True
crime is a genre that is read mainly by women. It has been suggested
that women are more interested in psychology generally, and therefore
the mysteries of the psychopathic mind specifically, than men. This
offers me a degree of comfort; it's a nice statistic I can pull out
when I want to justify what I'm sure some of my friends think is an
unhealthy interest.
I
have at times considered studying for a graduate degree in
criminology, not because I desire a change of career, but because I
want to justify my morbidity to myself and to the world. But of
course this would achieve nothing of the sort; it would be a sticking
plaster of respectability on a wound that needs disinfecting. That
sounds a bit over the top, but I do wonder about myself. When people
talk about the Dunblane Massacre I talk about Thomas Hamilton. When
people talk about the Moors Murderers I can remember the address at
which they committed their crimes (16 Wardle Brook Avenue). I know
the names of all the victims. I have eight books about Fred and
Rosemary West, three books on The Yorkshire Ripper and have read
countless other accounts of hundreds of sordid and degraded crimes.
Why? What has this done for me? What have I learned? The most useful
outcome, pro bono, is perhaps that I have written some good lyrics
about it, but I've also written some really bad ones too. When there
are genre-defying works like Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers
it is extremely doubtful whether much else of value is left to be
said about such people as the Wests. But still my interest persists,
still I buy and read books about horrible, horrible crimes, and still
I'm not entirely convinced that pure intellectual curiosity is a
sufficient, and sufficiently noble explanation for wallowing in this
uncleanness. I've learned a lot, but it's hardly been a slog; there
are no intellectual gymnastics required to understand what is going
on. Psychopaths are not the exotic enigmas that people like to buy
and sell them as. They are statistically unusual, but given the sheer
amount of humans on the planet, their acts are also not uncommon.
Like other kinds of human violence and degradation, their motivations
are based in selfishness and obsession that has always been with us,
and so if their behaviours didn't have terrible effects they would be
considered routine and tedious.
So
it may be surprising to hear that I found the Guardian's recent
coverage of Ian Brady distasteful. On the 25th June 2013
we were invited to follow the proceedings of The
Ian Brady Mental Health Tribunal In Live Tweets from the court by
Helen Pidd. Something about this didn't sit right with me, and I
wasn't quite sure why, and I've spent a while thinking about it.
Tweeting
feels to me an inherently whimsical and often flippant activity. One
of its worst aspects is the tendency for people to use it to validate
their involvement in an activity while it is happening, and in doing
so, inadvertently devalue it. Many people are sincere when they tweet
that they are enjoying gigs, but clearly they enjoy even more their
ability to tell everyone so. For such people real-time social
networking status updates have become a way of verifying their existence and enjoying
immediate validation from others. I exist. I am here, now, and others
know it. Events cannot reliably be known to have taken place, and
cannot have any integral value, unless they are simultaneously
reported upon and that reportage commented upon. The circle must be
completed immediately or the event vanishes. And then it abruptly
vanishes anyway, replaced by a new event requiring validation.
The
excitable tone and the inherent disposability and fleeting, transient
nature of twitter feeds feels inappropriate for coverage of such
events. We would have learned no less had Helen Pidd filed a report
for the newspaper at the end of each day after some careful
reflection, rather than tweeting mid-session. Perhaps this was felt
to be the cutting-edge reportage format for an event of huge public
interest. If so, a gauge of how much this level of coverage misjudged
the public mood is the half-emptiness of the public gallery.
One thing that has come from my 'studies' of psychopaths is the knowledge
that no matter how much time we spend on the subject, we will never
be as interested in them quite as much as they are in themselves. The
one thing we can be sure of is that Ian Brady, a vain, boastful, and
laughably pseudo-intellectual name dropper, craves power and control,
and this kind of publicity is exactly what he wants. Brady says he
wants to be transferred to a normal prison so he can be allowed to
die. But his forced-feeding regime was shown to be nothing of the
sort; it is a prop. We cannot know whether he wants to die or not;
but we do know he is motivated
by power, and whatever choices he makes are done with this in mind.
The
only power he has over the world ultimately resides in the
possibility that he knows where Keith Bennett's body is, a
possibility that he guards jealously and gloatingly. Everything else
surrounding that is theatrics, little power-plays where he casts
himself as the rebel against the system, the loner among the
unthinking masses, the intellectual in a confederacy of dunces. His
hunger-strikes, his petitions, his hints of knowledge of the burial
site, released at precisely the points when he senses people have
lost interest in him, these are transparent attempts at coercion, and
we would do well to realise that.
It
is a glum enough prospect that necessary coverage of these events
give him the oxygen of publicity. But communicating it through
real-time tweets felt a bit “Brady hunger strike? LOL!”
