The Fascination with Violence in Contemporary Society

When Crime is Sublime

Oriana Binik

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030267445
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

This book directly explores the question of why contemporary society is so fascinated with violence and crime. The Fascination with Violence in Contemporary Society posits that the phenomenon is, in part, because we have all become consumers of the sublime: an intense and strongly ambiguous emotion which is increasingly commodified. Through the experience of violence and the sense of disorientation that accompanies it, we obsessively seek out moments of intensified existence.Equally, crime continues to speak to the depths of the collective unconscious, questioning us about our transience and the model of society we wish to live in. Binik proposes that this is why the reaction to violence has become a tool with which to express and take ownership of a desire for social cohesion.
This book uses interviews with viewers, dark tourists, collectors and others to further interrogatethis social trend. Many of these are participants inthe four key case studies explored within the study: emotional pathways while watching atrue-crime TV series, the trend of dark tourism, murderabilia collecting and the fanaticism of (and for) Anders Breivik. This book seeks to answer one of the most pressing cultural trends of the modern age and fill in a gap in the criminological literature on the subject.

© The Author(s) 2020

O. BinikThe Fascination with Violence in Contemporary Society https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26744-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Oriana Binik¹  

(1)

University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

 

 

Oriana Binik

End Abstract

1. This book dialogues with a quandary which might well appear banal. Banal because it has crossed many people’s minds, above all in recent times. Nothing academically sophisticated, then, simply: why is contemporary society so fascinated with crime? I am very pleased that my work has been translated into English¹ because this is a question which there will almost certainly never be a definitive answer to but it is one which, I believe, merits greater attention from the academic community. We seek constantly to conceal the ambiguous and fundamental bond between crime and all human societies: violence frightens us, we struggle on an everyday basis to keep it at arm’s length but we are seduced and dazzled, sometimes even obsessed by it all the same.

What follows are words, one after the other, designed to deal with this subject.

And it is precisely the word itself which it is worth spending a few introductory words thinking about.

As Flaubert has argued, words can be compared to a tin kettle: we continue to hammer on that kettle in an attempt to move the stars but what we get is always an approximation, a lesser version, of our desires, sufferings or—in this case—attempts to understand. We are constantly obliged to use language, this entity codified by others, to attempt to shape what we have the urge to communicate.

If this consideration can be valid for any expression communicated via words, it takes on even more profound meaning when the theme is one of fascination with crime which, in accordance with the perspective adopted here, hinges on the experience of the sublime, namely saying the unsayable, that emotional state which goes beyond words and crosses every line.

2. “I can’t speak — my tongue is broken”. This is how Sappho expressed the ambiguity of emotions, formulating an expression which suggested the condition of disorientation which also characterises those contemplating crime. How can it have happened? Why? What are the boundaries up to which human beings can go? These are the questions which accompany the sense of the sublime and the fascination with violence. They are questions destined to clash constantly with the impossibility of a closure capable of breaking down ambiguity. As in the case of those which guide this book, like a Chinese box game they are banal insights which it is impossible to answer in a transparent and definitive way.

Facing up to the paradoxical nature of crime and the emotions it triggers in society thus requires attempting to entrap in language the intense and contradictory reactions which the people fascinated by violence interviewed for this research struggled to externalise.

How can we express ourselves whilst taking account of language’s constant betrayals? This is especially powerfully the case when we are attempting to get to know ambiguous emotions, as in this book. Violence triggers both attraction and repulsion. The very word ‘fascination’ is charged with ambiguity. It is not by chance that it derives from fascinum which means curse. We are thus looking at a thicket of intense emotions and trying to translate it into words.

3. What follows is an experiment designed to push words to describe ambiguity and meanings vacuums, make their way into the most hostile places, take non-linearity on board. As we have seen, it is difficult to colonise a terrain like that of violence and the collective reactions triggered by it with words. The weapons available to us are feeble. However perhaps it is only by taking stock of the feebleness of words—always to be understood as tentative and approximate—that a theme as delicate as fascination for violence can be approached.

The empirical part of this book has been structured precisely to conjure up the image of the tin kettle which Flaubert spoke of, on which we hammer, sometimes clumsily. It is made up of four chapters which analyse and discuss case studies: the Quarto Grado TV series, the crime scene tourism phenomenon, collecting objects belonging to serial killers, the fanaticism of and for Anders Breivik, the Utoya massacre perpetrator. In each of these four chapters considerable space is given to the words of interviewees, to their attempts to approximate a description of their emotional states and the meanings which the fascination for crime takes on in their eyes. The intention behind using the words of these fascinated people is to foster the reader’s identification with them and thus, in some cases, a change in perspective. It has been, as far as possible, a matter of presenting their vision in their words, considering the spoken and unspoken and also difficulties in managing the unsayable. I thus decided to ensure that the colonisation of this research theme took place via the vision of those directly involved in it, called on to give meaning to their experiences via sounds which have meaning for them.

The first section offers certain theoretical tools with which to take on empirical analysis and is made up of three parts: after two introductory chapters, one focusing on the sublime as an emotion and one on certain macro-changes affecting contemporary society, the subsequent chapter is a methodological one designed to present the vision which guided the exploits presented in the third chapter.

Adopting this approach has, however, not led to theoretical interpretation being sacrificed. More precisely, as an exploration, the objective was to create an elastic dynamic between conceptual analysis and empirical research, respecting what went beyond the bounds of the analysis itself, taking account, where possible, of the great many meanings short-circuits which the phenomenon studied is so replete with. Returning to Flaubert, it has, in other words, been a matter of hammering on the kettle delicately in the hope that even a bear dance may constitute a desirable result.

References

1. Akrivos, D., & Antoniou, A. K. (Eds.). (2019). Crime, deviance and popular culture: International and multidisciplinary perspectives. Springer.
2. Flaubert, G., & Aveling, E. M. (2008). Madame bovary. Auckland, New Zealand: The Floating Press.
3. Raymen, T., & Smith, O. (Eds). (2019). Deviant leisure criminological perspectives on leisure and harm. Springer.
4. Wood, M. A. (2018). Antisocial media: Crime-watching in the internet age. Springer.

Footnotes

1

The first version of this book was published by Mimesis in Italian and entitled Quando il crimine è sublime: la fascinazione per la violenza nella società contemporanea in December 2017. Since then, it has primarily been Palgrave Macmillan, in its wonderful Crime, Media Culture series, which has published titles of great interest on this theme. I will briefly cite here certain publications which deal with the themes examined in this work: Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture (Akrivos & Antoniou, 2019), Antisocial Media (Wood, 2018) and Deviant Leisure (Raymen & Smith, 2019).

 

© The Author(s) 2020

O. BinikThe Fascination with Violence in Contemporary Society https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26744-5_2

Begin Abstract

2. When Crime Is Sublime

Oriana Binik¹

(1)

University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

Oriana Binik

End Abstract

“Sympathy for the (D)evil”: The Fascination with Crime

The act of seeing violence, in its public consumption version or otherwise, is a hugely widespread everyday practice. A thirst for crime reporting, watched as if it were a TV series, is really common. To this should be added that, since the 1990s, over one thousand films have been made with serial killers in them (Jarvis, 2007) and this does not include TV series whose link to the crime theme is so close that it has prompted the creation of special themed channels.

Frequently dealt with critically within study currents which blame “trash TV” for it, this trend can be encompassed within a wider framework. Like pieces in a single jigsaw, the phenomena linked to the passion for violent crime on television are to be found in many other fields too: in the art world, in forms of tourism, in literature, in shopping and, more generically, across all spheres of leisure time and pastime management.

It is a sort of ‘proximity’ to crime which is also visible in dark tourism¹ involving visits to crime sites or museums devoted to crime. Groupon offers an organised tour for two people in Milwaukee for the bargain price of 25 dollars to visit all the gay bars in which Jeffrey Dahmer met his victims, for example. Despite protests from certain sector associations which also voiced the feelings of some of Dahmer’s victims’ family members, the tour was so successful that Amanda Morden, agent of the firm which promoted it, BAM Marketing and Media, reported to a local newspaper that the initiative was continuing to attract American and international tourists. In actual fact BAM’s business idea was not especially unusual as similar tours are offered in London, following in the footsteps of Jack the Ripper, in Los Angeles, in those of Charles Manson, in Boston, in those of the Boston Strangler and in Sicily to visit mafia sites.

In Italy, in Avetrana, site of a famous murder, a town council order by its mayor, blocking access to certain streets, was needed to stop dark tourism, a decision taken after news of the planned arrival of dark tourism tour buses was reported.²

The Los Angeles Museum of Death offers the chance to enjoy photos of Sharon Tate’s corpse taken after her murder by the Manson family for 15 dollars a ticket, together with artwork made by serial killers, car accident videos, executions and autopsies. There are hundreds of opinions on the museum in Trip Advisor and most of them positive. Some minor controversy has been generated, on the other hand, by sites such as Supernaught, Serialkillersink and Murderauction which sell murderabilia³ to crime fans from all over the world. Set up over the last decade these sites primarily sell works of art made by serial killers, journals which include articles and illustrations made by the perpetrators of crimes, objects belonging to murderers and postcards signed by serial killers. Eric Gein, founder of Serialkillersink, keeps up contacts he calls ‘friendships’ with various murderers whose works of art, objects, locks of hair and the like he sells. This has prompted protests from victims’ families, as it did in Milwaukee. Gein’s response to these has been irremovable “We’re sure they have a tremendous amount of pain to bear but we make no apologies for our business. We are not breaking any laws. This is America and we have a right to make a living⁴”.

Whilst the fascination with crime has been sketched out here in a series of rapid brush strokes, whether it is shopping sites, TV, film, art or tourism, it is clear that violence has become an element of central importance in the entertainment industry and one which is capable of attracting consumers and fulfilling the wishes of both sellers and buyers.

Targeting the Phenomenon: From “Expulsion Narrative” to “Proximity Narrative”

Our fascination with violence can be related to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. When Crime Is Sublime
• 3. Effervescent and Ready for Use: The Sublime and Other Emotions in the Carnival of Crime
• 4. In the Cultural Criminology Hall of Mirrors
• 5. From Sublime to Resentment: Emotional Trajectories When Watching Crime on TV
• 6. In the Wild Land in Search of a Story: Dark Tourism
• 7. This Is a Taboo Business: The Murderabilia Market from Sacred to Profane
• 8. Attacks or Fireworks? The Spectacularisation of the Anders Breivik Massacre
• 9. Conclusion
• Back Matter