\n"}Oh man, you know what I just remembered? That time in the \u201890s when some guy went on an interstate murder spree and disappeared, and then while he was an active news story on the Ten Most Wanted list he emerged to finish it off by killing Gianni fucking Versace and people still don\u2019t know what that was about
\nThat drew me to this September 1997 article, which fascinated me in its own right because there\u2019s something here I want to draw your attention to. Two things, actually.
\nFirst, I assume Vanity Fair still commissions some decent longform, but look how fucking lush this is - 12,500 words, people even tangentially related to the subject interviewed across several states, 16 months in development and published a year after the last bodies were cold.
\nI\u2019m not gonna say this was the norm, but the norm was still a bit off in that direction back then. Newspapers and TV news would deliver their first draft of history the next day, and a spry reader might subscribe to a few weekly magazines, but past that things just developed at a slower pace. Or, rather, things developed on their own and a while later you\u2019d hear a reasonable account of what happened.
\nI suppose CNN was already disrupting towards a constant news cycle though, MSNBC and Fox News had launched as me-toos in 1996.
\n(As point One-and-a-Half, notice how in a pre-Internet world how much social power Cunanan acquires just by reading a lot, remembering things, and other people being unable to check or refute his claims)
\nSecond, another \u201clook into a lost world\u201d in this 20-year-old article is just how natively fluent everyone is in a psychiatric idiom. It\u2019s not really Freudian per se, the old man was already musty in 1997, but a thoroughgoing sense that you can explain someone by reference to the development of their psyche, that they pursue this desire this way but encounter this obstacle and that warps them this way in response\u2026
\nSome of the cops come from the FBI profiling tradition so fair enough. (Should note the idea of the \u201cserial killer\u201d only dates to the 1980s and the concept of \u201cprofiling\u201d got a lot of attention in response I suspect as much as anything as a way for the state to reassure the citizenry that in a relatively un-surveilled, pre-computerized, pre-DNA testing world, they had some defense. This was the context for Silence of the Lambs.)
\nAnd maybe it was the author who chose that angle for the piece but geez, her interviewees sure gave her a lot of quotes to work with, it\u2019s really striking how people with even limited contact with Cunanan feel confident talking past observed actions to the nature of his character, on to inferred internal motivations and placing their experience in the context of a narrative or character arc.
\nNow this was all gay culture in the not yet normie mid-90s, where you might expect people to have a more complex sense of the relationship between interiority and social performance than the average bear. But remembering back it\u2019s just like the writing - this was maybe an outlying case, but things in general did used to be noticeably more like that, now that I think of it.
\nAnd maybe that could be done poorly, and even done properly it wasn\u2019t ~scientific~, a bit of Freudian speculation plus a bit of residual Christian \u201cspiritual development\u201d, each put through a few washes of folksy popularization before combining and then put through a few more. \u201cScientism\u201d wasn\u2019t as strong as it is now, I really have the sense it was more accepted that if some social or hard science expert made a claim about human experience and supported it by reference to math or scientific consensus it was much further \u201cin bounds\u201d for a humanities expert - a reverend, an analyst, a Foucauldian critic - to rebut them by reference to their own traditions.
\nThis was what Alan Sokal was peeved about, and are we better for living in his world now? Honestly I think maybe when a guy who\u2019s intense into hard S&M bashes a guy\u2019s face in with a hammer as part of a murder spree we should consider \u201chuh, maybe he\u2019s a sadist, what\u2019s that about?\u201d
\n(I have seen a bit of a spike in essayistic psychoanalysis lately with people trying to explain the 4chan/alt-right nexus but you can tell they\u2019re just equipping polemic arms, clumsy in their mouths, not the idiom they see their own lives through)
\nThe flip side of all this, of course, is I\u2019m reading through this whole psychological profile of an article, noting all the times Cunanan varied between reclusive or despondent to life-of-the-party, five-figure spending sprees, sudden intense violence and I\u2019m wondering when they\u2019d speculate he was bipolar. (Actually, I was wondering if it would still be \u201cmanic-depressive\u201d back then.)
\nAnd the answer is\u2026 never. And you realize that \u201chaving X mental condition\u201d as a way to understand yourself or others was not yet the thing it now is, the big breakthrough of that narrative into mainstream culture was in 1993-4 with Listening to Prozac and Prozac Nation (I once intended to borrow the latter from the library and picked up the former instead, which was not as bad as the time I intended to rent Steel Magnolias and got Magnolia).
\nNow I\u2019m not suggesting Eli Lilly created \u201cchronic depression\u201d to match Prozac in the same way Listerine created \u201cchronic halitosis\u201d. But I am saying a consequence of bringing their breakthrough blockbuster SSRI to market was the cultivation of a narrative with a constituency by which you took the drug and were your self, whereas before you had been under the influence of something that was in hindsight distinct from your self. And this narrative matching experience, and being socially validated, in a way Valium or Halcion weren\u2019t.
\nAnd that this was not always a typical way to think of the self, even when sympathetically thinking of imperfect or damaged selves. And that reading this 20-year old article, by a writer who debuted in the \u201870s, and then looking up to this blue website, it\u2019s really striking how much older ways of discussing the self have faded away and the Prozac experience seems to have been generalized to bear that weight.
\n