The perennial popularity of films, mini-dramas, and documentary-style TV shows depicting serial killers reflects the symbiotic state between production and our fascinated consumption. As a culture, it seems we return to the scenes of violent and notorious crimes compulsively. Mark Seltzer implies the extent of our interest in this particular configuration of masculinity when he writes that representations of the serial killer and serial murder ‘have by now largely replaced the Western as the most popular genre-fiction of the body and of bodily violence in our culture’ (1).
View More Returning to the Scene: Seriality and the Serial Killer in Mindhunter (2017-)Author: Katie Jones
Katie Jones is a recent PhD graduate with research interests in the history of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and life writing. Her PhD research, Improper Subjects: Confession, Shame, and Femininity, focuses on ‘confession’ as a narrative trope in semi-autobiographical fictions by twentieth- and twenty-first-century English- and German-language women writers. She has articles or reviews published or forthcoming in the Modern Language Review and gender forum.