It is the serial killer’s responsibility to exceed in beauty every attempt by the cops or the psychologists to apprehend him, and it is always a him. He is an aesthete who, whether his victims are skinned, decapitated, defenestrated, dismembered, skewered, raped, or stewed, always admires them for their appearance, with an utterly uncultured, almost animal taste for their flesh. Maleness is a remnant of an old aesthetic prejudice, but it also implies an atavism and purely physical strength to tear through the layers of cultured nonchalance. The female has fashion models, the male serial killers.

The rips he makes in the patina of our expectations are the same rips he will make in his victim’s torso, and it is by the sudden jagged partitions that the skin comes to be the focus once again. Skin gets its closeup under the butcher’s knife. Thus the utter perversity of a serial killer who is also a vigilante. Dexter is moral, and so he breaks the only ordinance in the serial killer code: have no concern for morals, or: nothing deeper than the skin. When the serial killers become cops, the cops become wanton murderers, and society is at its end. We know and the television serial killer knows the only violence to do is against morality, since the only thing that is not skin deep is guts, and these are the most beautiful skins of all.

Crimson is the color of lust; even five-day-old blood blazes with it in the televisual understanding. Nowhere else among the old metal furniture and grey walls, hard-boiled detectives with their broken-down marriages and feeble passes at each other, do we find anything like the creamy skin, grasping hands, lecherous glares, and brute physicality of the murderer in his lair.

It is as if the world no longer smells, as if the only scenery left is crime scenery, all the other sets having lost their luster and become merely real. In the drama of the killer who keeps on killing, the pleasure principle and the death drive are one. Freud guessed that they come together in sadism; what he also almost says is that this accompanies the demise of the psyche.

It is no wonder, we note, that a largely pacific society dedicated to freedom of opinion–which means, in effect, balance, envisioned as a single grand debate with two equal sides and no end–and commerce should dream of secret violators who will not be stopped by common sense or by market forces. Like weeds they grow up among the fruitful. Reciprocal justice, the biblical way of morality, plays itself out in this fantasy, where the open wars we have denied ourselves since Vietnam have produced their covert equivalent. Surely this all started in the late 60s, the TV killers, the video games. Have the statistics been calculated? Is it 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 100 to 1?–the tally of victims in TV episodes and video games compared to those in our impoverished, purified reality? Every night a few dozen or so mangled corpses, or more, and now with satellite signal, even the tiniest, most remote village is nightly awash in blood.

Our television goes on so our punishment can go on, and our punishment is the death of the interior and the return of the surface. Serial killers murder victims, but they also murder depth and, with a blow to the head, abandon us to the appearances that we already haunt.