Dahmer and Nilsen met their victims in bars or pubs, offered them money, food, or shelter to lure the men back to their apartments. Deception became a fundamental part of their ritual, their means of bringing their bodies into the thresholds of their apartments, the inner circle of their lusts, the topography of control and release. They were the despot of their ‘center of signifiance,’ the men becoming victims in the paranoid operations of Jeff and Dennis. Both Dahmer and Nilsen incapacitated their victims—Dahmer attempted to make zombies of the men by drilling holes in their skulls and using a needle to inject boiling water or hydrochloric acid; Nilsen enjoyed strangling them while they were eating a meal he had prepared—this ‘last violence’ an attempt to stop the men leaving, only for the post-mortem sex to not be enough, the bodies merely bodies, not companions, and therefore yet another regime of violence and sex would have to begin. The last would always be the limit—incapacitation through drugs, alcohol, or violence, sex, death, sex again—alcohol for Dahmer and Nilsen the trigger to explode any preventive morals, the suppression of any conscience, and the stimulator of anticipation. The men, the victims, the zombies, the bodies becoming new assemblages of desire, passive vessels of infiltration and defilement, then becoming meat to be consumed or obliterated.
Writing about Andy Warhol’s work, Fredric Jameson states, ‘…it is as though the external and coloured surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra◦– and in the disposition of the subject.’[208]
Dahmer and Nilsen’s victims were simulacra, fundamental mut(il)ations of would-be perfect partners—passive, silent, compliant. Dahmer/Nilsen were addicted to glossy hardcore pornography—Dahmer’s video collection included pornographic titles: Cocktales, Tall Dark and Handsome, Rock Hard, Hard Men II, Peep Show, and Tropical Heat Wave; Nilsen petitioned the courts while imprisoned to allow him to receive copies of the hardcore gay porn magazine Vulcan. Both men used the images of gay sex to lure men back to their apartments, to watch a simulation of their desires. Dahmer took photographs of his victims’ dead bodies, reducing them to movie stills (stiffs), representations of the photographs they masturbated over as he then masturbated over the corpses. Death and bodies became a thematized and ritualized part of Dahmer/Nilsen’s eroticism, their death in the world, mut(il)ating the victims into an appearance of a submissive lover, a simulacra, an other. The bodies became collages of Jeff and Denis’s desires and fantasies, mixed body parts, multimedia, the flip side of Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
Jameson singles out Warhol’s automobile accidents and instruments of capital punishment as representations of the death of the world of appearance, and it is worth noting that Berkowitz used a Ballardian necro-erotic stylized automobile accident—he targeted young couples in cars to murder—as his modus operandi. ‘In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die.’[209] Gacy used a killing device to execute his victims and ultimately died by lethal injection. Gacy also painted portraits and erotica that are sub-Warholean, even primitive. To Warhol and to Dahmer/Nilsen, the object aestheticized or eroticized is fundamentally dead, it has no being apart from its image, the image of and over which one masturbates, replacing the object with its copy, with its subject (as passive ‘thing’), the body becoming rejectamenta, the person no longer, just something to be used and then to be disposed of.
For Dahmer/Nilsen, living human beings were simulacra, they were copies of copies of copies of objects of desire to be mut(il)ated into yet more copies until the subjects (torn, tattered, erased, decomposed) had to be disposed of, annihilated, or turned into things. Nilsen—after keeping the bodies for a few days or weeks—cut them up and flushed them down the toilet. Dahmer kept them for weeks, sometimes dismembering them, keeping body parts—heads, hands, torsos, organs, genitalia—in a refrigerator, freezer, filing cabinet, kettle. One photograph of the head and hands of an Afro-American man resembles the dearticulated, deterritorialized masturbatory devices found in sex shops—a copy of a copy of a copy, so attenuated that it becomes its own phenomena, takes on a ‘death’ of its own. Jameson writing about the hyperrealist lifecasts of artist Duane Hanson writes: ‘The ultimate contemporary fetishization of the human body, however, takes a very different direction in the statues of Duane Hanson—what I have already called the simulacrum, whose peculiar function lies in what Sartre would have called the derealization of the whole surrounding world of everyday reality. Your moment of doubt and hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures, in other words, tends to return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum and to transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulacra in their own right. The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density. But is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience?’[210]
Dahmer as mixer in the chocolate factory, Nilsen as administrative officer in a job centre, both seemingly grounded in mundanity; the sweet tooth of the confectioner, the bitter tongue of the put-upon civil servant, awaiting the touch and taste of the illicit, the fetishization of the body as a collection of parts—mouth, cock, balls, anus. Dahmer/Nilsen derealized the everyday world, their world started in the bars and pubs and finished in the apartment and flat, the refrigerator and the drains. ‘I never lived in dreams of winning the pools as a solution to psychological impoverishment. I was never materialistic. My needs were the needs of a “dog” who had never been cuddled, patted, wanted, praised or rewarded. I was a viable human being forced by early circumstances into the role of “lone wolf”. It was my genetic inheritance which decreed that I would possess the difference which would mark me out from “the norm”. It was not these differences which spawned destructive behaviour later on in life but an utter repudiation of them by my parents, peers and a conventional repressive society then extant.’[211]
Whereas Hanson’s figures have the semblance of the real—even though we encounter them in a gallery—Dahmer/Nilsen’s victims were less than real, manifested fetishizations of their pornographic fantasies. Dahmer, in taking Polaroids of his victims alive and dead in various forms of bondage and pornographic posing, his mutilation and dismemberment, attempted to return them to their pornographic existence. Nilsen’s dismemberment, boiling, burning, burying, and flushing of body parts, to make them excremental, elemental, prolonged his ritual homicides, his fetishistic eroticism. A trained cook, Nilsen used his skills to break down the bodies to become ‘so many dead and flesh-coloured simulacra.’ Dahmer used his childhood animal experiments and amateur vivisections to do likewise. The victims of both resembling the paintings of Chaim Soutine, or the more extreme works of Francis Bacon’s existential-abattoir rush of flickering human monstrosities at once exhilarating to behold and terrifying to comprehend. Deleuze writing of Bacon’s portraits could be quoting Dahmer/Nilsen, ‘each time meat is presented [as pornography, as post-mortem, post-human], we touch it, smell it, eat it, weigh it.’[212] Dahmer/Nilsen used bodies, flesh, meat as sexual sacraments. Nilsen washed his dead victims, dressed them, went to bed with them, masturbated over them, sat them in chairs so they were there to greet him when he came home. Dahmer tortured his victims, killing them during sex, photographed them pre-, peri-, and post-mortem, used their body parts as fetishes—one skull he covered in chocolate. ‘But why is it an act of vital faith to choose “the scream more than the horror,” the violence of sensation more than the violence of the spectacle? The invisible forces, the powers of the future—are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? Yes, in a certain sense—every piece of meat testifies to this. But in another sense, no. When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles, affirming the possibility of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us. It is as if combat had now become possible. The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible force, or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream.’[213]
208
Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’
211
Denis Nilsen to Matt Ruscoff, available here: http://russcoff.typepad.com/russcoff/2004/06/cofessions_of_a.html
212
Gilles Deleuze,