Daily Mail, December 10, 2007
What was nineteen year old Robert Hawkins thinking as he looked down the sites of his rifle at the anonymous shoppers in the Westroads shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, this week?
What was going through his mind as in just a few minutes he picked off eight of them, one by one, and took their lives, before ending his own? Was he feeling anger that his family didn’t want him, frustration that he’d broken up with his girl friend, or depression that he’d lost his job?
Probably all three played some part. But according to the suicide note he left behind there was something else on the mind of this disturbed young man. “At least now I will be famous,” he is said to have written.
Of course! FAME! He wanted fame.
The desire for fame is the addiction of our age. Everybody wants to be famous.
Indeed celebrity for itself alone is almost seen as a sole ambition by many young people. Traditionally fame came for outstanding achievement. It usually suggested great merit.
That is not necessarily how fame is viewed nowadays. Go into any school and ask fourteen year old kids what they want to be when they grow up, and a surprising number will say, perhaps as Robert Hawkins would have done: “I want to be famous”.
And, in a sense, that’s now possible, if only in the Andy Warhol “fame for fifteen minutes way”. All you have to do is perform something zany or outrageous on your mobile phone, maybe even happy-slapping, edit it on your home computer and shove it on to one of the internet sites that cater for these things, and there you are, virtually a film star, with millions of people able to look at you.
Who knows, if you’re really lucky, you may get the chance to perform on some reality TV show and make a career out of nothing more than your celebrity. It happens—in a world swamped with junk TV and the internet. See how well Jade Goody has done.
For most young people, and it is mainly young people who become hooked, the drug of fame will, of course, be a transitory, harmless one. But, disastrously sometimes, that is not the case for everyone.
For some, like Robert Hawkins, it can provoke a compulsion to do the unthinkable. And although his deeds, and similar acts by others, are purely the responsibility of those who pull the triggers, perhaps we should all be looking into ourselves and asking a question.
It is possible that in some wider sense we may be unknowingly encouraging such killers?
I was thinking about that this week, before I read about the Omaha shootings, after seeing a new film about Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon in 1980.
Chapman is still in jail and will, I suspect, remain there for the rest of his life. But if he has access to a television in his cell, and I think he might, he has a treat coming. Because, sooner or later, some American TV station is sure to show the film about him. It’s called The Killing Of John Lennon. And he’s going to love it.
There he will see not the chubby nerd we remember from newsreel footage, but a handsome, muscular, personable Mark Chapman as played by actor Jonas Ball. Perhaps this was how he imagined himself all those years ago.
Not only that, he’ll also find himself mirroring the role of Travis Bickle, the stalking, homicidal character played by Robert De Niro in the Martin Scorcese film Taxi Driver. There he’ll be on his TV, just like Bickle, filling his revolver with bullets in slick, shining close-up, then standing sideways on to a mirror, his arm outstretched as he holds his gun, its trigger cocked, rehearsing his role as assassin. “Bang bang, you’re dead,” he says in the film several times. “Bang, bang you’re dead!”
Bang bang and John Lennon was dead, just like those shoppers this week in Omaha.
Now, I’m not suggesting that actor Jonas Ball or writer/director Andrew Piddington set out to glorify Mark Chapman by making a movie about the events leading up to that psychopath’s moment in history. But the actor’s very attractiveness, the choice of camera angles, lenses and lighting, and the way the New York streets at night recall the mood of the Scorsese movie, cannot help but glamourise him.
And at this point I should declare an interest. I knew John Lennon and was due to see him the day after he was killed. The last message I got from him was “John’s looking forward to seeing you”, given to me on the phone by a secretary just four and a half hours before Chapman ended Lennon’s life.
So, yes, I was going to be upset, seeing, on screen, a double of a man I liked being shot four times in the back, and then watching dams of his blood burst across the New York pavement.
But putting personal feelings aside, forgetting director Piddington’s grotesque creation of Chapman’s violent imagined bloodbath when we see him blasting away at a couple of homosexuals having sex in the next room at the YMCA; and even overlooking the tawdrily erotic scene with a prostitute (of dubious veracity, by the way) the night before the assassination, I can’t escape the feeling that the decision to make this film was wrong headed.
“I was nobody until I killed the biggest somebody on earth,” Chapman told police after the murder. In other words “I wanted to be famous, and now by killing someone extremely famous, I am.
Hurrah!”
Just like Robert Hawkins in Omaha.
Fame was the scent which drew Chapman to his victim, and achieving personal fame through murderous association was his spur. Indeed, by Chapman’s own admission, if he hadn’t shot Lennon, he had a back-up list of other famous targets, including actor George C. Scott and President Kennedy’s widow Jacqueline Onassis.
He murdered Lennon to satisfy some malign sense of celebrity: to be, in his tortured mind, a somebody. But, it seems to me, by affording Chapman almost two hours of cinematic space, two hours in which we listen to his ramblings and justifications for his act (basically Lennon was a “phoney”, as defined in J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, and therefore he deserved to die) the film is making the insane Chapman famous all over again.
In other words the film makers, and we the audience, are giving him another giant fix of the drug he always wanted. Fame!
This in itself would be a depressing state of affairs if it concerned only Mark Chapman. But, as we can see, it doesn’t. While he’s been in jail the world has changed beyond recognition. With the invention of the internet, the introduction of blogs, and the popularity of websites like YouTube and Facebook, not to mention reality television, an entire worldwide generation, like no other time in history, now dreams of becoming famous.
Fame, it is thought, means an easy, luxury life; fame means being attractive, being lionised and photographed, and being invited to all the best parries. Fame means being rich. There’s nothing as sexy as fame.
But how do you become famous if you have no particular talent and are unlikely ever to be a success at anything? That’s easy. Through notoriety. Indeed, notoriety, owning up to some very odd interests, has become the mindset of the day.
Not to prejudge the investigation, but Amanda Knox, now known universally as Foxy Knoxy, and her Italian boy friend Raffaele Sollecito, both being held in Perugia in connection with the sex murder of Meredith Kercher, both had, shall we say, very unusual websites.
Obviously, for most young people, logging on to YouTube and Facebook is simply an amusing pastime. And some of the little amateur films made by loggers for YouTube are quite brilliant.
But for a few, internet sites can provide an unhealthy oxygen with which to fan the smouldering embers of darker desires. And in Omaha this week, and month after month, we see evidence of how global digital technology, and the part played by mass television and the internet, is being used as a platform for self-glorification and self-justification among the seriously deranged. Mark Chapman would have fitted into the internet generation perfectly.
Last April a young American student called Cho Seung-Hui put together, with the help of a web cam, a thirty minute media package of himself and his guns, sent it to the US television network NBC, and then went out and murdered 32 people, mainly college students, at Virginia Tech.
When NBC realised what had arrived in the mail, they didn’t transmit the full package, but unable to resist their scoop, they showed some of it, and quickly flashed images of Cho Seung-Hui around the world to other TV stations. Instantly Cho Seung-Hui, the loner with a history of psychological problems, got what he most wanted. For a few days he was world famous, and television and the internet became his accomplices.
And it’s inconceivable that in Finland Pekka-Eric Auvinen didn’t know about the man behind the Virginia Tech massacre when he posted his message on YouTube and began his high school killings last month. His posthumous infamy in a country with a small population will be more shorter-lived globally than that of Seung-Hui, but no less deeply felt by those bereaved. And, like Seung-Hui, he was able to use modern communication technology to promote his ravings on his YouTube site: to become a “somebody”.
But, you might say, isn’t this use of the internet or television as an outlet of expression for crazed, gun carrying loners just a new means of an ancient desire to be noticed?
Yes, it is. But, I suspect, something more sinister may also be at work here. My concern is that with the way mass communications now saturate us a malign new psychopathic virus that feeds on the ultra-modern quest for celebrity is emerging, a mental infection that we may not be able to control, particularly in America with its absurd laxity over gun control.
Will we get more copycat mass killings, where the alienated insane justify their deeds to hundreds of millions over the internet and then on through endless showings on TV? I’m afraid we will. That’s what publicity does. It attracts attention.
And while for most of us the attention seeking exploits of Robert Hawkins, Cho Seung-Hui and Pekka-Eric Auvinen will provoke horror, as Mark Chapman’s murder of John Lennon did, their subsequent notoriety might well also encourage other unbalanced young people towards equally terrible acts.
It was, after all, only eighteen months after Mark Chapman’s murder of John Lennon that John Hinkley shot and injured President Reagan, believing in his deranged way that the shooting might impress actress Jody Foster on whom he had a stalking fixation.
Al Quaeda, of course, realised the strength of the internet and television as a brain-washing agent, as well as one for recruiting and terrorising, even before the attack on the World Trade Centre, since when they’ve used it with sickeningly callous regularity.
Make a video of the last self-justifying speech of a suicide bomber, or of a threat to murder a hostage, or even of the murder of a hostage, as was the case with Ken Bigley, post it on an internet site, and within minutes TV stations around the world will be showing an edited version.
It took a little time but these days most Western television stations are much more cautious about how much they show of such videos, and how much they do the propagandists’ work for them, as was evidenced with the relative downplaying of the video of the British hostage in Iraq this week.
But the terror videos, as those of the Japanese suicide cults who encourage death rather than counsel against it, are still out there on the internet to lure the impressionable.
Once warped minds would have found it difficult to meet others with the same obsessions. Now, as we’ve seen from the growing paedophile internet rings, it’s disturbingly easy.
But what can anyone do about the internet which roams freely across the political borders of the world, and appeals so particularly to young people? We can’t uninvent it, even if we wanted to, and we don’t. The access to legitimate, important information which it provides for everyone is extraordinary.
The problem is the internet is so new, and developing so quickly, we haven’t yet learned how to cope with it. We know that the major young people’s websites, like YouTube, are policed, with inappropriate material being weeded out—although Pekka-Eric Auvinen’s contribution seems to have been missed.
But new sites are springing up every day, everywhere in the world. They can’t all be policed. And those who want them enough will always find them.
I suspect part of the answer lies with us, the overwhelmingly vast majority of rational people in the world who might be sleep-walking into accidentally encouraging these insane killers.
And how are we doing that? By doing nothing.
Somehow, be it by pressure on news organisations, internet service providers or television stations (and we can do this by simply choosing to watch other channels), we need to withdraw the oxygen of publicity which greets every atrocity, and then provokes the next copycat massacre.
My own profession, particularly in television, carries an obligation to report the news—but also to make sure we aren’t wallowing in the blood. We must starve the perpetrators of violence of the publicity they seek.
We mustn’t do the Devil’s work for him, which means, perhaps, that we don’t encourage the making of films such as The Killing Of John Lennon. In short, we should everything we can to deprive the perpetrators of these killings of the fame they seek.
But, more than that, we also have to look at what has gone wrong with the world into which our children are growing up, and to outlaw the pernicious message they now learn from the cradle.
And the message? That fame just for itself, without any achievement, is good; that fame is to be desired at all costs; that fame is the be all and end all.
It isn’t.
