The Killer's Trail
Oh man, you know what I just remembered? That time in the ‘90s 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’t know what that was about
That drew me to this September 1997 article, which fascinated me in its own right because there’s something here I want to draw your attention to. Two things, actually.
First, 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.
I’m 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’d hear a reasonable account of what happened.
I suppose CNN was already disrupting towards a constant news cycle though, MSNBC and Fox News had launched as me-toos in 1996.
(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)
Second, another “look into a lost world” in this 20-year-old article is just how natively fluent everyone is in a psychiatric idiom. It’s 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…
Some of the cops come from the FBI profiling tradition so fair enough. (Should note the idea of the “serial killer” only dates to the 1980s and the concept of “profiling” 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.)
And 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’s 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.
Now 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’s 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.
And maybe that could be done poorly, and even done properly it wasn’t ~scientific~, a bit of Freudian speculation plus a bit of residual Christian “spiritual development”, each put through a few washes of folksy popularization before combining and then put through a few more. “Scientism” wasn’t 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 “in bounds” for a humanities expert - a reverend, an analyst, a Foucauldian critic - to rebut them by reference to their own traditions.
This 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’s intense into hard S&M bashes a guy’s face in with a hammer as part of a murder spree we should consider “huh, maybe he’s a sadist, what’s that about?”
(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’re just equipping polemic arms, clumsy in their mouths, not the idiom they see their own lives through)
The flip side of all this, of course, is I’m 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’m wondering when they’d speculate he was bipolar. (Actually, I was wondering if it would still be “manic-depressive” back then.)
And the answer is… never. And you realize that “having X mental condition” 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).
Now I’m not suggesting Eli Lilly created “chronic depression” to match Prozac in the same way Listerine created “chronic halitosis”. 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’t.
And 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 ‘70s, and then looking up to this blue website, it’s 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.
