Bundy’s early fetishes, driven by his feelings of alienation and detachment, were fetishes of prohibition—do not go near (voyeurism) and do not touch (pornography), and his familial relationships mirrored these fetishes—no pleasure, no jouissance because of castration and, therefore, no language with which to understand the experience. Bundy’s voyeurism and addiction to pornography created women—the Other—as partial objects upon which he transferred his transgressive enjoyment moving beyond the pleasure principal into pain. He denied his own non-existence as he killed others in the darkness of the night, in the secrecy of their rooms, in the dark secrecy of the mountains. After escaping from prison, these prescriptions meant nothing to Bundy, he had gone beyond the word of the law. Rather than suppress his need for sex, he turned the discourse into an expression of his perversions (his search for the father). Rather than renounce (denounce) himself to the law (to admit his crimes), in the Chi Omega sorority house, Bundy announced himself above the word of the law, became the messenger of his (non)-existence. He appeared—staged an event of brutal sex and violence—and disappeared. Both his existence and the death of the young women creating a double bind of his and their non-existence.
Police arrived at the sorority house and found the body of Margaret Bowman (21), strangled with nylon pantyhose and beaten so severely with a log that her skull had split revealing her brain. They moved on to the next room. Attacked while she slept, Kathy Kleiner (21), suffered cuts to her upper body and a broken jaw from the attack but had survived. ‘The logic of censorship. This interdiction is thought to take three forms: affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists. Forms that are difficult to reconcile. But it is here that one imagines a sort of logical sequence that characterizes censorship mechanisms: it links the inexistent, the illicit, and the inexpressible in such a way that each is at the same time the principle and the effect of the others: one must not talk about what is forbidden until it is annulled in reality; what is inexistent has no right to show itself, even in the order of speech where inexistence is declared; and that which one must keep silent about is banished from reality as the thing that is tabooed above all else. The logic of power exerted on sex is the paradoxical logic of a law that might be expressed as injunction of non-existence, nonmanifestation, and silence.’[194]
Interdiction equals prescription. Before and within language, Bundy was not permitted to be a son, he was prevented from having a mother, saying ‘mother,’ his mother denied that he existed. He could not reconcile son/brother, sister/mother—the principle form of himself had been split, the effect was to deny all others without any censorship mechanisms. The inexistent (either nonexistent or existing totally within himself) fused with the illicit (perversions, fetishes, pornography) to become the inexpressible—necrophilia. Death equalled sex equalled death. As Bundy admitted, in the early stages of his lust murders he killed the women to keep them quiet, to stop them going to the police—to prevent their discourse with power. Bundy obliterated the women, erased their language, and he did so to keep his forbidden actions secret; for them to become a palimpsest on which he could write his own existence; the taboo of necrophilia becoming the manifestation—the roar—of Bundy’s being.
Bret Easton Ellis inverts and subsumes Bundy’s roar, his desire to keep the mother quiet, to kill the son and become the father, to move within the Real rather than fear the Symbolic. And Ellis creates an Imaginary double—the fissiparous Patrick Bateman. ‘Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I’m suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child’s life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It’s so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child’s would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy. I’m automatically seized with an almost overwhelming desire to knife the boy’s mother too, who is in hysterics, but all I can do is slap her face harshly and shout for her to calm down. For this I’m given no disapproving looks. I’m dimly aware of light coming into the room, of a door being opened somewhere, of the presence of zoo officials, a security guard, someone◦– one of the tourists?◦– taking flash pictures, the penguins freaking out in the tank behind us, slamming themselves against the glass in a panic. A cop pushes me away, even though I tell him I’m a physician. Someone drags the boy outside, lays him on the ground and removes his shirt. The boy gasps, dies. The mother has to be restrained.’[195]
In an adjacent room to the one in which police found Kathy Kleiner, they discovered the bludgeoned body of Lisa Levy (20). Bundy had strangled her. Police found bite marks on her buttocks, one of her nipples had been scissored by the attacker’s teeth and hung from her breast. After she died, Bundy used a hair-spray canister to sexually assault the body. ‘The things I could do to you with a coat hanger.’[196] ‘The uniformity of the apparatus. Power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels. From top to bottom in its over-all decisions and its capillary interventions alike, whatever the devices or institutions on which it relies, it acts in a uniform and comprehensive manner; it operates according to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanisms of law, taboo, and censorship: from state to family, from prince to father, from the tribunal to the small change of everyday punishments, from the agencies of social domination to the structures that constitute the subject himself, one finds a general form of power, varying in scale alone. This form is the law of transgression and punishment, with its interplay of licit and illicit. Whether one attributes to it the form of the prince who formulates rights, of the father who forbids, of the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states the law, in any case one schematizes power in a juridical form, and one defines its effects as obedience.’[197]
Bundy had little or no mechanisms of law, taboo, and censorship. No lawgiver to learn from (besides his brutal animal-torturing father/grandfather); no taboos against pornography, voyeurism, sadomasochism, rape; no censorship of his actions, despite his attempts to fit in and take part. His family—with the blessing of the state—denied him his true existence; his father dis-owned him; school authorities and police—mechanisms of power he needed—ignored evidence that Bundy may have been a thief, kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. Rather than inflict licit punishment, the agencies of social domination allowed Bundy to master and expand his acts of illicit transgression. Bundy became the prince who formulates rights (his law studies and his modus operandi); he had no father who could forbid and so he became the law, the master who made the young women he kidnapped, raped, and killed, obedient to his juridical power—they became his possessions, his effects.