Premediated killing

Shooting for Fame: Spectacular Youth, Web 2.0 Dystopia, and the Celebrity Anarchy of Generation Mash-Up

Michael Serazio^*

Article first published online: 24 AUG 2010

Communication, Culture & Critique

Volume 3, Issue 3, pages 416–434, September 2010

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that the stories from Columbine and Virginia Tech in the U.S. and Jokela High School in Finland betray a disconcerting dystopia of user-generated content gone wrong at a moment of much Web 2.0 hype. I use their actions and the subsequent reaction as case-study portals into an era of celebrity anarchy and narcissistic youth. I then contextualize these youth shooters within a generational context of purported narcissism—suggesting that their attacks are both premeditated as well as premediated. I conclude by pondering the challenges journalists face in complying with youth shooters' demand for celebrity and the possibility that, in the self-broadcasting world of Web 2.0, their role as gatekeepers may be more confounded than ever.

In an introduction to his exploration of the economics of fame, Tyler Cowen (2000) quotes the following declaration by British author Samuel Johnson:

Every man … has some project by which he hopes to rise to reputation; some art by which he imagines that the world will be attracted; some quality, good or bad, which discriminates him from the common herd of mortals, by which others may be persuaded to love, or compelled to fear him. (vii)

Johnson far predated the troubling rise of youth shooters who have intermittently unleashed school massacres at the turn of the 21st century. Each time, observers seem to inquire into the cause of their actions with familiar bewilderment: Who is to shoulder the blame for these recurring attacks? Debate quickly ignites over the tools of the tragedy—with gun control advocates faulting availability and National Rifle Association (NRA) surrogates countering with a case for mutually assured deterrence. The media—both singular and plural—is/are routinely taken to task, as well as the culture(s) fostered. Following the 1999 Columbine killings in the western United States, pundits invoked targets both specific and broad: Marilyn Manson and goth music subculture; The Matrix and violent action movies; the Doom video game series and Internet technology writ large. Conservatives in the United States incorporated the violence into a larger (culture) war: Congressional leader Newt Gingrich “credited the hippie embrace of freedom of the 1960s, while Thomas Sowell argued that the 1960s exonerated individuals from responsibility … [and] Tom DeLay just blamed daycare, the teaching of evolution, and ‘working mothers who take birth control pills”’ (Kimmel, 2008, p. 66). More recently, in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, crusader Jack Thompson loudly scourged gaming as the media culprit, although no evidence from Seung-Hui Cho's background was found to validate these claims (Hartlaub, 2007). As Douglas Kellner (2008) notes, “just about every form of youth culture except bowling” gets hauled in for moral questioning after an incident such as that of Columbine, Virginia Tech, or Pekka-Eric Auvinen's less infamous rampage in Tuusula, Finland¹ (p. 48).

That the politicization of school shootings often puts the rhetorical cart before the empirical horse should be of little surprise to any observer of mediated politics. Yet even the existence—or lack thereof—of demonstrable evidence about media effects on youth shooters misses a broader point. This sort of lay theorizing constructs audiences (particularly youth audiences) in the oldest of “mass society” frames² : vulnerable and passive, at a juncture “characterized by the breakdown of traditional social responsibilities and ties, leading to a mass of alienated individuals who could be led or controlled” (Brooker & Jermyn, 2003, p. 5). Led, controlled, or induced by media message to violent rampage—in this essay, I will argue that this critique seems to get it only half right. If we are to take Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen as symbols of contemporary youth (as media commentary is often wont to treat them), they are indeed vulnerable—but not in a hypodermic way—and far from passive. Rather, their stories betray a disconcerting dystopia of user-generated content gone wrong. Media indeed functioned as tools of the tragedy in this telling, but these tools are wielded by the killers themselves as much as by professional broadcasters. To recall Elihu Katz's (2001) discipline-synthesizing epigram, we might inquire into what youth shooters do to, with, and through media as much as what media do to youth shooters. For in shooters' quest for notoriety, those mass media broadcasters seem to be held hostage (metaphorically) along with shooters' classmates (literally). And while Samuel Johnson may have predated school shootings by 300 years, his declaration no doubt prefigured the same abiding and timeless fame impulse that still drives these actions at a moment when new technologies and cultural conditions of late modernity are destabilizing the media landscape and giving way to a kind of celebrity anarchy to be seized upon by enterprising Web 2.0 terrorism. Harris and Klebold's home videotapes, Cho's NBC multimedia package and, most emblematically, Auvinen's YouTube mash-ups signal youth audiences armed with new media participatory software (Bruns, 2008; Deuze, 2007; Jenkins, 2006) and suckled in an allegedly narcissistic climate (Twenge, 2006).

The dizzying convergence of producer and consumer vis-à-vis media content as the digital generation comes of age has introduced a new scale, pace, or pattern of perception into human affairs (McLuhan, 1964). Troubled youths like Cho and Auvinen perhaps develop their “sense ratios” in this technological context. Pundits have invested much effort in trying to decode the metamessage about this youth era that those shooters send with firearms. To date, not enough analysis has critically appraised the message sent by way of their cameras themselves. What, therefore, are youth shooters trying to communicate through their actions about celebrity and technology? And how is journalism supposed to respond?

Fame and function

By regularly supplying audiences with an appetite for the visual, 20th-century media—and television in particular—cultivated audiences with steady wonderment for the possibility of being visualized themselves; 21st-century media provide many of the tools to play along with that fantasy. This, it would seem, is one of the “big picture” effects of television on society over the course of the past 50 years: It exponentially accelerated our cult of fame—that pervasive and inveterate desire for personal celebrity that shows up embarrassingly on reality TV, gauchely in one's thousands of MySpace “friends,” and most gruesomely in the work of Cho and Auvinen that is at once destructive and creative. These media have, in a way, made fame the dominant currency of modern social capital. They have brought the stage, in this most general sense, to the forefront of human consciousness.

This may be a less explored implication of cultivation theory and agenda-setting research. If, indeed, television viewing cultivates perceptions of social reality—and research has notably found that heavier viewers tend to see the world, for example, as more dangerous—then perhaps the gradual exposure to mass media similarly breeds a tendency to value fame for its own sake. In their review of 3 decades of cultivation research, Michael Morgan, James Shanahan, and Nancy Signorielli (2009) state that “Cultivation is not conceived as a unidirectional but rather more like a gravitational process” (p. 38). Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen were perhaps vulnerable to that sense of accumulated “gravity” as much as the individual messages they received from rock stars or hit films. For no matter what the common symbolic environment of the mass media may be specifically portraying at a given moment, its fundamental and enduring power is in convincing viewers of the continuing importance of whatever topics and persons pass through its screens. The gravitational pull exerted on and perhaps internalized by viewers is one of relevance—that what (and, more importantly, who) shows up on-screen fundamentally matters. Thus, the cultivated effect of mass media on audiences may be to ingrain an altered sense of “worth ratios” as much as McLuhan's “sense ratios”—and by this, I mean that visual media cultivate an appreciation of spectacle alone as success. The loftiest ideal for an individual in a society governed by agenda-setting media (e.g., McCombs & Shaw, 1972) is to set or beon the agenda (something that only fame affords): That is, as we are variously told what to think about, perhaps we crave most to be thought about ourselves. Thus, Marilyn Manson's true danger to the youth shooter is not in what he says, but in his capacity to be heard. To that end, literary and social historian Leo Braudy (1986) notes that this sense of “performance” has overtaken the nation-state, God, and even history itself, as the dominant frame for assessing achievement: “Much more than the famous of any previous century, the famous of the 20th century, whether in public professions or not, are onstage” (p. 549, italics in original). Dramaturgical sociology notwithstanding (e.g., Goffman, 1959), literal stages used to be more stable, clearly delimited places. We knew where to find them and how to avoid them; Shakespeare's cliché (“all the world's a stage”) was more metaphor than camera-phone fact.

Fame, too, has seen less volatile days. Braudy's tome, The Frenzy of Renown, provides a comprehensive survey of this condition through the ages and the needed back-story for shooter celebrity. The prospect of fame surely weighed less heavily on an individual's soul in the Middle Ages, a period of strict social hierarchy and deterministic, inherited ties. The emergence of modernity—and the creeping schizophrenia of identity—yoked the yearning to be known with the uncertainty of the self; with industrialization and urbanization, fewer traditions and more mobility meant that fame had more existential utility than when a fixed order constrained, if not altogether obscured, those stirrings of ambition: “As each new medium of fame appears, the human image it conveys is intensified and the number of individuals celebrated expands” (Braudy, 1986, p. 4). Some might say this alludes to a fragmentation or even democratization of fame; others note that achievement and eminence now have “pseudo” relations (Boorstin, 1987). Cowen (2000) remarks on how the media machinery of late modernity seems to grant fame without consulting merit: “As markets distribute fame more widely and more diversely, most fame rewards will stand apart not only from merit but from any particular standard” (p. 101, italics in original). Paris Hilton springs to mind—our “human pseudo event” in full. Because of this, critics curse fame for its complicity with neoliberal capitalism and P. DavidMarshall (1997) in particular condemns how “celebrity status became aligned with the potentialities of the wedding of consumer culture with democratic aspirations” (p. 9). But to understand why Harris, Klebold, Cho, and Auvinen “premediated” their attacks so deliberately, we might seek some synthesized typology of fame's functionality in the late modern imagination.

Indeed, there exists a distinctly existential logic underpinning their savage gambits. It is the idea that, in late modern society, the supposedly rootless, alienated individual can, through visual media broadcast, rise above his or her station in life, his or her “seat in the audience”—that fame can grant eternal life and one's own image proliferation can somehow transcend mortality. Before television, this was the vague, distant seduction of film fame; after television, it suddenly appeared open to more viewers; with the dawn of the Internet era (that Auvinen exploited so fiendishly), those studio walls have been further knocked down commencing a hyper-mobility of images sliding past what had been the gatekeepers of yesteryear. To be known (and, by this, I mean “seen”—that ocularcentric conversion of image to knowledge in the TV epoch) is to repair the plight and plague of late modernity. One might break down celebrity desire into a typology of three categories: It provides one with the experience of individuality; it offers transcendence above powerless anonymity; and it entices with the potential for immortality. These will help illuminate the logic behind the mediated productivity of the youth shooters; these are the “worth ratio” values cultivated by decades of mass media ritual.

Marshall (1997) illuminates the first concept quite clearly: “[Celebrities] are allowed to express themselves quite individually and idiosyncratically while the rest of the members of the population are constructed as demographic aggregates” (p. ix). The famous person, being granted wider leverage of psychosocial agency, has the power to construct his or her own identity and to “house conceptions of individuality” there (p. xi). Braudy (1986) adds, “In the heart of the fan and the famous alike, fame is a quiet place where one is free to be what one really is, one's true, unchanging essence” (p. 6). In short, fame delivers individuality; it offers identity expressed most forcefully against uncertainty. Auvinen seems to rage at this uncertainty, surprisingly explicitly, when he posts in his online manifesto:

Collective deindividualization is a phenomenon where the individual will be trained as part of the mindless herd controlled by state, corporation, church or some other organization, group, ideology, religion, or mass delusion system … It is just done so that people will think they are free and don't realize they are being enslaved. Majority of people in society are weak-minded and ignorant retards, masses that act like programmed robots and accept voluntary slavery.

Conservative pundits, as noted earlier, unknowingly rely upon a “mass society” critique to explain how individuals like Auvinen are warped by powerful media, but Auvinen himself reveals Frankfurt School-worthy angst here (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1977).

By way of the camera—by way of circulating images of one's self as Cho and Auvinen did in advance of their acts—that anonymity of one's existence undergoes “legitimation,” as Graeme Turner (2004) puts it (p. 62). David Giles (2000) notes how the camera itself is a critical step forward in this legitimation: “Each time we are photographed, it could be argued, we reproduce” (p. 51, italics in original). One can add that school shooters seeking celebrity status see this legitimation in reproduction. An important ethical question journalism will need to answer in going forward is whether reproducing the media packages shooters provide renders complicity with this legitimation (and, indeed, if there's really any alternative in forgoing such information subsidies in an era of rampant self-publishing). Anonymity surely mattered far less in the premodern world; Braudy (1986) estimates that, in the medieval period, the average human being only saw 100 other people in their whole lifetime. One main effect of the escalating crowds encountered in daily life is “the blossoming of more contenders for symbolic singularity” (p. 27). To see so many faces is to trigger an unease of being unknown and hence powerless. ChrisRojek (2001) has suggested how, through para-social interaction, celebrities offer potent messages and affirmations to audiences, verifications that ultimately serve the functions once given over to religion. Yet para-social interaction also feeds the celebrity by articulating the pleasure taken in the celebrity's transcendence above powerless anonymity; it heralds the godhood potential that visually mediated fame suggests.

To this point, I have argued that visually mediated fame allures by first offering the individual the very possibility of individuality and, second, making that individuality known to all at a particular point in time. The third and final existential appeal of fame exists in the eternal dimension—along the y-axis—in its siren call to immortality. If fame has become the dominant currency of modern social capital, it is through this prism that one hopes for stability—to become a gold-standard across time. This, Braudy (1986) documents, may be the oldest penchant of all: “In the ancient world the desire for fame is a desire to make an impact on time, to be remembered” (p. 27). Fame stood out as a way to cheat death; to be granted eternal life. Indeed, it was just as much a sense of being more than human: “For if an image lasts beyond death, it implies that its possessor is more than human” (p. 589). If in the first stage of this fame typology singularity was sought and in the second ubiquity, in the third, we can add permanence. Giles (2000), citing psychologist Erik Erikson who coined the idea of “identity crisis,” terms this basic desire “generativity”—that is, being able to affect successive generations (p. 44). The inevitable fear of copycat threats following a school shooting is a consequence of the shooters' egomaniacal yearning for generativity; at their most specific, they hope to inspire disciples through the publicity generated. Continuing Auvinen's manifesto from the earlier quote:

Majority of people in society are weak-minded and ignorant retards, masses that act like programmed robots and accept voluntary slavery. But not me! I am self-aware and realize what is going on in society! I have a free mind! And I choose to be free rather than live like a robot or slave. You can say I have a “god complex,” sure … then you have a “group complex!” Compared to you retarded masses, I am actually godlike.

Joseph Campbell believes this dimension of fame—immortality—was what endowed movie stars with their magical quality: “The person you are looking at [on screen] is somewhere else at the same time. That is the condition of the god” (in Gritten, 2002, p. 72). A century removed from Lumière—where countless screens seem to be open to countless faces—what gods do youth worship and where might it be leading them?

Premediated killing

In 1898, a poll asked some 1,500 young teens, “What person of whom you have ever heard or read would you most like to resemble?” (Cowen, 2000, p. 47). George Washington topped the list, as did Abraham Lincoln, with 78 percent of selections coming from politicians, moral leaders, and military heroes. No entertainers appeared. A similar survey took place in 1948, with Franklin Roosevelt and Clara Barton taking the lead and 14% choosing entertainers. In 1986, The World Almanac listed the 10 most admired figures by U.S. teenagers: Bill Cosby, Sylvester Stallone, and Eddie Murphy led off a list wholly comprised of current or former entertainers (including, not irrelevantly, the U.S. president at the time).

Few would seemingly dispute that contemporary culture is fully immersed in the throes of fame desire—as the historian Braudy (1986)comments, it is our “national obsession” (p. 8). We have more potential than ever to direct the spotlight of (now personal) media technologies in whatever direction we choose and, tellingly, we shine them upon ourselves—arms outstretched, digital cameras turned inward. With MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube, fame—albeit a kind of microfame—seems to be delegated in remarkably egalitarian ways relative to a century ago, very nearly bordering on anarchy. Television presaged this shift in its evolution from film and the Internet seems to have accelerated the trend. Yet the visual technologies and media developments that “empower”—to borrow a fondly used cultural studies buzzword—the spectator are the same advances that cheapen the classic definition of fame and the elements that structure its stability. A generation—Cho and Auvinen's generation—is coming of age as the media landscape reshapes itself in profound ways.

Take, as one example, Morris Janowitz's classic definition of mass media which states: “Mass communications comprise the institutions and techniques by which specialized groups employ technological devices (press, radio, films, etc.) to disseminate symbolic content to large, heterogeneous and widely dispersed audiences” (cited in McQuail & Windahl, 1993, p. 6). Yet it is not broadcasting but now the network that represents “the core organizing principle of this [new] communicative environment,” as Axel Bruns (2008) proposes (p. 14). Since the popular emergence of Internet use some 15 years ago—when the network began to supplement if not supplant broadcasting as that dominant organizing model—user-generated media has steadily increased, thanks to lower costs of production equipment and easier means of distribution. Yet in contrast to mass media forms of the 20th century (centralized, professional content in newspapers, on radio, or in film), the user-generated content that has emerged in the past decade (decentralized, amateur content on Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter) provides a different experience of fame—quicker, cheaper—for those who produce it. In turn, user-generated fame tends to lack the depth, breadth, and length of mass media fame, and cheapens the former's existential claims to singularity, ubiquity, and permanence: What was once 15 minutes of fame to all has perhaps been truncated to 15 seconds of fame to 15 people. Therefore, user-generated content allows users to act out the rhythms of mass media fame—broadcasting daily minutia to our social networks and uploading Flickr streams as self-paparazzi—even if TMZ (celebrity news website) has little interest in covering our lives. This kind of behavior might lend itself to a kind of rephrase of US Weekly: “Stars—we’re just like them!” Yet even as these tools of user-generated content—and the network of distribution that grounds them—have given participants the opportunity to communicate like the mass media, the vast majority of that self-published content rarely gathers a mass audience.

Douglas Kellner (2008), in a book-length analysis devoted to school shootings, writes that the Internet offers a social space markedly different from earlier media cultures—“more fragmented, diverse, and interactive” and “an increasingly complex and hybridized matrix” (p. 67). The shootings offer performance as participatory spectacle and highlight the deeply narcissistic vein that apparently pulses within millennial youth (and rages unchecked upon Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Jokela). Jean Twenge (2006) calls this group Generation Mefor precisely that reason: It represents, in her view, a demographic that harbors wildly entitled expectations about the self and fame. The angst and alienation embodied in shooters' rage is perhaps a product of that crushing gap between media-fueled fantasy and lived reality: “GenMe's focus on the needs of the individual is not necessarily self-absorbed or isolationist; instead it's a way of moving through the world beholden to few social rules and with the unshakable belief that you’re important” (p. 49). She cites various evidence that suggests youth narcissism has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years; for instance, in the early 1950s, 12% of teens agreed with the survey statement, “I am an important person” as compared to 80% in the 1990s (p. 69). Other data show generational rises in “agency” as a youth personality trait (not to mention as an audience construct for media researchers in cultural studies); that is, “assertiveness, dominance, independence, and self-promotion” (p. 74). Most notably for this analysis, thanks to decentralizing technology, the rise of reality media formats, and user-generated content platforms, Twenge suggests that “much of GenMe expects to be famous” (p. 87). To that end, Twenge points to a 2004 national survey that found more college freshmen wanting to be an “actor or entertainer” than those who hoped to go into law, medicine, social work, business or teaching (p. 82). More recently, Pew Research Center (2007) found that, among 18- to 25-year-olds, being famous is among the most important goals for their generation.³ These widespread aspirations stitch the social fabric of millennial youth; and yet it is equally marked by deep pockets of unease:

Other studies have confirmed that younger generations experience more anxiety and stress … The number of teens aged 14–16 who agreed that “Life is a strain for me much of the time” quadrupled between the early 1950s and 1989 … One out of three college freshmen reported feeling “frequently overwhelmed” in 2001, twice as many as in the 1980s. (Twenge, p. 107)

These are the statistical measures typically invoked when contextualizing a school shooter run amok; yet these data on stress must not be extricated from the related data on fame (which is comparatively overlooked when appraising societal “causes” of, say, Columbine). The burdens of celebrity would appear to weigh on the youth imagination and, for shooters, can perhaps only be lifted with successful execution of the notorious act.

As such, Howard Stein (2000) claims that Columbine is a metaphor for the crisis of “disposable youth.” I believe that Columbine—along with Virginia Tech and Jokela—is equally a metaphor for the crisis of celebrity and youth, of fame-seeking and identity-uncertainty. After all, evidence bears out the fact that schools are, by and large, very safe environs for youth despite the much-panicked coverage following a tragic incident (Muschert, 2007). Muschert also notes that there is, as yet, no unified body of knowledge or theory about school shootings. Ralph Larkin (2007), in an analysis focused on Columbine, also concedes “there is no comprehensive understanding as to why it happened and why it happened where it did” (p. 15). But he does suggest, importantly, that the contemporary cult of celebrity may be a striking factor: “One of the hallmarks of contemporary postmodern culture is the rise of an intensely competitive struggle within the cultural realm that can be distinguished from economic and political competition. Sitting at the top of this competitive struggle is the celebrity” (p. 180). Contextualizing these forces in terms of youth, Larkin argues, “In contemporary postmodern culture, the new class system can be categorized as celebrities, has-beens, and nobodies. The culture of the modern high school reflects that same sort of stratification in the microcosm” (p. 181). At Columbine, Larkin contends, jocks sat atop the social pyramid as microcelebrities—and “everybody else is a nobody” (i.e., lacking the individuality fame affords). He adds:

To an impressionable adolescent, the message of postmodern American culture is that if you are not a somebody, then you must be a nobody, which is worse than being a has-been. At least if you are a has-been, you can be recycled on a “whatever became of …” article or show. (192)

He quotes Donna Gaines' conclusion following an ethnographic inquiry into the teen culture that ended in a New Jersey suicide pact:

Kids who go for the prize now understand there are only two choices—rise to the top or crash to the bottom. Many openly admit they would rather end it all now than end up losers … The big easy or the bottomless pit, but never the everyday drone. As long as there are local heroes and stories, you can still believe you have a chance to emerge from the mass as something larger than life … kids try to play at being one in a million, some way of shining, even if it's just for a while. (151)

It is not difficult to hear in Auvinen's manifesto a similar disdain for that “everyday drone”: “Of course there is a final solution [to this]: death of the entire human race,” he writes. Besides the genocidal Nazi allusions here (hardly coincidental given the prominence of Nazi imagery and themes in his other materials), Auvinen's real solution is fame. Like Harris and Klebold before him, Auvinen hoped his action would satisfy what Erikson called “generativity”: “There is a third way to become a celebrity—and that is to do something so outrageous that one becomes notorious. For nobodies, this is the one sure route to celebrity” (Larkin, p. 193).

Of course, as Kellner (2008) observes, media-made celebrity killers stretch back for decades from political assassins like Lee Harvey Oswald to serial murderers like the Zodiac killer and Son of Sam. The technologies of the digital era bring celebrity platforms inside so many more bedrooms of youth. The means are there to self-make into a celebrity killer; only the ends are needed. Robert Samuels (2000)believes that, because of this, school shooters are guided by contemporary entertainment logic endemic to “postmodern media narcissism”:

By constantly breaking down the distinctions between the private and the public, the audience and actor, and reality and fiction, postmodern media feed into a technological mode of narcissism where everyone has the potential opportunity to be recognized by a mass audience. (p. 312)

Because of this, the youth celebrity killer leaves nothing to mediated chance. The preparation for the act is obsessively documented so as to be publicized. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold produced home-made video tapes self-reflexively musing on the celebrity potential of their actions. Only a handful of journalists have seen the tapes but two Time reporters wrote of them:

They wanted movies made of their story, which they had carefully laced with “a lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony,” as Harris put it. There was a poem that he wrote, imagining himself as a bullet. “Directors will be fighting over this story,” Klebold said—and the boys chewed over which could be trusted with the script: Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. “You have two individuals who wanted to immortalize themselves,” says [FBI agent Mark] Hostlaw. “They wanted to be martyrs and to document everything they were doing.” (Gibbs & Roche, 1999)

Presaging the impulse of Web 2.0, they further assembled a web page that announced to the world their intentions and targets (Samuels, 2000). Harris visually modeled a Doom character's pose, chugging Jack Daniels with a sawed-off shotgun, in the tapes. They remarked how audiences would retrospectively marvel at the time and date of the tapes they were making. In that, their actions were not only premeditated (planned in advance), they were effectively “premediated” (packaged in advance). That is, their strategy encompassed both the preparations for the act itself as well as contingencies for the media circus they knew that would unfold around it. Neither Spielberg nor Tarantino took the bait, but Gus Van Sant loosely dramatized Columbine in his film, Elephant, and P. J. Paparelli's play, Columbinus, toured the country to glowing reviews (Larkin, p. 194).

In the midst of his own rampage on April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho similarly took time out to attend to public relations, sending NBC News a multimedia package that included an 1,800 word manifesto, 43 photographs, and 25 minutes of videotape. As one forensic scientist and consultant to ABC News argued, “These videos do not help us understand him. They distort him. He was meek. He was quiet. This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character” (ABC News, 2007). Furthermore, some had initially presumed that two of Cho's iconic photos—posed menacingly with a hammer and with a gun pressed to his head—were visually quoting the film Oldboy, in which a Korean takes revenge through violent rampage (the latter of which was itself referencing Taxi Driver). Stephen Hunter adds that “much of the iconography in the photo gallery quotes poses in films by Hong Kong action director John Woo, as in the images where Cho holds two guns in his hands or points a gun at a camera” (in Kellner, 2008, p. 40).

Delving further into Cho's past, the Virginia state review panel tasked with producing a report on the shootings revealed earlier traces of Cho's hunger for celebrity. His sister reported on Cho's failed efforts to publish a novel and the disappointment that came with that rejection from a New York publisher. Roger L. Depue, a forensic behavioral scientist profiling Cho for the panel, wrote that in his sophomore year Cho discovered what he thought was “his niche, his special talent that would set him apart from the sea of other students at the university” (i.e., seeking the singularity—the disaggregation—of fame): writing (VT Review Panel N-3, 2007). Yet the publisher's rejection likely left him “devastated.” Depue's report proceeds from the notion that fame drives murderous actions like Cho's from the very inception: Because of mental disorders, “[shooters] have come to the realization that they will never become important persons … memorable persons in history” (p. 1). Documenting their plans in essays and journals, these assassins “want to make sure that history records their most significant event”—they seek, in short, the lure of celebrity immortality and diagram with increasing precision and multimedia interactivity how that obituary might be penned. Yet “Cho's dream was slipping away because of people—people who could not see and appreciate his desperate need to be recognized as somebody of importance” (p. 4). He fantasized solidarity with Eric (Harris) and Dylan (Klebold) on a first-name basis, but sought to do them one better: As the author of the “greatest school massacre ever,” he would “go down in history” as “the savior of the oppressed” (p. 5). Cho's celebrity-god-complex ultimately articulated itself through inchoate invocations of Christ: “Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations” (Kellner, p. 41).

Cho's effort to write himself into history took not only textual but also bodily form: He hoped that media would record his notoriety and that disciples would march in his footsteps, much as he did the Columbine perpetrators. Copycat panic immediately emerges to certify this. A high school student was arrested in Arkansas after writing of Cho's heroism; an Internet posting threatened to kill 50 San Diego State students; and an entire Northern California school district shut down when a threat was made to “dwarf” the Virginia Tech violence (Hoffman, 2007). A former FBI agent claimed on MSNBC that: “This is what this guy [Cho] wants … He wants to … make us listen to him one more time” (p. A18). Indeed, the celebrity youth shooter premediates by seeking to choreograph his or her own performance publically; they act out terror scripts authored in advance and try to direct the coverage that emerges by furnishing user-generated content that subsidizes the mass media. In earlier eras, that celebrity youth shooter had the gateway barrier of old media distribution; that Cho, in 2007, felt the need to package a multimedia PR kit for NBC seemed technologically anachronistic for the time. With the emergence and proliferation of self-published, online amateur content in the past decade, a kind of celebrity anarchy has ensued. The youth terrorist can now be actor, director, and distributor. It is for this reason that Pekka-Eric Auvinen came to be known popularly as the “YouTube” killer: He demonstrates a disturbing devolution of the mash-up ethos; his cyber-evidence bespeaks the dark potential of Web 2.0. Writing of digital bodies and youth violence, Carolyn Guertin (2008) cautions:

The more we live connected in virtual worlds (in our minds or online) and disconnected from the real world the greater the potential mismatch between our egos and ourselves … The user-generated content revolution of Web 2.0, which includes blogging and other social network lifestyles, is in short fostering a new kind of egomania. (p. 222)

If Cho's egomania—fertilized by the current climate of technology and celebrity—compelled him to deliver a packaged narrative to NBC, Auvinen knew that he could land on countless screens without needing a broadcast network intermediary. Relative to youth shooter precedence, his online presence was prolific. He wrote in English rather than Finnish to no doubt maximize the greatest potential audience for his performance. In one discussion forum, he announced, “I want this to be remembered forever. Maybe I’ll get followers too. Because I am an ubermench, nearly a god.” Several hours after the shooting, YouTube suspended his account but one-quarter of a million people had already visited it by then and his mash-up creations are not hard to track down on the Web. His diary and online postings outline a noxious—and jumbled—brew of fascist, misogynist, and misanthropic ramblings from a self-described “cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial social Darwinist, realistic idealist, and godlike Atheist.” He explicitly sympathized with the Columbine killers and wrote gleefully of Cho's actions in the aftermath of Virginia Tech. Just hours prior to his own rampage, he posted a home-made video to YouTube titled, “Jokela High School Massacre—11/7/2007”—again, not only signaling premeditation (police say the attack was 8 months in planning) but also premediation; Auvinen sought to script his own spectacle in advance.

Finnish federal authorities seized Auvinen's home computer less than an hour after the attack and dozens of A/V files—a good portion of which made their way online—were available for review here and it is worth describing them in some detail. Not unlike Auvinen's potpourri of political philosophy espoused (flirting with both the far left and far right), the media material shares a mash-up, omnivorous, and darkly ironic texture. There are scenes of Auvinen blowing an apple to pieces with a handgun in the woods (and, crucially, mugging for the camera afterward). Title cards scroll through vague, offensive screeds: “Gods & religious morals: Created by delusional/manipulative human beings to control the masses. Were created in the time without high level of technology and developed scientific research.”“Humanity: … is overrated and something I hate very much.”“Women: Mmmm, I love them (of course because I'm straight) though most of them are cheating whores, lying sluts, and manipulative bitches. They are best when they are dominated, tied & gagged.”“Democracy: Dictatorship of the moral majority which is manipulated by the state mafia.”“Political correctness: Lame.”“Morals: … are relative!” He narrates sadomasochistic fantasies with a Nazi tinge and punctuates them with pornographic clips of women bound and gagged. He captures his own video game footage from Hitman of his character strangling women and recuts it with excerpts from a Discovery Channel docudrama of Columbine. There is pastiche homage to famous killers and assassins throughout history and a clip assembling footage from the media materials and coverage of the 1997 Heaven's Gate suicide cult. And, taking the viewer fully through the Baudrillardian looking-glass, he recasts Natural Born Killers images with a Motorhead track, “Born to Raise Hell”—the film itself originally meant to serve as satirical commentary on violence and celebrity, but Auvinen appears to ironically appropriate the message. The clip “Videography1” contains the most densely textured and hyper-referential pace of any of the edited creations; it is a collage of many of the other mash-ups from his hard drive, breathlessly cycling through: Finnish natural landscapes; Hitler rallies; first-person shooter game scenes; serial killer mug-shots; religious iconography; The Matrix footage; military weaponry and war destruction; propaganda posters and consumer culture brands; Columbine reenactments; dictator portraits; heavy metal band logos; and his own enraged title card musings.

Virtuoso as “Videography1” seems intended to be, the clip “NaturalSelector891” offers perhaps the most concise glimpse into Auvinen's mash-up sensibility. The audio track plays the Alice Cooper tune, “Wicked Young Man” and as the base chugs toward the chorus (“It's not the games that I play/The movies I see/The music I dig/I'm just a vicious young man”), we see spliced clips successively synchronized to those lyrics from a first-person shooter video game, a machine gun shootout from A View to a Kill, the logo for German industrial rock band KMFDM, and a photo of Auvinen himself. As a message no doubt meant to be understood posthumously, he is almost talking back to the social conservative critique that opened this paper—reclaiming power, agency, accountability—and making the notoriety his own rather than allowing these famous media texts to hog his spotlight. Parts of his writings testify to this openly: “Remember that this is my war, my ideas, and my plans. Don't blame anyone else for my actions than myself. Don't blame my parents or my friends … [Then quoting Cooper explicitly:] Don't blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the book I read.” Auvinen wants shooter celebrity all to his own; he obsessively stresses that he alone authored this spectacle, this project that “discriminates him from the common herd of mortals.” He knows how the script might be written (the media caused him) and—offering up user-generated content, doing the back-story prep work for the press that would follow—seems to want to reverse the equation (he caused the media). This demonstrates the uneasy negotiation of fame-seeking through such self-published content: He is reliant upon the popular culture of the mass media but not wanting to be fully absorbed by it. He wants to make a name for himself, but cannot articulate a statement that is not but the hodgepodge of texts whose own fame predates (and will succeed) him. If the story of Auvinen is written as the effect of industrial rock, violent video games or Oliver Stone films, Auvinen loses his grip on singularity, ubiquity, immortality—he remains a footnote of a celebrity. His cause would be lost; his spectacle subsumed; and his fame cut short.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 779