society gives insight into the sociology of that society.

“Learn about art, Captain. When you understand a species’ art, you understand that species.”
― Grand Admiral Thrawn

This fascinating idea has been personified in a minor Star Wars villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn. Grand Admiral Thrawn, possibly the most-beloved villain of the Star Wars expanded universe of novels and comic books, was created by Timothy Zahn for a series of novels that revived interest in the Star Wars franchise during the early 90s.^[6]What a tragedy that the book series that contributed to the resurrection of Star Wars got cast aside as non-canonical. In my heart of hearts, those Timothy Zahn novels are my Episodes 7, 8 and 9. Although Thrawn did not have magic powers like the Jedi, he was a formidable opponent. Among other traits, he had uncanny ability to understand the mental weaknesses of various races of aliens by reviewing their works of art. What an interesting character!

Do you and I possess such powers? Can we understand our own mental weaknesses and limitations as a society through understanding our own art? I think we can — at the very least, if we try, we’ll learn something.

American Movies Reflect American Values

American society creates American movies. Even for multinational media companies, the focus and attitude of these companies is American or at least distinctly of the Anglosphere.^[7]I’m talking about the USA and Commonwealth countries like Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Hollywood movie-makers are a part of American society. Even the wealthy people involved at the highest levels of production are from, or are a product of, American culture.

Even if you won’t take this idea at face value (yes, I’m aware that some writers, directors, etc. aren’t American), a company making a big blockbuster movie is targeting an American audience (and/or an audience sympathetic to American movie sensibilities). Big movie companies are extremely skilled at making money. To make this money, they figure out what the audience wants to see at the movies. Big movie companies deploy their vast resources to almost scientifically investigate what might make a popular movie.

American movies can teach us many things about American culture. For one, we can infer what the American movie-going audience thinks from what the movie creators believe the audience will or won’t accept. For example, we can figure out that the studios believe that U.S. audiences will buy tickets to a movie where a person flies through space, or goes back in time, or whatever — but only so long as that person is White, or a man, etc. What does it say about U.S. audiences that our Hollywood elites routinely spend $200,000,000 apiece to make movies about White men doing almost anything imaginable, things utterly outside human possibility, but are reluctant to spend $20,000,000 to make movies about Black women doing, well, anything?^[8]This idea, specifically, might change with the success of Black Panther. Praise be to Bast!

American Movies Maintain American Values

Another aspect of the relationship between sociology and art is that the art a society consumes, in addition to reflecting its values, also creates and reinforces those values.

Most people can’t describe their feelings, beliefs, and values without referring to stories. In my opinion, this is because those stories are indeed what instilled in them the values. Stories also help people understand and express feelings that otherwise might be too vague for them to articulate. Conversely, when a person’s feelings aren’t validated in stories, that person might repress them or forget about them altogether.

Almost certainly you have experienced this for yourself, or at least heard other people tell you about their experiences this way. A movie, a song, a novel, an episode of a TV show — even though the story was fictional (or fictionalized), this story taught you something. Maybe you learned that other people sometimes experience deep love as a painful feeling, and this helped you understand your own emotions. Or maybe you saw a character refuse to give up, and for the first time understood the meaning of perseverance. And of course, there are endless anecdotes about how merely experiencing a character with some trait helped a young person feel comfortable that they too have the trait.

Art can also teach people to be bad. Example: Many, or even most, racist beliefs of White Americans are taught to them through TV, films, and so on — not necessarily their everyday experiences. Specifically, the vast majority of White Americans have all sorts of stereotyped and prejudiced beliefs and attitudes about our Black minority,^[9]Americans of color (that is, those who are not White) are of course not exempt from prejudiced thinking, but that’s not relevant to the point I’m trying to make here. even if they don’t know any Black people — even if they’re from a part of the country where few Black people even reside. These ideas simply must be coming to them through stories.

The values we learn from stories persist inside us, even if we have experiences that probably should teach us to think differently. Maybe this point goes beyond the scope of this article, but I think it is worth mentioning that most people are incredibly stubborn in their beliefs. I do not believe that “life experience” educates people. Unless a person is trying to learn new ideas, they will only acknowledge life experiences that are consistent with what they already think and forget about everything else. If you believe me that this is true, then you may have an idea of why I think the values promoted in stories are so important.

Movies Are An Ideal Cultural Artifact for Us to Analyze

The kind of investigation I am doing here is relatively easy to perform on movies. A given movie is a small, permanent thing (compared to, say, a human being). The content never changes, and it’s the product of a specific group of people at a specific moment in time. We can pin it down, take it apart, and understand what’s going on inside a movie with far greater ease than we can for a person.

For some examples of how to examine the psychology of a film, I recommend taking a look at these movie reviews I wrote:

• Terminator 2: Judgment Day (I consider the racial dynamics at play with the death of the movie’s only significant Black character)
• The Incredibles (I discuss the bad values implied by how the script treats its protagonist)
• Captain America: The First Avenger (I examine how the movie attempts to re-write the true history of America)

Combining the notion that movies are relatively easy to understand with my earlier points about sociology and understanding people leads me to this conclusion:

American movies (produced by and for Americans), by their enormous popularity and influence, offer us a way to analyze the thinking (including the hidden thinking) of American people.

In Part 3, I will take a deep dive into the American psyche, and discuss just what makes the Charismatic Serial Killer so “cool.” Click here to keep reading.