Vol. 26 No. 1 (2023): Familiar Perpetrators: On the Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture
Special issue on Familiar Perpetrators: On the Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture. This issue was co-edited by Dragoș Manea, Dana Mihăilescu, Roxana Oltean and Mihaela Precup, whose work was supported by PCE grant 101/2021, “Familiar Perpetrators: On the Intimacy of Evil in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture,” offered by UEFISCDI.
Published:
2025-02-06
Full Issue
Articles
-
Perpetration and Performance: Unlikely Villains and the Ghosting Effect in Fargo
Abstract
Noah Hawley’s anthology series Fargo (FX, 2014- ) has received critical acclaim for its equally humorous and violent depiction of small-town delinquency. Participating in a range of criminal conflicts in and around Fargo, perpetrators are at the heart of the series’ thematic interest. However, Fargo self-reflexively deviates from classic crime and detective fiction schemes and rearranges generic conventions into a pastiche of cultural references. As I demonstrate in this article, the series’ playful rearrangement of familiar elements also affects the depiction of perpetrators. While the series features classic criminal characters such as hitmen and gang members, it is also interested in portraying previously blameless characters who gradually develop criminal potentials—characters who evolve from ordinary citizens to murderers, from oppressed to oppressors, from victims to perpetrators. I argue that the evolution of these unlikely villains is complemented by the choice of actors for the respective roles. The “recycling of the bodies of actors” is part of what Marvin Carlson has termed “ghosting” in theatre studies (The Haunted Stage 10). By interspersing reminiscences of some actors’ previous roles, Fargo deliberately activates the audience’s cultural memory to alienate them from established connotations and create new, uncommon villains. In this vein, the series prompts its audience to reflect on their own expectations that are based on cultural conventions and problematizes the issue of role-playing in the evolution of perpetrators both on a thematic and on a performative level.
-
From Disaffected Youth to Dangerous Adults: The Brooding Evil of the Familiar in Bret Easton Ellis’s Fiction
Abstract
Contemporary American author Bret Easton Ellis has written seven novels, one collection of interrelated short stories, multiple screenplays, one long work of non-fiction, and a number of essays throughout the better part of the past four decades. In addition, in recent years, he has cultivated a significant online presence through social media, as well as a popular podcast. From the time of his debut novel, published while he was still an undergraduate student, until the present day, his works have been the subject of much scrutiny in terms of subject matter and style. Particularly in the case of the release of his best-known novel, American Psycho (1991), a good deal of the criticism of Ellis has shifted between the text and the public persona of the author himself. In typical postmodern style, this blurring of boundaries was not only welcomed, but frequently precipitated by Ellis, his publishers, and the public relations machinery at work on his behalf. The focus of the majority of this attention, self-perpetuated and otherwise, has been on the apparent element of evil at work in terms of the amorality of his characters and a corresponding lack of moral certitude. Firmly rooted in theoretical tradition established by Georges Bataille, as well as the work of numerous recent scholars, this project examines the squandering of youth and its damaging impact upon contemporary society as a consistent thread running through Bret Easton Ellis’s oeuvre, particularly in his characters’ pervasive drug use and conspicuous expression of sexuality. The trajectory of narrator-protagonist Clay, from isolated college student in Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) into savage narcissist in Imperial Bedrooms (2010) is a prime illustration of evil, as inherent in the familiar, throughout Ellis’s postmodern landscape. As opposed to presenting an external perpetrator of evil as a threat to an existing moral order, Ellis’s narrator reports on the evil at work in these young people’s daily lives. The reader, therefore, as this project contends, is placed in the uncomfortable, but imperative and at times voyeuristic, position of determining the extent of culpability for an entire society—one that is all too familiar.
Opinion Article
-
The Problem with Clowns: Political Perpetrators and Their Comedic Critics
Abstract
Political clowns engage in statutory, cultural, and discursive crimes. While statutory crimes are available for litigation and resolution, cultural and discursive crimes are not. To comment and correct those actions, we turn to comedic clowns to police and parody political perpetrators. Those parodies and take-downs are clever, but they do not affect the behavior of the perpetrators, nor do they the result in the resolution of repetitive and stressful experience. Instead, those parodies produce familiarity, potential retraumatization, and coverage. The problem with clowns is that critical attention increases the reach of their influence and the assumption of their inevitability. This condition has hardened our political discourse and divisions and made it difficult to see civic enactments, such as elections, as productive or therapeutic in this age of cultural trauma. This article has four sections and a discussion. Part one discusses the clown as a perpetrator of discursive crimes. Part two explores how public commentaries on clownish political perpetrators both keep them in the public eye and excuse their actions as a joke. Part three focuses on how comedic response specifically repeats the discourse of perpetrators and runs the risk of retraumatizing their spectators. Part four examines how perpetrators employ self-clowning to invite derision and to delegitimize critique. The article will close with discussion of what currency we can find in the ideas of truth and reconciliation.
-
“Instead of Pumping Iron, She was Pumping Bullets into her Husband”: The Portrayal of a Female Perpetrator in Nanette Burstein’s Killer Sally
Abstract
In the media, the law, and public opinion, women who resort to violence within abusive relationships are often depicted as either victims or monsters. Nanette Burstein’s three-part docuseries, Killer Sally (2022), reexamines this binary which focuses on Sally McNeil, a former professional bodybuilder who murdered her husband, also a professional bodybuilder, in Southern California in 1995. Drawing on Belinda Morrissey’s When Women Kill and The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, this article argues that Burstein questions the discursive, performative, and one-sided dimensions of media and legal portrayals of female perpetrators. By placing both the perpetrator and the victim within complex socio-psychological and posthuman frameworks, Burstein broadens the discourse on battered women who kill by granting the perpetrator agency and voice.
