Our society is obsessed with fictional murder, but more significantly with fact-based murder and true crime in general. This is no recent phenomenon. We've glorified outlaws and bad men since the "West was Won": the Dalton Gang, Billy the Kid (22 movies have been made about the Kid); Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and other mobsters/gangsters; Ed Gein of Psycho fame, the Boston Strangler, the Hillside Stranglers, Ted Bundy, and most recently Jeffrey Daumer. We have presented their lives in print and their murderous acts as entertainment and current interest. Endlessly, we look into the lives of these murderers in an attempt to find answers as to why and how these individuals are capable of such monstrous acts. Perhaps we should look, rather, into ourselves.
We are a top dog society that expresses power inequities in all our political/personal/cultural forms and media. Framed in good old capitalist competition, the basic dynamics of the power struggle of murder---victimizer vs. victimized---coexists in metaphoric terms with rich vs. poor, white vs. black, male vs. female. In public opinion polls, two out of five, and in cities one in two, people are afraid to go out alone at night. Interestingly, African Americans are more afraid than whites, women are more afraid than men, and the elderly (frail and cast out) are the most fearful of all. Only in a culture with such imbalance could we arrive at this fascination with "power"---the violent taking of life.
The piece, Mass [Media] Murders, consists of re-creations of TV Guide entries of programs based on factual murders and murderers, isolated and mounted on 8" x 10" board and shown as a group. The scope and variety of the TV programs presented expose our fascination with violence and vary from the sometimes serious to the absurd, as you can see by reading through them. I believe the genre is a "groping" effort of our society to give a form to our internal fears of violence---bringing them into a 'virtual safe place' where we can explore/examine/experience our 'fear' (scaring ourselves) in the safety and comfort of our homes. Through this type of TV programming, we have somehow "captured" those awful, monstrous murderers. We have imprisoned them and exposed them, thus cleverly holding them in the non-real space of TV-land. This "movie land" where we are in control; where we have the options of looking, not looking; walking out of the room; or turning off the set. TV-land is also where we are able to suspend our disbelief and alter reality in order to identify ourselves as the victors, not the victims, in a primitive feat of survival of the fittest (a force prevalant in all aspects of our lives).
Somehow, in this primitive manner we try to fight fear with fear. The dichotomy of this cathartic event plays havoc on our psyches---at the same time that it affirms our safety and relieves us that we were not the victims in this instance, it adds yet another thin layer of worry to our fearful souls.