aurora

Music: Robert Earl Keen: Gravitational Forces (2003)

Sitting in an airport bar, Holmes' badly dyed red head bobs periodically as he endures a preliminary hearing. A harried attorney with long hair---its subtle, unkempt character the signature of "harried"---sits with him in the jury box as his primary public defender navigates the inevitable ten paces away. His head bobs, at times his eyelids shut; he seems sedated.

While I was in Colorado Springs at a conference just an hour's drive away, Holmes massacred twelve and wounded another 58 in a packed movie theatre with assault weapons. I write these details not to inform, but chronicle, mostly for myself. (Insert aside here about the death of the blog and its retreat to journaling for the self, as it began.)

CNN has been looping images of the dazed and confused killer in court, which I watched live this morning with my hosts, who live close to Aurora. Shortly after I arrived to visit them, Bernadette reported she and her partner Josh were deliberating seeing the midnight showing of the new Batman movie. "That's the theatre we go to," she said. She explained they liked to attend the midnight screenings of new releases in the past. "This thing hits a little too close to home."

It was strange to be so close to the crime scene by mere happenstance, having traveled to share scholarship and to spend time with friends, and then have the latest excuse for a mass mediated apocalyptic frenzy explode Onto The Screens the first fitful night. I have trouble enough spinning down the hard drive in strange bedrooms. Mediated atrocity demands sleep aids.

By any account, this morning Holmes didn't appear completely aware of the situation (or perhaps he was faking, it's impossible to tell). He appeared to be drugged, or physically exhausted, or simply "crazy." Owing to the horror of the pre-planned slaughter, the seemingly "blank" emotional reactions of the killer provide an enticing projection screen, and certainly at some level Holmes knows this: he lived-out a kind of fan-fiction, in a movie theatre, with a mythos about the glory of psychosis (in the Dark Knight comic series, Batman is far from a hero to be praised . . . nor is Bale as an actor, I should add, which might say something about Nolan's casting decisions). Why hasn't the film this guy used as a context for murder not been more widely discussed? This seems important. You know this guy is thinking about nothing else right now.

Projection is a powerful concept in the psychoanalytic literature. Originally theorized by Freud as the attribution of feelings, fantasies, and so forth that one harbors onto others as a means of "defense," projection has subsequently been absorbed into general parlance as a common thing we all do. In film studies it was taken up in apparatus theory, melding the ideological function of cinema, technology, and the psychoanalytic concept to explain how the cinematic experience "sutures" us to the celluloid. I've been wondering over the past couple of days, in the context of the carnage in Aurora: was Freud thinking about cinema when he introduced "projection" as a defense mechanism? I don't know, and a quick run through my reference books didn't yield a fast answer. He does reference photography from time to time . . . but this is a tangential wonder (still: was Freud thinking about cinema? Probably not, but from a sort of zeitgeist context it seems overdetermined just a tad). Film theory gear heads had a field day with projection, regardless. Whatever the concept's cultural moorings may be, this particular massacre demands "projection" as a concept for thinking-through: the metaphorical theatre of violence collapsed all sorts of "projections" into a deadly event. The irony of the media coverage of the massacre is the "blindness" of journalists to the symbolic gesture of projection at its dead-center. It would seem, given the film and the place Holmes chose to anchor his "acting-out," that projection is key, which implicates displacement as the shadow of violence.

And displacement is what we are all watching on our screens now.

Popular discourse immediately collapsed onto "gun control," which is an easy and well-trod recourse, a sort of "filler" for the vacuum that the existential "why?" seems to suck us (them, the MSM) into. But is this not the sort of rent that implicates the role of (cinematic) fantasy violence in "real life," the tired but nevertheless important worry we have about the influence of cinematic violence on youth? It's a projection of my own, of course, but it would seem Holmes' choice of spectacular violence is a deliberate sort of mirror-work. Reportedly, he told the police he was "the Joker." Commentators were speculating that his courtroom appearance as "drugged" today was feigned.

Coming up for air: on the day of the carnage, I was frustrated with the news coverage drinking my morning coffee. As David Beard and I wrote about in our essay "On the Apocalyptic Columbine" over a decade ago, once television news made the move to continuous "real time" coverage of "tragic" or atrocious events, the challenge was to keep viewers glued to the screen when there was little to no new information---that is, news. Our argument then was that the solution initially developed was one in which viewers vicariously experience, and re-experience, atrocity through looped footage and reenactments. Little has changed in today's coverage, except that the maudlin machines now get to retrospective sentimentality almost immediately. I laughed aloud when I saw NBC has brought Ann Curry "back" to reporting to ask stupid, manipulative, and insulting questions to survivors of the massacre. Covering Columbine amounted to a continuous reenactment of the killing. The difference now is the almost immediate fashioning of trauma into sentimental nationalism/commercialism. Ann Curry back from the banished realm is the displacement.

Our projection is to misread this violence as the act of a "monster," displacing the larger, structural problems this kind of "wake up" horror points us to: a larger ideology that fashions "mental health" as individual problem, often a moral shortcoming. Although I totally get this tendency---what this kid did was evil---I feel dirty writing the massacre off as the result of a single nut. When Stanley Kubrick made Full Metal Jacket, he was tapping into a larger, cultural psychosis that echoes in this latest horror in Aurora. Holmes will be tried and killed. Projection and scapegoating are the Oreo of public "justice." What will be deferred is a reckoning with our own responsibility in this, as a people and a culture: mirror work. He'll be killed and put away just like he killed and put away the faceless others of his video-game world, two-dimensional and utterly absent of compassion. That he's a white kid just makes it a little harder to execute the script.