Violence: the Gift that Goes on Giving
Seattle, this very nice city in the beautiful scenic Northwest, is still reeling from a rampage murder last weekend, when a 28 year old man killed 6 young people relaxing after attending a rave party the night before. No one knew the man. He seemed innocuous, although some have mentioned he had a bad vibe. He was a big man, a quiet man. He attended the rave, was invited to the house party, came and smoked some dope, drank a bit, and then at 7 o'clock in the morning on this quiet, residential street went out to his truck, got an arsenal of weapons and came back into the house and started shooting. He was reported to have a smile of his face and to have said, "There's plenty for everyone," before killing himself as a police officer arrived on the scene.
The aftermath of this stupid and senseless killing has left people groping for something, anything to try to explain it, to make the insanity of it go away. The youngest two victims, girls, were fourteen and fifteen years old. Initial editorials in the local newspapers called for stricter regulation of teenage dance clubs, as if by controlling the whereabouts of your teenagers you could magically save them from ever crossing paths with a homicidal killer because homicial killers only come out after midnight, right? Duh! The rest of the local commentary focused on wanting to understand the motives of the killer, the frustration of ever being able to get a fix on that because of his suicide and the resigned and almost helpless collapse into one rhetorical response: there is evil in the world and there is nothing you can do about it.
Curiously, I happened to spend the evening before this happened watching the DVD of the movie A History of Violence. And the intersection in time of these two events, this rather powerful, though aprocryphal movie experience, and this real life tragedy, has left me thinking a lot about the American love affair with violence this week. The movie, incredibly well acted particularly by lead actor Viggo Mortenson, is about a quiet, meek husband and father in a mythical small town American, who overnight becomes a media hero when he kills two thugs who invade his diner and threaten everyone inside. Turns out that Tom, our hero, is not all he seems to be, for East Coast mafioso types turn up who insist they know him from the past and that he is ace-killer Joey Cusack. And little by little Tom's life falls apart. The gentle guy's disguise begins to crumble and finally we begin to see that in fact, he has been living a lie and no one, not even his wife, suspected the truth, of the past he had left behind. By the time the movie ends, at least nine more bodies have piled up and we see that Joey/Tom is in fact a superb killer. The guy has fabulous reflexes. But wait, why is he killing? What is he killing for? In defense of his family and his way of life? To survive? Or is it something else? Does it have something to do with the fact that maybe he really likes it, that maybe it gives him a rush and makes him feel really alive? At the end of the movie, once his shy, well-behaved son has also been bloodied in combat, Joey/Tom slinks back home and creeps back to the family dinner table. The movie ends enigmatically there. Will Tom/Joey be able to be a regular family man now that he has killed off all the bad guys from back in Philadelphia? The movie hints that his wife is more turned on to him sexually knowing that he is a real man who will kill to defend her. Maybe their marriage will have more pizzaz! Will this family stay together happily ever after? How much do you wanna bet?
We have some crazy ideas about violence in this society, really, really weird ideas. Like killing makes you strong. If you are feeling powerless, weak, trapped or pushed around by other people, grabbing a gun and threatening other people and shooting then is a massively powerful feeling, a real rush. Too bad it only lasts a brief time, as long as you have the gun in your hand. For as we have seen (see my first post on power vs. empowerment) true power has nothing to do with force and everything to do with effectiveness in the world. We also think that violence run amok, rampage killing is crazy, and can't be understood but that so-called crimes of passion can be understood. A crime of passion is something we can imagine ourselves doing if we were provoked strongly enough. But a rampage killing is something we would never do because we are good people. The bizarre thing is that in our society we train people to be killers in our military and we think that by putting very tight rules around who you are supposed to kill and when (e.g. only when your superior officer gives you an order to) that you can control and contain the impulse to kill that you have cultivated in your soldiers with your training. And then you expect them to turn it off once they have been bloodied in combat, perhaps wounded or lost beloved companions in battle, and then return home. That's weird!
Some of the absolute best thinking of violence that I have ever found has been done by Dr. James Gilligan, author of the book, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. Dr. Gilligan suggests that violence has meaning and that if you study the behavior and work with the perpetrator of that violence long enough, you will finally come to understand what that specific action was all about for that individual. Dr. Gilligan used to be the director of mental health services for the state prison system in the state of Massachusetts and is a professor at the medical school at Harvard. He knows what he's talking about. When I was volunteering at a state prison near Seattle and working with convicted murderers, I found his book an invaluable aid in connecting with the men in my group. While the shooter in last week's rampage killings in Seattle is dead, I think that we may be able to make some educated guesses, based on and derived from Dr. Gilligan's approach, that might be helpful in understanding how a man comes to undertake a massive crime like this.
What we do know about Kyle Huff is the following. I am going only by news accounts and the following is strictly conjecture based on my own studies of violence and experience in the mental health arena. But it is a place to start for exploration and inquiry into the subject of violence having meaning. This was a very tall man, about 6'5" who since he graduated from high school ten years before had found no more meaningful employment than making and delivering pizzas. He lived with his twin brother in an apartment in Seattle. Both were said to be quiet, teddy bear-like men who were very polite. News accounts have not mentioned romantic attachments, either gay or straight. In high school this man appears to have been on the fringes, wore long trench coats. The one thing he enjoyed, oddly, was pottery. This doesn't give us much to go on does it? So you have to do a lot of conjecture if you want to inquire into someone's inner life. My penchant for doing this may come from several places: the fact that I was an actress in an earlier life and had to invent a back story for my characters that made sense; the fact that I had a brooding, sometimes violent half brother growing up; and the fact that I have worked with violent men. I want to know, what goes on inside their heart and soul? I know about my own crazy thinking and thoughts and emotions. If my thoughts and emotions run such a wild roller coaster ride, what is going on inside the noggin of a guy who accumulates an arsenal, hangs out at a rave party smiling at people, then goes to his truck for weapons, spray paints "NOW" on the sidewalk and walks inside and starts shooting? I don't think that's meaningless.
Here's my hunch---and I could be wildly off base: I suspect that our shooter never fit in with his peers, never felt part of the group, felt like there was something wrong with him and yet longed, yearned to be part of the in-group. I hazard a guess that he felt apart because of his height and body size. He was a quiet guy, a guy who didn't have a facility for words and because of that, probably didn't find a friendly adult to connect to who could have drawn him out. He resorted to wearing strange clothes in high school. Maybe he thought he could find a peer group in Seattle and moved to the big city with high hopes of connecting, meeting a girl (or a guy?), finally fitting in and being happy. But as time went by, when he kept getting mediocre jobs and not getting anywhere he probably began to brood and nurse his resentments and try to explain to himself why life wasn't turning out how he thought it should. Now here's why strong, silent, polite guys are dangerous. No one knows what they are thinking. They don't talk to anyone. And if they collect guns, you have a potentially violent situation. If they visit internet sites that are full of hate so much the worse. The danger comes when the person stops blaming themselves for their problems and starts turning all that rage on other people. My guess is that what happened in Seattle is that Kyle Huff started visiting the rave party scene and projected his rage on these young people for appearing to be happy, for looking like they were having a good time, or else for looking like they were challenging society's mores successfully when he couldn't do it himself. They were the problem, not him. And so, he could get rid of all the internal self-hatred and despair and rage by one massive act of violence, and he could be powerful, oh so powerful when he did it. Once someone hooks into a plan like this, there is an addictive quality to it and no one can dislodge them from it, particularly if they are the kind of guy that never talks to anyone in the first place. Now, we may find out later that Kyle Huff had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or some other reason may emerge that will explain this killing spree, but so far no such history has surfaced. So we are left with conjecture. And mine is as good as anyone else's at this point.
Here is what my analysis leaves me with. First we have seven families suffering sudden, incalculable grief and loss, that is the families of the six murder victims and then the Huff family who has to come to terms with the shame of why their son might have done such a horrendous thing. All of these families will be dealing with this for a long, long time to come. When families have had a loved one violently killed, they don't just get over it and move on. The recovery process is long and complex. Some people stay stuck in grief and suffer terrible health problems, their own lives possibly shortened by their grief. Some may get focused on vengeance and payback, a few taking on violence themselves. We tend to forget the costs to the families of perpetrators. But living with the shame of what your child, partner or sibling has done must be an extraordinarily difficult thing to move on from.
Which brings me back to the character Tom in the movie A History of Violence. Granted this movie is meant to be mythic. The story is set in a small-town America that has ceased to exist, with the hero Tom running a diner the likes of which we haven't seen since the forties and nary a McDonalds or Walmart in sight. This is not meant to be reality. Tom/Joey is a guy who is just good at killing people. He has tried to leave his past behind and it won't leave him behind. Once nine bodies are on the ground you are left to think, well, he's killed all those awful bad guys who were torturing him, now can't he go home and have his dinner?? Well, can't he? Uh---think about it. His son, who used to turn off bullies at school by disarming them with words, has now been bloodied in battle, not once but twice, once killing the man who was trying to murder his father. Tom/Joey has killed, and very effectively too, nine times!!! Now that he's a proven killer his wife can't help but think maybe he's really hot in bed. Do you really think he's done with it and he's going back to being Casper Milquetoast? I don't think so!!! Life doesn't work like that. I'm not sure what the filmmaker was trying to say with this movie. I don't know if he was trying to say that Tom could go back to a nice sweet life in small town America now that all the bad guys were dead but fat chance. For there is a terrific price to be paid for each act of violence. Just ask any veteran who has killed in war, that is the ones who will be honest enough to tell you.
Killing is not normal and it is not easy. But you can get used to it and you can turn off your heart and soul when you do it, especially if you do it a lot. And therein lies the problem for us and for Tom/Joey. When you turn off your heart and soul, you turn off your true connection to other human beings and then your ability to love and your ability to create and to stay in community dies. When community dies, that is our sense of being lovingly connected to each other, we are all left wide open to the kind of violence that occured last weekend in Seattle. Eventually more tragedy would strike in the house of Tom/Joey because there has to be a price for the kind of violence he committed. The problem with the Seattle shooter, at least in the way I have analyzed his possible motives, is that he may epitomize a kind of loneliness and disconnection that is endemic in our large, urban, increasingly globalized society. It is curious to me that with all our cell phones, text messaging, My Space, computers and super smart technogy, inside our ultra connected society are so many terribly lonely people, people so angry, and hurting that they are willing to kill to feel powerful, if even for only a few minutes. What an incredible tragedy. What an incredible waste.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. What would a society look like where we were so truly connected that we did not let the loners be loners? What would it be like if we were so committed to connection of everyone to the whole, that we saw it as a fundamental responsibility of all to connect with and check in on the weakest, most fragile members (the quiet ones!) and know how they were doing all the time?
2. What is the payoff, the positive side of the gun culture? What keeps it going? What feeds it? Why do we Americans so love our guns?
3. How does the movie and entertainment industry play into and keep this appetite for violence going? What would happen if the public started to be a demand for alternative ways of handling conflict being expressed on film and TV?
The aftermath of this stupid and senseless killing has left people groping for something, anything to try to explain it, to make the insanity of it go away. The youngest two victims, girls, were fourteen and fifteen years old. Initial editorials in the local newspapers called for stricter regulation of teenage dance clubs, as if by controlling the whereabouts of your teenagers you could magically save them from ever crossing paths with a homicidal killer because homicial killers only come out after midnight, right? Duh! The rest of the local commentary focused on wanting to understand the motives of the killer, the frustration of ever being able to get a fix on that because of his suicide and the resigned and almost helpless collapse into one rhetorical response: there is evil in the world and there is nothing you can do about it.
Curiously, I happened to spend the evening before this happened watching the DVD of the movie A History of Violence. And the intersection in time of these two events, this rather powerful, though aprocryphal movie experience, and this real life tragedy, has left me thinking a lot about the American love affair with violence this week. The movie, incredibly well acted particularly by lead actor Viggo Mortenson, is about a quiet, meek husband and father in a mythical small town American, who overnight becomes a media hero when he kills two thugs who invade his diner and threaten everyone inside. Turns out that Tom, our hero, is not all he seems to be, for East Coast mafioso types turn up who insist they know him from the past and that he is ace-killer Joey Cusack. And little by little Tom's life falls apart. The gentle guy's disguise begins to crumble and finally we begin to see that in fact, he has been living a lie and no one, not even his wife, suspected the truth, of the past he had left behind. By the time the movie ends, at least nine more bodies have piled up and we see that Joey/Tom is in fact a superb killer. The guy has fabulous reflexes. But wait, why is he killing? What is he killing for? In defense of his family and his way of life? To survive? Or is it something else? Does it have something to do with the fact that maybe he really likes it, that maybe it gives him a rush and makes him feel really alive? At the end of the movie, once his shy, well-behaved son has also been bloodied in combat, Joey/Tom slinks back home and creeps back to the family dinner table. The movie ends enigmatically there. Will Tom/Joey be able to be a regular family man now that he has killed off all the bad guys from back in Philadelphia? The movie hints that his wife is more turned on to him sexually knowing that he is a real man who will kill to defend her. Maybe their marriage will have more pizzaz! Will this family stay together happily ever after? How much do you wanna bet?
We have some crazy ideas about violence in this society, really, really weird ideas. Like killing makes you strong. If you are feeling powerless, weak, trapped or pushed around by other people, grabbing a gun and threatening other people and shooting then is a massively powerful feeling, a real rush. Too bad it only lasts a brief time, as long as you have the gun in your hand. For as we have seen (see my first post on power vs. empowerment) true power has nothing to do with force and everything to do with effectiveness in the world. We also think that violence run amok, rampage killing is crazy, and can't be understood but that so-called crimes of passion can be understood. A crime of passion is something we can imagine ourselves doing if we were provoked strongly enough. But a rampage killing is something we would never do because we are good people. The bizarre thing is that in our society we train people to be killers in our military and we think that by putting very tight rules around who you are supposed to kill and when (e.g. only when your superior officer gives you an order to) that you can control and contain the impulse to kill that you have cultivated in your soldiers with your training. And then you expect them to turn it off once they have been bloodied in combat, perhaps wounded or lost beloved companions in battle, and then return home. That's weird!
Some of the absolute best thinking of violence that I have ever found has been done by Dr. James Gilligan, author of the book, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. Dr. Gilligan suggests that violence has meaning and that if you study the behavior and work with the perpetrator of that violence long enough, you will finally come to understand what that specific action was all about for that individual. Dr. Gilligan used to be the director of mental health services for the state prison system in the state of Massachusetts and is a professor at the medical school at Harvard. He knows what he's talking about. When I was volunteering at a state prison near Seattle and working with convicted murderers, I found his book an invaluable aid in connecting with the men in my group. While the shooter in last week's rampage killings in Seattle is dead, I think that we may be able to make some educated guesses, based on and derived from Dr. Gilligan's approach, that might be helpful in understanding how a man comes to undertake a massive crime like this.
What we do know about Kyle Huff is the following. I am going only by news accounts and the following is strictly conjecture based on my own studies of violence and experience in the mental health arena. But it is a place to start for exploration and inquiry into the subject of violence having meaning. This was a very tall man, about 6'5" who since he graduated from high school ten years before had found no more meaningful employment than making and delivering pizzas. He lived with his twin brother in an apartment in Seattle. Both were said to be quiet, teddy bear-like men who were very polite. News accounts have not mentioned romantic attachments, either gay or straight. In high school this man appears to have been on the fringes, wore long trench coats. The one thing he enjoyed, oddly, was pottery. This doesn't give us much to go on does it? So you have to do a lot of conjecture if you want to inquire into someone's inner life. My penchant for doing this may come from several places: the fact that I was an actress in an earlier life and had to invent a back story for my characters that made sense; the fact that I had a brooding, sometimes violent half brother growing up; and the fact that I have worked with violent men. I want to know, what goes on inside their heart and soul? I know about my own crazy thinking and thoughts and emotions. If my thoughts and emotions run such a wild roller coaster ride, what is going on inside the noggin of a guy who accumulates an arsenal, hangs out at a rave party smiling at people, then goes to his truck for weapons, spray paints "NOW" on the sidewalk and walks inside and starts shooting? I don't think that's meaningless.
Here's my hunch---and I could be wildly off base: I suspect that our shooter never fit in with his peers, never felt part of the group, felt like there was something wrong with him and yet longed, yearned to be part of the in-group. I hazard a guess that he felt apart because of his height and body size. He was a quiet guy, a guy who didn't have a facility for words and because of that, probably didn't find a friendly adult to connect to who could have drawn him out. He resorted to wearing strange clothes in high school. Maybe he thought he could find a peer group in Seattle and moved to the big city with high hopes of connecting, meeting a girl (or a guy?), finally fitting in and being happy. But as time went by, when he kept getting mediocre jobs and not getting anywhere he probably began to brood and nurse his resentments and try to explain to himself why life wasn't turning out how he thought it should. Now here's why strong, silent, polite guys are dangerous. No one knows what they are thinking. They don't talk to anyone. And if they collect guns, you have a potentially violent situation. If they visit internet sites that are full of hate so much the worse. The danger comes when the person stops blaming themselves for their problems and starts turning all that rage on other people. My guess is that what happened in Seattle is that Kyle Huff started visiting the rave party scene and projected his rage on these young people for appearing to be happy, for looking like they were having a good time, or else for looking like they were challenging society's mores successfully when he couldn't do it himself. They were the problem, not him. And so, he could get rid of all the internal self-hatred and despair and rage by one massive act of violence, and he could be powerful, oh so powerful when he did it. Once someone hooks into a plan like this, there is an addictive quality to it and no one can dislodge them from it, particularly if they are the kind of guy that never talks to anyone in the first place. Now, we may find out later that Kyle Huff had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or some other reason may emerge that will explain this killing spree, but so far no such history has surfaced. So we are left with conjecture. And mine is as good as anyone else's at this point.
Here is what my analysis leaves me with. First we have seven families suffering sudden, incalculable grief and loss, that is the families of the six murder victims and then the Huff family who has to come to terms with the shame of why their son might have done such a horrendous thing. All of these families will be dealing with this for a long, long time to come. When families have had a loved one violently killed, they don't just get over it and move on. The recovery process is long and complex. Some people stay stuck in grief and suffer terrible health problems, their own lives possibly shortened by their grief. Some may get focused on vengeance and payback, a few taking on violence themselves. We tend to forget the costs to the families of perpetrators. But living with the shame of what your child, partner or sibling has done must be an extraordinarily difficult thing to move on from.
Which brings me back to the character Tom in the movie A History of Violence. Granted this movie is meant to be mythic. The story is set in a small-town America that has ceased to exist, with the hero Tom running a diner the likes of which we haven't seen since the forties and nary a McDonalds or Walmart in sight. This is not meant to be reality. Tom/Joey is a guy who is just good at killing people. He has tried to leave his past behind and it won't leave him behind. Once nine bodies are on the ground you are left to think, well, he's killed all those awful bad guys who were torturing him, now can't he go home and have his dinner?? Well, can't he? Uh---think about it. His son, who used to turn off bullies at school by disarming them with words, has now been bloodied in battle, not once but twice, once killing the man who was trying to murder his father. Tom/Joey has killed, and very effectively too, nine times!!! Now that he's a proven killer his wife can't help but think maybe he's really hot in bed. Do you really think he's done with it and he's going back to being Casper Milquetoast? I don't think so!!! Life doesn't work like that. I'm not sure what the filmmaker was trying to say with this movie. I don't know if he was trying to say that Tom could go back to a nice sweet life in small town America now that all the bad guys were dead but fat chance. For there is a terrific price to be paid for each act of violence. Just ask any veteran who has killed in war, that is the ones who will be honest enough to tell you.
Killing is not normal and it is not easy. But you can get used to it and you can turn off your heart and soul when you do it, especially if you do it a lot. And therein lies the problem for us and for Tom/Joey. When you turn off your heart and soul, you turn off your true connection to other human beings and then your ability to love and your ability to create and to stay in community dies. When community dies, that is our sense of being lovingly connected to each other, we are all left wide open to the kind of violence that occured last weekend in Seattle. Eventually more tragedy would strike in the house of Tom/Joey because there has to be a price for the kind of violence he committed. The problem with the Seattle shooter, at least in the way I have analyzed his possible motives, is that he may epitomize a kind of loneliness and disconnection that is endemic in our large, urban, increasingly globalized society. It is curious to me that with all our cell phones, text messaging, My Space, computers and super smart technogy, inside our ultra connected society are so many terribly lonely people, people so angry, and hurting that they are willing to kill to feel powerful, if even for only a few minutes. What an incredible tragedy. What an incredible waste.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. What would a society look like where we were so truly connected that we did not let the loners be loners? What would it be like if we were so committed to connection of everyone to the whole, that we saw it as a fundamental responsibility of all to connect with and check in on the weakest, most fragile members (the quiet ones!) and know how they were doing all the time?
2. What is the payoff, the positive side of the gun culture? What keeps it going? What feeds it? Why do we Americans so love our guns?
3. How does the movie and entertainment industry play into and keep this appetite for violence going? What would happen if the public started to be a demand for alternative ways of handling conflict being expressed on film and TV?
posted by Joy at 3:55 PM
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