From Gotham City to Littleton

John Xiros Cooper

9 May 1999

Here's a fairly typical scene. Two teenage boys at the pizza place in your neighborhood. They serve back of the counter in their gaily colored shirts, or wait to pick up the padded pouches for delivery. They seem normal enough in every way. Polite, well-groomed, well-spoken. They clearly come from good homes, in a word, your average teenagers.

In the privacy of their own rooms and on their Web pages they change. They cultivate other personas. They immerse themselves in neo-Nazi imagery and symbolism, or, alternatively, in the blood chilling characterology of RAW or WWF. They fizz hatred, violence, obsess on swastikas, spit out the gruesome poetries of revenge.

Right you are. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. OK, which of these two character studies is the real Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? The nice kids or the fascists? You know what their parents will say. You know, also, what the parents of the kids they killed at Columbine High will say.

What if both sets of parents are right?

Now, here's another fairly typical scene. A five year old boy is playing with his toys. If you haven't seen the kind of toys that are being sold to young boys these days, you might be surprised. I'm not referring to the enormous array of plastic handguns, machine pistols, rifles, service revolvers, and the truly bizarre development of the simple water pistol into a hideously kinky dayglo assault weapon. At the war games in your local spray park the Super Soaker is the weapon of choice these days.

No, I'm referring to the whole cast of action figures dangling on hooks in the aisles of your local toy store like brightly colored insects, encased in hard, clear plastic.

Listen to the five year old play. He makes them talk. They walk, fly through space, pounce on each other, growl, kickbox. The boy assembles brief segments of narrative. He lives this story, first as actor in the drama, then, as narrator, then back to acting it out. One moment he's the saintly crimefighter, the next, he's the snarling baddie, then, just as easily, he's the detached narrator telling the story from afar.

The psychological acrobatics of a five year old are truly amazing. His identity is as malleable as play-dough, and the action figures provide this nerf self with its hard plastic masks.

There's nothing startling or strange about this and nothing in the process of identification itself which necessarily leads to anything untoward. Identification is crucial for the formation of the self and it's perfectly natural to our species.

But when did the action figures get to be so grotesque? When did they acquire their strange aggressive bodies. And, worse, when did they begin to wear those creepy masks and hoods?

The first superhero, Superman, wore a funny costume for sure, but you could always see his face. Batman, Captain America, Spiderman, Green Hornet, the Wasp, Mr. Freeze, Tarantula, Swarm, Beetle, Dark Knight, and the Spiderman transform called Spider Bat, and the rest of the grotesque band of steroid sucking freaks, prefer to go around in masks.

Look at these toys carefully. They don't resemble anyone you know or can see walking around in the streets. Well, not yet anyway. Their costumes are not clothes really, but garish, crammed body gloves. They have tiny waspish waists, buns of steel, muscly backs, arms, thighs, and calves.

But why are they all masked? Who do these figures represent? What happens to the process of identification in a five-year-old when presented with the likes of Lethal Impact Bane, or with Venom, or with the flaming hair and spikes of Poison Ivy?

Contrast this with the old-fashioned toy soldier. The toy soldier might not be the best identity icon for the production of a peaceloving citizenry, but at least a soldier is an actual member of society. You might actually see one walking down the street. A five year old can play with a plastic firefighter, for example, and then go round the corner and look at a real one in the local fire station. No matter what fantasy he might have about the firefighter, inevitably, it must come down to earth.

Where are the real life counterparts for the action figures of today? Who does Electro or Red Skull stand for? What happens to those magical processes of identification and identity formation in the young when the icon has no socially existing analogue?

What happens? They get warped. And when the five year old gets older he migrates psychologically from the Bat Cave to your local corporate-sponsored arena whenever RAW or WWF set up shop. And if his parents have plenty of money and no time for the kid, he migrates to the Internet on a state of the art PC, a 19 inch screen, and a color card that will blow your socks off. There are plenty of game and web sites there where he can continue to live the fantasy. And in cyberspace he can come upon the realest fantasies of all - the cyberNazis, the hate groups, and the porn.

It's easy for a little boy who has identified psychologically with a bunch of weird toys to elaborate a similar but more complicated and involved persona as he gets older. For example from the cast of ghouls in the WWF. And move on from there to the powerful symbols and historical narratives invoked, say, by the Internet Nazis. It is in this later phase that he makes the transition from fantasy to real life, when he begins to costume up the fantasy personality. When it becomes real.

Does this mean that the boy doesn't also develop a perfectly normal personality alongside the masked and costumed freak in his head? Of course not. He's got to keep his distracted parents happy. You know the kind of personality I mean, the one that gets him through breakfast in the morning, algebra class in the afternoon, his part-time job at the pizza place in the evening, and those annoying meetings with his probation officer after he's been busted for lifting a stereo from a parked car.

Most of us work on the assumption that our normal personality - the one we show for all the concrete tasks of life - is more or less our real self. The other self wears a different costume and engages in a different set of behaviors. But, we assume, it is safely subordinated to the normal self. In other words, the normal self is the base from which fantasy life departs and to which it returns.

But what if the two selves operate more or less independently of each other? Both are normal. When the rogue self puts on its costume and mask, or in the case of Reena Virk's killers their designer label ensembles, that self is the person, as real and as lethal as can be. It is not under the control of the normal self, but acts independently. When the black trenchcoats went on at Littleton, Colorado the fantasy selves jumped right into the midst of real life.

Many people at the time were struck by the incongruities in Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They were both normal and weird, typical teenagers and Nazi executioners in the same body. They seemed to flip flop between being your average suburban teenager and a psychotic killing machine.

They certainly knew how to 'do' normal well enough to convince a fairly large number of adults, including a fairly competent probation officer. And they knew how to 'do' the executioner well enough to gun down thirteen people, toss a few bombs, and booby trap a building.

You could say they were classic examples of split personalities, severely dissociated, schizophrenic and so on and so forth. But you'd be wrong. No one in Littleton suspected a pathology. They weren't out of control. They were completely in control, in both movies. Just like the five year old happily sliding in and out of those flashy plastic personas.

We might soon have to get used to these sorts of personality disorders in the future. At least they used to be disorders. But, if we're to believe Yale law professor Lawrence Friedman, in his new book The Horizontal Society, we had better get used to living in a society in which Harris-Klebold syndrome might soon be the norm. Of course, not everyone is necessarily going to go out and shoot up a high school. But the self as an integrated, hierarchically organized unity is gone for good.

Friedman writes that hierarchical or vertical bonding structures have collapsed with the passing of the authority of the family, community, and the state. We live in horizontal times as a result of the impact of modern communications technology. We now slip into rootless grouplets defined by common interests and obsessions shared by like-minded people. Friends defines this new kind of society not Father Knows Best.

And what if the individual's inner world is also gradually horizontalizing? What if there is no base identity with one or two subject offshoots, but simply a series of more or less equal selves lacking a dominant?

Let's say the ordinary teenager working efficiently and pleasantly in the pizza place is no more real than the savage agent of retribution packing a machine pistol. Each is a kind of performance, a method actor minus a host self. Lacking a center of gravity, he can drift in and out of personas as easily as putting on and taking off a black trenchcoat.

Does this explain how Harris and Klebold could be two people in one? Possibly. The costuming for the part is the key. These were not boys who could kill while dressed in their brightly colored pizza shirts. They could only kill in costume because killing was part of that persona, not because they suffered some deep and dark trauma to a deep and dark self. They had no such self.

Had they played with toy soldiers, those boring old GI Joes, Eric and Dylan would have probably come down to earth years ago.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches English and cultural analysis at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.)

Finish