Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (30 page)

Two events in the 1990s seemingly sealed the connection in the popular mind between alternative sexualities and the murdering maniac. Jonathan Demme’s brilliant 1991 film
Silence of the Lambs
and the real-world horrors of Jeffrey Dahmer both seemed to underscore the conservative claim that deviant sexuality threatened family values and American lives. In representations of Dahmer, and in both the novel and the film versions of
The Silence of the Lambs
, alternative sexualities are presented as a kind of gateway drug to serial murder.
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The discovery of the carnage wreaked by Jeffery Dahmer in the summer of 1991 riveted the nation. Dahmer’s neighbors frequently heard the sounds of buzzsaws, loud thumps, and occasional screams coming from his apartment. The police had, by accident, come close to discovering Dahmer’s crimes earlier than they eventually did. In May of 1991 two women found a drugged, dazed fourteen-year-old boy wandering the street who had escaped from Dahmer’s apartment of horrors. Dahmer managed to convince police that the boy was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend. The officers on the scene allowed him to take the boy back to his apartment.
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In July, another of Dahmer’s intended victims escaped and this time brought police back to the apartment. Police arrested Dahmer after finding a human head in the refrigerator, chemical vats with human organs, and the beginnings of an altar made out of human skulls in his bedroom. Gein, who had died in prison in 1984, seemed back from the grave.

Dahmer’s
atrocities became fodder for the culture wars. Law enforcement officials in Milwaukee assumed a link between Dahmer’s homosexuality and his monstrous murders. Jeffrey Jentzen, the medical examiner for Milwaukee County, termed the murders “homosexual overkill.” The two police officers that came close to arresting Dahmer in the late spring of 1991 made a series of homophobic comments when reporting the incident, joking with the dispatcher that they had reunited the “lovers.” Both officers were fired for the incident soon after Dahmer’s arrest. They successfully appealed their termination and even received back pay. One of the officers, John Balcerzak, later became president of the Milwaukee Police Association.
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The perception of a link between homosexuality as a “deviant” lifestyle and violence is common in the literature on serial murder. The image of the “gay serial killer” appears in both tabloid journalism and in true crime literature. In 1951 a popular exploitation paperback entitled
Terror in the Streets
described the “homosexual prowler” as “the sex deviated version of what we call the ‘wolf.’” More contemporary accounts of serial murder indulge in the same kind of monster making. Dennis McDougal’s book on California serial killer Randy Kraft asserted that heterosexual murderers have little interest in “torture or dismemberment,” whereas the homosexual killers can barely discern the difference between gay sex and violence. The discovery of young male corpses, McDougal claimed, “could generally be traced back to a lover whose anger or ecstasy—or both—got out of hand.” Even gay victims of serial killers, or victims portrayed as gay in media sources, are demonized and dismissed. Anne Schwartz, the wife of a Milwaukee police officer, wrote in her book about Dahmer that the murderer’s “victims facilitated him in some way.” She further insisted that “their life-styles and unnecessary risk-taking contributed to their deaths.”
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In retrospect, 1991 seems the year of the cannibal. The day before Valentine’s Day, Jonathan Demme’s
The Silence of the Lambs
introduced audiences to Hannibal Lecter, a sophisticated psychiatrist with a taste for art, classical music, and human flesh. Lecter becomes a strange kind of Van Helsing figure, instructing FBI ingénue Clarice Starling (Jodi Foster) in the method and lore of serial killers. Starling uses this secret knowledge to track and kill “Buffalo Bill,” a deviant serial killer who murders young women in an effort to sew together, like Ed Gein, a “skin suit.”

The Silence of the Lambs
, despite its garish subject matter, showed strong conservative instincts. Buffalo Bill is portrayed as seeking a new, transgender identity, and his crimes are motivated by a sexual deviancy that can find release only through violent means. He clearly has
no sexual interest in the women he kidnaps and kills, but rather wants to leave behind his male identity by taking their skin and creating his gruesome skin suit. One scene, designed to create unease about abnormal sexuality, has Bill camping it up in drag queen fashion. Buffalo Bill represented more “homosexual overkill.”
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The film and literature of the serial killer clearly exhibited conservative anxieties over the increasing plasticity of sexual identity in America. While authors and film producers infrequently had overt political intent, their efforts to pitch their products to the broad mainstream resulted in a demonizing of alternative sexual identities. In the “gay murderer” and the “sexual maniac,” themes of evil and mental sickness came together in a single figure.

By the early 1990s conservatives had come to use the languages of mental sickness and of moral depravity as a single language, suggesting that frightening deviant forces posed both an internal and external threat. In a book entitled
Body Count
, Reagan advisor and “virtue czar” William Bennett described America’s inner cities as suffering primarily from “moral poverty.” Meanwhile, conservative scholar James Q. Wilson combined savage monster imagery with the language of mental sickness. African American men in inner city environments, he wrote, had become “feral, presocial human beings.” These ideas had a public policy component in the restoration of the death penalty in a number of states and a prison population that grew by 130 percent between 1980 and 1990.
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The Silence of the Lambs
, like most sophisticated works of art, contained more than a simple political message. The film’s denouement does not give us the straightforward destruction of the monster. Instead, we learn in the conclusion that Hannibal Lecter has managed to outwit his captors and make good his escape. This raises questions about whether or not Starling and the FBI’s quest for one monster has only served to unleash a more vicious one to walk the earth.

The Silence of the Lambs
offered mainstream audiences a stylized version of the popular, youth-oriented slasher genre. The maniac killers of the earlier slashers provided a way for a generation of screenwriters and directors to comment on America’s family values, both as an ideology and a reality. The slasher became one of the most subversive American film genres. Previous horror films had used the monstrous to picture the marginalized. Increasingly, horror imagined normalcy as the truly monstrous.
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An examination of the history of the slasher film reveals the changed nature of the monster in America and its role as a creature that unleashed anarchic impulses on the American landscape. In many
respects utterly apolitical, the slasher film’s celebration of excess, dark humor, and complex portrayals of gender made it a subversive art form in an increasingly conservative America.

Slasher Dreams

The story of
Psycho
borrowed from the Ed Gein narrative the theme of oedipal fixation and the archetypal terror of cadavers being kept and preserved rather than properly buried or destroyed. Unprepared audiences in 1960 were deeply shaken by the story and its psychosexual meanings. Hitchcock, however, left out the most gruesome aspects of the Gein story.

Director Tobe Hooper’s 1974
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
went to those dark places with a howling, power-tool-wielding vengeance. Jim Van Bebber, a director heavily influenced by
Chainsaw
, remembered that, prior to 1974, horror had tried to frighten audiences by “jumping out from behind the door.”
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
was different. “This thing was coming out in fucking clown paint, blood-spattered, with homicide on its brain”
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
followed five countercultural teenagers making their way across Texas. A brother and sister, Nancy and Franklin Hardesty, have family roots in the region of rural Texas where the group is traveling and convince the others to leave the main road in search of their grandfather’s old homestead. What they find is the terrifying Sawyer family, a psychotic, all-male family of murderers and cannibals who had once been workers in a local slaughterhouse. Leatherface, the youngest son, lives in a preverbal, infantile state, his face covered in a mask of human skin, his chainsaw the screaming embodiment of the family’s madness and violence.
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Hooper describes the origins of
Chainsaw
as both an outgrowth of the verbal transmission of American horror tales and a reflection of the times. Hooper recalled in an interview that Wisconsin relatives had terrified him as a child with tales of Ed Gein, as well as other stories of psychotic maniacs.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
had been an attempt to tap into the weirdness and “dysfunction” of American families, exacerbated by the generational split of the 1960s, the emerging culture wars, and the consequent struggles over the nature of the family.
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Hitchock’s
Psycho
and Hooper’s
Chainsaw
provide symbolic bookends for the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s. In the thirteen years since 1960, political assassination, a violent response to the civil rights struggle, the massive escalation of the Vietnam War, and the rise of
countercultural protest and meteoric changes in the household rocked American culture. A significant number of POWs who returned from Vietnam in 1973 felt like, and sometimes compared themselves to, Rip Van Winkle. The sister of Lieutenant Everett Alvarez, shot down over North Vietnam and captured in 1964, described how her brother had left an America where “there was complete faith in the government, the government knew best.” His sister told him on his return that “all of that had changed considerably.” Other POWs complained that all their friends seemed divorced, while the meek housewives they had left behind had become financially independent, and often sexually adventuresome, women. Others simply complained about X-rated movies, the men in “women’s clothes,” and Andy Warhol.
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Certainly any vets who went to see
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
the year of their homecoming received a very different image of American history than their 1950s history textbooks had offered. The setting of Hooper’s film on the Texas frontier evoked the violence of the American past and situated it in the troubled present. The name of the family conjures both cutting (the saw) while playing with the notion of American innocence on the frontier (Tom Sawyer). When asked what
Chainsaw
was really about, Tobe Hooper, whose only previous feature had been an antiwar drama, laughingly responded in a 2000 interview that “it’s about America, man.”
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It is about America. The Sawyer family represents all that the Puritans feared about the howling wilderness, the alleged savagery of the Native Americans who lived in the dark woods beyond the settlement. And yet, the Sawyers are not the American other, the enemy of the nation. They are deeply American, intricately tied to national myths of the frontier hunter-hero. This is the implicit message when the Sawyer homestead is shown as a kind of frontier cabin full of hunting trophies, both human and animal. Leatherface himself obviously references James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, the hunter who becomes part of the natural landscape.
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The 1986 sequel to
Chainsaw
underscores similar themes. The patriarch of the family (known simply as “the Cook”) is now presented as a 1980s entrepreneur who rides the wave of Reagan’s free-market cowboy capitalism by becoming Dallas’ favorite barbeque purveyor. At the beginning of the film, he appears in front of an adoring crowd dressed like a car salesman, proudly taking his award for winning a chili cook-off with his special recipe. “I love this town,” he cries. “This town loves meat.” The Sawyer clan’s less public face has relocated from their homestead to a bizarre, blood-drenched chamber of horrors beneath a
Frontierland-style theme park. Giant, creepy statues of Davy Crockett are joined by images of forts and wagons. Meanwhile, Dennis Hopper plays a former Texas Ranger (“the Lone Ranger”) on the trail of the Sawyers. Hopper used his signature style to portray this typical American hero as almost as deranged as Leatherface himself.
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Chainsaw
sliced and diced the American dream of the past. Increasingly, the slasher genre mocked the American dream of the present. Wes Craven’s 1972
The Last House on the Left
prepared the way for a new kind of horror film that combined extraordinary violence with a countercultural critique of American institutions and their violent origins and trajectory. Craven’s film showed the brutal rape, degradation, and murder of two teenage girls by a “family” of murderers that mirror the dark family of Charles Manson. The killers’ car breaks down and they find themselves the houseguests of the parents of one of the brutalized girls. The middle-class parents discover the crime and that they are playing host to the perpetrators. Rather than calling the authorities or running for their lives, the bourgeois couple themselves become maniacal killers, vengefully slaughtering the murderers in ways that actually cause some shift in audience sympathies and raise questions about primal violence beneath the veneer of middle-class America.
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