eJournals Colloquia Germanica 46/1

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2013
461

(L)earned Monsters: Psychopathic Masculinities in Contemporary German Film and Fiction

31
2013
Mary L. Knight
cg4610004
(L)earned Monsters: Psychopathic Masculinities in Contemporary German Film and Fiction MA RY L . KNIGHT Wa k e For e st Univ ersity In the summer of 1991, the young Swiss-German reporter Christian Kracht sat down with the newly notorious American author Bret Easton Ellis to discuss Ellis’s most recent novel, American Psycho, for Tempo magazine. When the two met for beers at Ellis’s New York apartment, they must have been struck by how much they had in common. Both men were born in the mid-1960s to affluent parents, and both came of age at elite New England colleges (Kracht studied at Sarah Lawrence, while Ellis attended Bennington). As an author, Ellis, an ingénue who first published at the age of twentyone, was nearly a decade ahead of Kracht, who would not write his breakthrough novel Faserland for another three years. Yet the published interview provides evidence of a shared vision of violence as a response to threatened masculinity: by the end of the piece it is unclear which observations are Ellis’s, and which are Kracht’s own. Their respective comments merge into one seamless statement on life in late capitalism: both authors suggest that consumer culture, transcending national boundaries, flattens and negates individual (masculine) identities and warrants a violent response. Kracht begins the interview with a summary interpretation of American Psycho, which offers a glimpse into the mind of an all-American boy cum serial killer who spends his days at the office or the gym and his nights hacking people to pieces in his luxury apartment: «Bateman ist eine Art Dr. Jekyll, der keinen Mr. Hyde braucht, der keine Maske aufsetzen muss, weil das Grauen untrennbar mit seiner Welt verbunden ist» (Kracht, «Psycho» 166). Ellis agrees. Thus, Kracht and Ellis present Bateman as perfectly in sync with the «horror» of his milieu, which is affluent New York society in the late 1980s. He is as smooth as Dr. Jekyll, and as brutal as Mr. Hyde: a hybrid who fits right in among the powerful elite of Wall Street. Curiously, Kracht and Ellis characterize Bateman - and his real-life counterparts Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer - as a powerful wake-up call for a sickened society. Kracht paraphrases his interview subject: «Was hat er [Ellis] denn Furchtbares getan? Er, der Chronist eines Jahrzents, hat es gewagt, einen sehr genauen Blick auf die Wirklichkeit zu werfen. […] (L)earned Monsters 5 Diese Monster, sagt Ellis, hätten wir verdient» (168). Noting that the word Monstrum is related to the Latin verb monere, «to warn,» Kracht sees Bateman as «nicht nur … eine Warnung in einer aus den Fugen geratenen Welt, sondern auch ein Vollstrecker: der Teufel im Fegefeuer der Banalität» (168). More than just a «warning,» Bateman reigns as judge and executioner for the society Ellis aims to indict, and in this way he almost resembles a psychopathic Übermensch: omnipotent, righteous, infallible. The obvious admiration both authors show for this murderous character highlights their shared conception of their protagonists’ masculine personae as a rigid shell which must contain and subdue a roiling core of fear, desire, and rage which threatens to emasculate and corrupt masculine identity. The target of that rage, society, is consistently embodied by misogynist feminine tropes, such as the prostitutes and vacuous «hardbodies» Bateman chooses as his victims, whose hollowness underscores the narrator’s struggle to define himself. Though Kracht’s work is for the most part less violent (though perhaps no less controversial), he has since acknowledged the great debt he owes to Ellis and to American Psycho in particular (Poschardt, Mertens). This article therefore examines three instances of psychopathic masculinity in German-speaking film and fiction in the 1990s and early 2000s. Masculine psychopaths are made to represent punishment or vengeance for cultural evils in the three examples I analyze: Christian Kracht’s 1995 novel Faserland, Benjamin Lebert’s 2003 novel Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, and Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games. These three are, in fact, merely a small sample in a large pool of texts which reflect this pattern, but I have chosen them in order to demonstrate a range of intensity - from the obvious psychopathy of Michael Haneke’s serial killers to the more subtle psychopathic characteristics evident in Christian Kracht’s narrator - and a clear similarity of vision across media and genre. I argue that the authors’ use of psychopathic characteristics in their construction of male protagonists normalizes psychopathy and encourages the viewer or reader to sympathize with the male character’s anger and even excuse his violent behavior as a product of his damaged masculinity. In fact, the works in question present psychopathy not as a mental illness with complex origins, but as a brand of contemporary masculinity which has directly resulted from a social system that embraces narcissistic materialism and trivializes empathy. At the same time, when analyzed together, these texts offer up the inherently misogynist suggestion that society’s real «crime» worthy of punishment - the sin which summons «the devil in the purgatory of banality» - is the erosion of masculinity’s place within society: the demonization, as it were, of masculinity itself. 6 Mary L. Knight The word «psychopath» inevitably conjures images of infamous serial killers such as Fritz Haarmann or Ted Bundy, and certainly there are copious representations of psychopathic killers in contemporary film and fiction. But psychopaths are not always killers, as Canadian psychologist and psychopath expert Robert D. Hare is careful to point out. And as British journalist Jon Ronson demonstrates in his 2011 book The Psychopath Test, in some ways the psychopathic personality can thrive in contemporary culture, often in the upper echelons of the business world, where successful CEOs must exhibit the ruthlessness and manipulation innate to a psychopath (189-222). British psychologist Kevin Dutton even suggests in his 2012 book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, that we could all learn a thing or two from this way of behaving, in which one’s own needs are put before the needs of others, which is a sure-fire way to get ahead in a cutthroat capitalist economy, for example. According to Hare, who developed a widely used diagnostic questionnaire for psychopathy (the PCL-R), the disorder is characterized by impulsivity, narcissism, lack of empathy, and the ability to manipulate or abuse others for personal gain without guilt. Psychopaths tend to have great success at charming other people in the short term, but find it impossible to foster long-term reciprocal relationships - they do not achieve true intimacy because they ultimately cannot feel deeply for others (Hare 4-12). In The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson describes an early experiment of Hare’s in which diagnosed psychopaths and a control group were repeatedly subjected to electric shocks after a countdown. The control group’s brains exhibited a fear response after the first shock when the count neared zero, in anticipation of the next jolt of pain. But the psychopaths had no fear response, leading to the conclusion that the psychopathic brain’s true abnormality is an inability to experience fear-based emotions, including guilt, which involves fear of judgment (Ronson 98). Recent popular interest in the psychopathic mind has focused on the apparent symbiotic relationship between psychopathy and the cultural hegemony of late capitalism. On the surface, observations like Dutton’s and Ronson’s offer psychopathy as a rather charged metaphor for the greed, shamelessness and cruelty of our own capitalist culture, much the same way Ellis presents Patrick Bateman as the embodiment of 1980s New York. But Bateman can also be read as the consequence of that time and place: the monster earned through American culture’s own petty cruelty and vacuity, the starvation of the American soul. A similar dynamic courses through the works discussed here: German-speaking society’s materialism and hypocrisy are figured as the corrupting forces which engender psychopathy in young men. (L)earned Monsters 7 In an interesting correlation between scientific study and popular gender role stereotypes (which dictate that men be fearless and women be empathic), an overwhelming majority of diagnosed psychopaths are men, and even psychopathic women tend to score lower on the PCL-R. Hervey Cleckley’s seminal 1941 study of psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, refers only to male case studies and uses the male pronoun exclusively when describing the disorder. Some have attempted to explain away this imbalance: the PCL-R, for one, was based on Hare’s study of exclusively male prison populations, and some of Hare’s critics have wondered if the checklist is biased toward masculine manifestations of psychopathy. Some researchers speculate that women simply express psychopathy differently, and we have yet to formulate a test that will accurately identify female psychopaths (Skeem et al. 107-9). Of course, this begs the question whether different symptoms might not indicate a completely different condition; such attempts to find balance between male and female psychopathy may in fact construct a façade of equality which further cements notions of gendered behavioral expectations. In any event, the general public notices only that the vast majority of known psychopathic serial killers are white men. Western culture has adopted the view that violent psychopathy is a masculine affliction, a notion defined at least in part by the sensationalized reports of male serial killers in Germany in the Weimar era and the subsequent release (in both Germany and the US) of Fritz Lang’s M, a cinematic exploration of a serial child killer based on the infamous «Vampire of Düsseldorf,» Peter Kürten (Tatar 153-72). In Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer, Richard Tithecott suggests that, in fact, «we assume masculinity’s presence and femininity’s absence» (156) in the specter of the serial killer, for «power as masculinity […] is a meaning with which we make sense of our world» (157). While often thought of as a mental illness, psychopathy does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and is instead more or less subsumed by Antisocial Personality Disorder, which exhibits many of the same traits but does not take hard-to-measure personality traits like «empathy» into account (Ronson 239-40). Thus, psychopathy remains a nebulous, mutable label, an uneasy sort of non-identity itself: it is widely diagnosed and studied as if it were a mental illness by psychologists in prisons and mental institutions, and yet not included in the DSM and not considered insanity by criminal law. There is ongoing debate as to whether the condition results from a physical abnormality, a biochemical imbalance, or is the result of environmental factors such as childhood trauma. Psychologists debate whether or not psychopathy is treatable; many, like Robert Hare 8 Mary L. Knight himself, do not think there is any way to reform a psychopath. The other complicating factor is that psychopathy is diagnosed on a spectrum, much like autism, with various possible combinations of characteristics at varied intensities. Kevin Dutton argues that, in fact, certain levels of psychopathy - or certain combinations of psychopathic traits, as long as they aren’t too severe - can actually be seen as «functional» or even beneficial to a person’s success (Dutton). In these ways, psychopathy - much like masculinity - has become a malleable concept in both the popular and the scientific imagination, and indeed, psychopathy and masculinity have become symbolically linked. Peter and Paul, the young serial killers who terrorize a family in Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, exemplify our popular understanding of the psychopath. Dressed in tennis whites and flashing mega-watt smiles, the two are at once charming and aggressive, manipulating their prey into inviting them inside and toying with them for hours before finally killing them and moving on to the next house. Both young men are conventionally attractive and clean-cut, and create a first impression on both viewers and victims of benign, polite banality. For instance, when Peter comes to the door, ostensibly to ask Mrs. Schober for some eggs, his choice of words is exceedingly polite and formal, and he speaks in a soft, shy voice. Paul, on the other hand, comes off as boyishly exuberant: he immediately steps past Mrs. Schober and picks up one of Mr. Schober’s expensive golf clubs, then asks if he can give the club a try. Within minutes, though, it becomes clear that Peter and Paul have constructed a very thin façade to cover their true intentions. Both make nearconstant careless errors with detail: they call the neighbors by their first names, indicating a familiarity that doesn’t make sense with the story that they are the children of the husband’s business associate. Paul introduces Peter to Mr. Schober, and then immediately refers to him as «Tom» - in fact, he calls Peter «Tom» so often that one might assume this is Peter’s real name, until Peter calls Paul «Jerry,» suggesting that the two have a series of code names for each other and these are just two sets of them. Their politeness and decorum are also clearly a façade, and quickly twisted around to ensnare the Schobers. For instance, when Mrs. Schober becomes uncomfortable and demands that they leave, the two young men act profoundly offended, as if they cannot believe she would be so rude: «So etwas is mir noch nie passiert,» says Paul. They use this tactic to manipulate Mr. Schober, who hesitates to throw them out of the house despite his wife’s obvious fear and anger. This talent for manipulation is highly suggestive of psychopathy. Peter and Paul’s jocular attitudes and over-the-top sadism - the «funny games» in the title refer to a series of torturous and degrading games the two (L)earned Monsters 9 men put the family through - indicate that the killers have no conscience, and indeed no clear reason for their violence other than their own amusement (when asked why they are doing these terrible deeds, Paul answers simply, «Warum nicht? »). Indeed, the two remain eerily calm throughout the film, becoming upset only when Mrs. Schober momentarily gains the upper hand. After killing the family dog, they force Mrs. Schober to search for it as if playing a schoolyard prank, leaving her to wander through the yard as they yell, «heiss! » or «kalt! » to indicate how close she is to the body. More than just «textbook» psychopaths, Peter and Paul share many characteristics in common with their literary counterpart Patrick Bateman. All exhibit not just a self-centered brutality, but also a social standing as privileged outsider - that is, they are affluent white men who nonetheless feel victimized by their sociocultural surroundings. The killers Peter and Paul, like true devils in the purgatory of banality, have come to make bourgeois society pay for its insularity, weakness, and hypocrisy. They exact this vengeance from within, as they ensnare their victims by adopting upper-class manners and appearances and appealing to the family’s sense of good manners. The family fears rudeness more than strange men in their home, and this belief in the surface of things, and the implicit discrimination that belief represents in the logic of the film, elicits a violent response (Wurmitzer 166-76). The family we watch suffer and die serves as a scapegoat, a symbolic representation of the society which encourages inequality and superficiality and deserves to have its illusions about the world shattered. Peter and Paul playfully hint at social factors which could cause them to be so damaged. Paul tells the Schobers multiple versions of Peter’s troubled life story, suggesting first that he was born into desperate poverty, his father drank, and his mother sexually abused him. This, though, is a joke, as he notes that no one would believe that Paul grew up deprived. Eventually he shrugs and says that Paul is simply a spoiled kid plagued by «Überdruss und Weltekel» and the «Leere der Existenz.» Thus, it is not that Paul has been harmed in any tangible way by the dysfunctional sociocultural system in which he lives; rather, the vacuous superficiality - and hypermediality - of his world has presumably corrupted his soul. In this way, Peter and Paul are not presented to us as simple villains, but indeed as earned monsters, come to teach us a lesson about the banality of bourgeois evil. Of course, Haneke’s film also serves to indict the viewer in the act of watching violence for entertainment - a form of participation in the culture on trial (Laine 3-5; Falcon 10-13). Haneke hammers in this critique of media violence with a heavy hand: Paul turns to the camera and winks as Mrs. Schober searches for the dog’s body, drawing the viewer into complic- 10 Mary L. Knight ity. And when Mrs. Schober manages to grab the rifle and shoot Paul, Peter rushes to find the TV remote and actually rewinds the film to the moment before she prevails, so that he may change the outcome. This wielding of control over both victim and viewer speaks to a masculine fantasy of omnipotence. Indeed, Michael S. Kimmel defines hegemonic masculinity as «a man in power, a man with power, a man of power» (125). To Kimmel, hegemonic masculinity revolves around, is in fact defined by, power - an obsession echoed in the psychopath’s penchant for manipulation and egotism, not to mention the high percentage of psychopaths in positions of power in business and politics. This psychopathic lust for complete control may well be hegemonic masculinity taken to its logical extreme. Ben Knights describes twentieth-century hegemonic masculinity as «an imaginary community […] its borders require constant policing, the floodwalls which surround it a scene of increasing activity to protect it from the encroaching sea» (5). Indeed the relationship between psychopathy and mainstream masculinity does not begin in the 1990s. All of the young male characters discussed here struggle to define themselves against a threatening flood of pop-cultural refuse: consumerism, sexualization, and the ambivalent and ultimately unsuccessful quest for a deeper connection with another person. These characters must isolate themselves and build up a metaphorical masculine armor which keeps out the threat of dissolution by the flood, but also dams in the fear and desire which threatens them from within. The notion that armoring or damming up represents functional adult masculinity echoes patterns explored by Klaus Theweleit’s Männerphantasien in the work of fascist «soldatische Männer»/ «soldier males.» Theweleit noticed a pattern in these narratives by «soldier males»: they all maintained a hardened, soldierly façade and viewed any sort of internal messiness - whether bodily fluids (literal messiness) or emotions - as threatening and disgusting. It was clear that the external façade of the crisp uniform, the stiff upper lip, the apparent impassivity, served as a dam to hold something in - a flood of corporeality, shame, fear, and desire. Floods also threatened from the outside world in many forms: floods of sex, gender, class struggle, political adversity, racial difference. The barrier between the soldier male and the filthy flood thus spans a range of sectors which become symbolically linked. The flood comes to represent any threat of self-dissolution and takes many forms, from the communist horde to the sexual woman. All of these fulfill a paradoxical purpose for the soldier male; they threaten to penetrate his rigid borders and unleash the chaos within, and yet in doing so they provide him with a background of difference against which he must define himself. They give him a test one must pass to achieve true manhood. This strict di- (L)earned Monsters 11 vision between the Self and the Other is, in a metaphorical sense, the same division which separates the psychopath from his fellow man. One might even cast the psychopath as the purest and strongest of masculine identities in this model since he is completely self-contained and uninvolved with the outside world, except as a dominant force bent on manipulating others for his own purposes. Of course, if this divide is breached or if the power structure shifts, then the chaos within him escapes with dire consequences. This recurring representation of masculinity in 1990s German fiction, like Theweleit’s soldier male, requires such a contentious dynamic. The threats the male characters face are similar. The protagonists seem to want nothing more than to connect with another human being and yet, it seems to be impossible for them. This state leads inevitably to a violent breakdown. The characterization of Peter and Paul in Funny Games echoes Theweleit’s pattern. Peter and Paul respond to their «empty» and «tedious» surroundings with numbness and an egotistical drive for amusement and power. Their carefully crafted outfits, down to the white gloves they wear to avoid leaving fingerprints, and close-cropped hair present them as both conformist and completely self-contained (no hair out of place, no trace of their existence left behind). Their cool demeanors persist until they feel threatened by their female victim, and in that moment, as Peter lies dying on the floor, Paul loses all composure, screaming and tearing the room apart until he finds the remote, a symbol of his utter control over the narrative. In a strange way, Peter and Paul are also lonely. The two remain anonymous since they do not use their real names, and even their relationship with each other is obviously unequal, evidenced by the fact that Paul continually mocks Peter’s chubbiness and gives all the orders. Their only interactions with people in the film are geared toward deceiving, controlling and killing; one wonders if they are at all capable of even the most basic intimacies with another person. Their intimacy, like that of Theweleit’s soldier males, is the penetration of knife into flesh, the letting of blood, the destruction of another person’s identity for the protection of one’s own. This violent intimacy plays out somewhat differently in the novel Der Vogel ist ein Rabe. Author Benjamin Lebert weaves a subverted comingof-age tale in which three young men who see themselves as outsiders violently clash with the societal forces that make them feel worthless. The problem is that these forces are embodied in the text by two young women, who are beaten or killed for their superficial rejection of the young men’s advances. Paul, the narrator, spends most of the novel listening to his fellow train traveler Henry’s story. Henry describes the ill-fated love triangle which develops between himself, his cousin Christine, and their friend Jens, 12 Mary L. Knight whose rage at the media and especially women for stoking his insecurity about his obese frame eventually leads him to «snap» and beat Christine. Christine escapes, but at the end of Henry’s story, as he and Paul disembark from the train, we learn that Paul has actually just killed his own beloved, an ethereal (and very expensive) prostitute named Mandy who rejected his earnest advances. Police await him on the platform, and he submits to them willingly. Both Henry and Paul suffer from rejection and disappointment at the hands of idealized women, which makes them feel profoundly outcast. Henry directly identifies his greatest problem as «Mädchen» and describes the painful experience of watching girls at a school dance as a voyeur excluded from the enjoyment of their perfection: «Und die Mädchen sahen alle so toll aus. Als ob sie leuchten würden. Und ihr Geruch war, als wären sie kurz bevor sie auf den Ball kamen, in einem anderen Universum, in einer anderen Welt […] ich stand immer da und war dem allem so fern» (Lebert 17). His response to this otherworldly unattainability is hatred; at once the celestial creatures become base ones, ridiculous, promiscuous and cruel. Ausserdem wurde ich zornig auf die Mädchen. Ich sah sie vor mir, tanzend und blöd kichernd, während die Armen ihrer verdammten Tanzpartner sie umschlingen und Brüste quetschen. Ich dachte, die Mädchen sind gar nicht die wunderbaren Geschöpfe, so wie ich sie mir vorstellte, so zart und feinfühlig und weich und verletzlich. Um die man sich immer gut kümmern muss und alles. Die Mädchen sind Bastarde. Die genau wissen, was sie einem antun. (18) His anger hits a fever pitch when Henry confides in Paul that he longs for girls more than anything else in the world, and yet «dass ich sie gleichzeitig auf die brutalste Weise umbringen möchte. Alle» (70), a statement that will prove ironic when we discover that Paul has done exactly this to a woman who rejected him. In a way, Paul’s story functions as an intensifier of Henry’s, an exaggerated version of the same tragedy in which a man glorifies a woman to the brink of deification, only to discover, as she rejects him, that she is but flesh and blood, and will provide no redemption from his isolation and fear. For Paul, this happens as he professes his love to Mandy, the prostitute of whom he had previously said, «Wenn ich mit ihr zusammen bin, wird die Dunkelheit nie wieder bedrohlich sein. Und ich wollte sie auf der Stelle ficken. So ficken, bis es nichts mehr zu ficken gab» (122). Already there is a dangerous confusion between redemptive love, sex, and violence. «Fucking,» i.e. penetrating the woman’s body so violently that she is literally annihilated, is the immediate response to a feeling of excessive attachment and the possibility of redemption. The female love-object inspires desire, but in the end that (L)earned Monsters 13 desire is not just to possess or even dominate the woman; rather, the woman must be destroyed in order for the man’s sense of himself, of his place in the world, to be clarified and redeemed. This pattern of behavior may initially read more as a crime of passion than psychopathy, for our collective imagination generally conjures up an image of a smooth-talking, impervious egomaniac like Hannibal Lecter, who does not care enough about other people to let their judgments affect his own self-esteem. However, this is a fallacy. Psychopaths are absolutely capable of feeling deeply - about themselves - and may well have difficulty controlling emotional outbursts when their desires are thwarted. What distinguishes Henry’s, Jens’, and Paul’s sentiments as figuratively psychopathic is their utter objectification of the beloved woman. To all three men, a beautiful woman represents social acceptance and personal triumph. She is a trophy, a concept, a goddess, until she rejects the man, at which time she morphs into an evil force deserving of destruction. There is no room in this construction for female personhood, and whether or not they actually lay hands on a woman, all three men see no problem with taking her life. In fact, this set-up produces echoes of the interwar Lustmorde described by Maria Tatar, in which the annihilation of the female body figures as a key part of masculine identity formation, particularly when the woman can be made to embody societal ills like decadence and capitalist exploitation. The copious representations of dead or diseased prostitutes in German Expressionist art underscore this argument (Tatar 3-19). Der Vogel ist ein Rabe restates the critique found in Funny Games and American Psycho, in that Henry, Jens, and Paul are presented as victims and products of contemporary consumer culture. The young men feel that because they do not fit the physical and temperamental requirements suggested to them by the media, they are rejected by the women they long for, and so their despair quickly turns to rage. It is, after all, not the young men’s idea to objectify women and position sex as the ultimate test of a man’s virility and success. Jens suggests that they have learned this behavior from film and television, from advertising, and of course from young women, who, he claims, reinforce these harmful messages about both genders and exploit the sexual power they hold over men. As Jens puts it, «Ich kann diese Bilder einfach nicht mehr ertragen» (49). According to the men who tell the story, the women themselves, and not just the forces of culture, seem to orchestrate this torment. Throughout the text, Henry mentions various aspects of Christine’s character that hint at her imminent betrayal of her admirers. He sees her as arrogant and vain, mentioning the hours she spends in front of her makeup mirror and 14 Mary L. Knight the high-heeled shoes she totters in. She has an active sex life, and seems to relish telling Henry and Jens all about it: «Sie berührte die eine Seite ihres Gesichtes mit der flachen Hand, als wolle sie sich fühlend der Schönheit ihres Gesichts vergewissern. […] Sie genoss es sichtlich, wenn sie an einem bestimmten Punkt ihrer Erzählung bemerkte, dass uns praktisch der Speichel aus den Mündern tropfte» (57-8). In this way, the objectified women are made to take on the blame for inciting the young men’s violent transgressions, and yet the men present themselves as pure, blameless victims of a brutal system. This placing of blame echoes the justifications often made by real-life killers, such as Elliot Rodger, the mass shooter who killed six people near UC Santa Barbara in 2014 because, he claimed, he was unfairly rejected by superficial women. Blaming the female victim also underlines the potential misogynistic link between sexual murder and certain fantasies of contemporary masculinity in general, in which the attainment of masculinity hinges on the transcendence of a threatening, feminized society. Tithecott describes the masculinist/ misogynist allure of the serial killer as emanating from the «dream of transcendence,» which is «both a dream of transcending materiality […] and a dream of transcending society to untainted and liberated individuality. The two dreams merge in the figuration of society in material/ corporeal terms» (158). The victimized female body is made to stand in for the «body politic,» and in this way «[t]he negation of the female body symbolizes the transcendence of society […]. When the social body is figured as female, criminality is an affirmation of one’s masculinity» (Tithecott 159). In Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, Lebert draws a clear line of causality between adolescent male suffering at the hands of feminine culture and acts of violence. Though they are not as well-defined as psychopaths as the killers in Funny Games, Jens, Henry and Paul nonetheless demonstrate that modern masculinity requires either complete self-isolation or a blood sacrifice. The lonely, wounded young men in the text search for human connections that won’t threaten their fragile masculine armor, but much like the killers in Funny Games, they find that such relationships are only possible over a woman’s bruised, dead body. The masculine identities presented in the novel are indeed somewhat psychopathic in their lack of empathy, their impulsivity and in Paul’s case, coolness under pressure, but perhaps more importantly, Lebert’s men unconsciously aspire to psychopathy as they strive for a secure masculine identity. They yearn for the psychopath’s hard impenetrability, his cold ruthlessness in the face of adversity, and for his resolute belief in himself - the truly self-made man, constructing and reconstructing his own identity at will. (L)earned Monsters 15 The quest for a self-made identity is the central concern of Christian Kracht’s Faserland, in which a nameless protagonist wanders through Germany in an attempt to find himself through what Kracht himself has called an «Abgrenzungsversuch» (Poschardt 2). This means of identity formation, as in Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, requires a certain level of narcissism, as well as an Other to define oneself against. Consequently, Faserland’s protagonist exhibits several behaviors associated with «functional» psychopathy, most notably his profound self-involvement and apparent inability to empathize with others. Indeed, his very namelessness can be read as not just a lack of personal identity, but as a symbol of his isolation from others. Over and over in the novel, the narrator fails to understand other characters’ reactions and motivations. He is confused, for example, when his sudden decision to leave Sylt doesn’t sit well with Karin, his possible love interest whom he has just kissed for the first time. When people disappoint or unsettle him, as they often do, he obeys his first impulse to walk away and start over someplace else. As a result, none of his relationships are as deep as he claims they are, and like many psychopaths, the narrator is a social butterfly who is nonetheless ultimately disconnected from others. As he describes it, «es gibt so bestimmte, völlig ineinander verschachtelte Muster, die ich anwenden muß, um mit Menschen umzugehen» (Kracht 101). In fact, this difficulty in interacting with other people and ultimate refusal, in many cases, to accept any kind of conflict or negotiation with others, might even be termed sociopathy - a pattern of anti-social and narcissistic behavior often interchanged with the more ominous label of psychopathy. The self-centeredness of the narrator of Faserland also creates troubling consequences for his so-called friends. After recalling his own violent tirade against his former friend Alexander’s girlfriend that ended the two men’s friendship, the narrator spots Alexander at a bar and, instead of speaking to him, waits until his back is turned and steals his pricey Barbour jacket. The narrator has already burned his own Barbour jacket in the middle of an airport terminal because he had spilled yogurt on it. Neither of these actions inspires a feeling of guilt or apprehension in the narrator, whose focus is entirely on his own needs. Indeed, the narrator’s great «crime» in the text, if he has one, is that he walks away from his despondent and drugged friend Rollo, who stands on a dock and may be contemplating suicide. The narrator even thinks to himself that Rollo needs friends who would put him to bed and comfort him, take away his pills and alcohol, yet still he walks way - and steals Rollo’s sports car in order to leave town. Clearly aware, at least, that this is a punishable offense, he leaves the car at the Zurich airport and wipes his fingerprints off the steering wheel, even before he learns from a newspaper article that Rollo has indeed drowned in the lake. 16 Mary L. Knight Though not openly malicious, Kracht’s narrator exploits and abuses others in his aimless quest to find self-satisfaction. Most often it is his inaction or else the sum of his tiny, thoughtlessly controlling acts - such as stealing Alexander’s jacket or showing up at Nigel’s house uninvited - which causes trouble for others. In this sense, a phrase the narrator uses to describe Rollo provides an apt description of himself: he is marked by an «innere Leere.» This apparent emptiness at the center of the narrator’s being echoes Tithecott’s description of the serial killer as masculine hero. Tithecott posits that the «indifference» of the psychopathic killer - the nothingness in his gaze, the meaninglessness of his crimes - is masculinity taken to its logical extreme, since masculinity is characterized by subjectivity, power, and unspeakability. Ben Knights describes masculinity as «so taken for granted as to be invisible» (1). Tithecott asserts: «The ‹mindless,› ‹meaningless,› and ‹motiveless› acts of the serial killer are the acts of a figure who is also represented as achieving ‹ultimate› selfhood […] a state defined as the dead end of the continuum of behavior which we in the twentieth century have experienced to horrifying degrees» (166). Thus, even though he is not actively violent, Kracht’s narrator exhibits the sort of magnetic vacuity which makes the psychopath not only utterly masculine, but also emblematic of contemporary Western culture. Faserland is perhaps best known and was initially controversial because of the narrator’s excessive attention to brand names and surfaces. He judges people based on the kind of shirts they wear, or which color Barbour jacket they favor. He denigrates a group of business travelers by suggesting that they all wear Swatch watches from the duty-free shop, for example. On the other hand, his recollection of fact and history is vague at best, and he seems to stumble through life with absolutely no goals or concerns outside of his wardrobe and the parties he attends. This characterization (the «innere Leere») presents the narrator as a sort of cipher, a non-entity, and it is in this portrayal that one can see the marked influence Ellis had on Kracht’s first novel. For like Patrick Bateman, Faserland’s narrator sees himself - and encourages us to see him - as a product of a sick and decadent culture, and his deficiencies as inevitable symptoms of that sickness, a situation over which he has no control. The narrator’s lack of conscience and egotism are simply reflections of the values that surround him. They are Germany’s flaws. The narrator insinuates as much in a speech late in the novel, as he imagines what he would tell his children about Germany, which in his vision for the future seems far away from his new life in Switzerland: Ich würde ihnen von Deutschland erzählen, von dem großen Land in Norden, von der großen Maschine, die sich selbst baut […]. Und von den Menschen […] (L)earned Monsters 17 die gute Autos fahren müssen und gute Drogen nehmen und guten Alkohol trinken und gute Musik hören müssen, während um sie herum alle dasselbe tun, nur eben ein ganz klein bißchen schlechter. Und daß die Auserwählten nur durch den Glauben weiter leben können, sie würden es ein bißchen besser tun, ein bißchen härter, ein bißchen stilvoller. (153) This Germany, Kracht insinuates, is responsible for the narrator’s shortcomings, indeed has victimized him and caused him to suffer, and so Germany is in fact the true perpetrator of his crimes. Of course, his description of Germany as competitive and mechanical, a hallmark also of masculinity in capitalism, according to Arthur Brittan, underscores the text’s depiction of the narrator’s own masculine (and psychopathic) self-image as Dandy, connoisseur, and impenetrable «machine» beyond the reach of corporeal concerns (16). The protagonist of Faserland fits Theweleit’s «soldier male» model astonishingly well in several key aspects. The man Theweleit describes is obsessed with maintaining the boundary between himself and others, and between himself and the outside world, which can be seen as a serious manifestation of the supposedly German insistence that «Ordnung muss sein.» Theweleit describes a kind of exoskeleton or body armor erected as a makeshift defense against anything perceived as invasive, uncontrolled, or feminine, which is associated with flowing, messiness, and boundary transgressions. The exoskeleton keeps these forces, which both seduce and repulse the man, at bay, while simultaneously holding in the seething mush of his own insides, the flood of emotions and desires that also threaten his well-controlled world internally. Letting out this turmoil is dangerous, both for the man and for those around him; as Theweleit writes, «wenn der Mann selber fühlt […] dann ist alles andere vernichtet» (I: 207, emphasis in original). Faserland’s narrator shares the very same simultaneous fear and desire to connect with others, to lose his carefully forged external identity, and to let out the mess inside of him. The novel is fraught with examples of the narrator’s insides literally coming out, for example when he blacks out and vomits just after «accidentally» calling his former best friend from his hotel room. He also recounts a mortifying memory of the time he drank too much and then defecated and vomited in the guest bed of his girlfriend’s parents. These instances of corporeal messiness inevitably occur just at the moment when the narrator is poised to reach out to another person and «let them in,» but of course intimacy is impossible for him. Instead of soldierly rigidity, his exoskeleton is a Popper’s mask of cool composure, carefully chosen ensemble and helmet of gelled-back hair. This armor, like that of the «soldier male,» lends the narrator a sense of belonging: everyone around him is enveloped 18 Mary L. Knight in a Barbour jacket, a Triumph or Porsche, a well-tailored suit. Everyone has a set list of conversation topics based on a shared history that include the boarding school Salem, certain clubs and bars like Traxx and Odin, the same music, the same fashion designers. So in a way, the system in which our narrator has developed is just as rigid as a military academy. He knows that to break ranks, he would have to suffer the consequences. Intimacy of any kind, though coveted, threatens to breach this barrier of coolness and superficial perfection, and so it becomes not only a torturing desire but also the root of the narrator’s greatest fear, which is the dissolution of his armor and thus of his very identity. Consequently, the narrator behaves in a way which recalls the psychopath Patrick Bateman and the Funny Games killers: he proceeds numbly through his life, easing his anxiety with petty cruelty and delusions of grandeur. In fact, this anxiety about the construction of identity forms the true link between Theweleit’s soldier males and the protagonists of Faserland, Der Vogel ist ein Rabe, and Funny Games. In all of these works, there exists a tension between the individual and his oppressive culture. The tortured protagonist barely exists, in a way, as a cipher who is part human, part indictment - and part purgatory devil. We see this phenomenon represented in imagery of self-identification. In Faserland, for example, the narrator finds it impossible to look at himself in the mirror, but rather scans the edges of his reflection: «Die Mitte von meinem Gesicht, die will ich gar nicht mehr sehen, nur noch die Umrisse» (128). This moment echoes a similar one in American Psycho, in which Patrick Bateman faces his reflection and confesses, «there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory […]. I simply am not there. […] Myself is fabricated, an aberration» (Ellis 377). Paul in Der Vogel ist ein Rabe sees a «Geschichte» in the mirror, represented by a brown spot which has appeared on his eye since he murdered Mandy, the story he cannot bring himself to tell his new acquaintance Henry. As he is led away by police, Paul turns back to Henry and says, «Ich bin eben kein Erzähler wie du» (140). And in Funny Games, Peter and Paul are more fictional than real from the very start, from their fake names to Paul’s list of possible backstories to explain their murderous behavior. When Paul speaks during the extended scenes in the Schobers’ living room, he is almost always shown in shadow, so that we cannot see his face, just a silhouette of his head. This adds further drama to the final shot of the film, a close-up of Paul’s face as he looks into the viewer’s eyes. This image is reminiscent of mug shots and other photos of accused serial killers on reality television programs, which generally zoom in on the killer’s face and invite the viewer to gaze into the eyes in search (L)earned Monsters 19 of some indication that the person is «off» or evil. The viewer is meant to feel a chill run down her spine from the emptiness she sees in the killer’s gaze. Paul, like all the male protagonists discussed here, embodies this emptiness. These are the men who are «not there,» who possess a non-identity which is both guiltless (since how can a non-person be guilty of human crimes? ) and terrifying. I would argue that this non-identity is in fact the essence of psychopathic masculinity; the masculinity that isn’t there. Tithecott sees Jeffrey Dahmer as this self-negating masculine type, «in possession of a self with no other and therefore no meaning, someone who has destroyed his sense of difference and consequently destroyed his own sense of self,» a death that is in fact a triumph, a «release to omnipotence» (Tithecott 164-5). In the fictional realm, psychopathy is what happens when Theweleit’s soldier male launches his quest to isolate and maintain his rigid masculine identity. When such masculinity goes unchecked, especially in response to a perceived threat from feminized, corrupt and damaging culture, all hell breaks loose. That the masculine type represented in these recent works is just as rigid and loath to adapt as Theweleit’s fascist «soldier males,» however, suggests that far less has changed in the course of the past century than we might have hoped. The implication of all these texts is, ultimately, that our culture is in crisis. Ellis says, that «we have earned these monsters.» Like Ellis, Kracht, Lebert, and Haneke cast young men, young everymen, in fact, as «devil(s) in the purgatory of banality,» who serve alternately as canaries in the mine and as executioners sent to teach us a lesson. And like American Psycho, the three works examined here thus construct a metaphoric link between psychopathy and masculinity such that the psychopathic male protagonist becomes an emblem of modernity. Works Cited Brittan, Arthur. Masculinity and Power. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Cleckley, Hervey. The Mask of Sanity. St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 1941. Dutton, Kevin. 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Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Theweleit, Klaus. Männerphantasien: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1977. -. Männerphantasien: Männerkörper - zur Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern, 1978. Wurmitzer, Gabriele. «‹What Goes without Saying›: Michael Haneke’s Confrontation with Myths in Funny Games.» New Austrian Film. Ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. 166-76.