In the summer of
1976, Nadia scored 7 perfect tens, and David Richard Berkowitz began a shooting
spree that would leave 6 people dead and 7 others wounded. Olympics be damned, worldwide press cemented
the year forever in our memories as the Summer of Sam, due in part to the
police manhunt and also to the letters staged by the killer. While Summer of Sam too poetically for
comfort abbreviates to S.O.S., it must also be poetic justice that Summer of
Bill abbreviated becomes S.O.B.
While both men’s
adventures may be motivated by narcissistic delusions of grandeur, the truth is
that they are play-acting (with devastating results) at the angel of death
archetype which we have seen so many times before. Indeed plagues have stalked civilization
since time immemorial, and yet man has always devised a way to survive such
onslaughts. Moses, the father of the
neighborhood watch, asked the Israelites to cleanse their doorways with lamb’s
blood that the spirit of God would Passover their domiciles. Glinda, the Good Witch of North, was a bit
more cheerful when in syrupy sweet tones she proclaimed to the little people in
funny costumes, “It’s all right. She’s gone.
You can all get up.” And do you
know: the practice caught on! To this
day, little people in funny costumes who show up at your door may be fended off
with a single bowl of candy. Pagan and Christian rituals around the world
sprung up to unite villagers in defending their homes against evil. While Bill sees a civil conspiracy in the
faces of the people gathered here, I see a national neighborhood watch working
in cooperation with law enforcement for the safety of the public.
The more infamous
plagues of the middle ages occurred at an intersection of time when population
levels sped past a speed bump in medical innovation. The sciences were religiously regulated
by…well, the church, to the suppression of both conventional wisdom (old wives
tales) and emerging biological studies. Rather
than accept the changing times and take preventative steps for all mankind, we
hear stories of self-quarantine by the wealthy nobility. This would inspire the Edgar Allan Poe
classic, “Masque of the Red Death,” wherein the Spectre of Death progresses
further and further into the palace of one Prince Prospero. Ironically, Bill’s narcissism is such that he
is trying to isolate himself while trying to visit ruination upon those he
claims are jeopardizing his own life. Themes
inherent in Poe’s “Masque” include revenge fantasies (upon the rich) and the
futility of escaping death.
Themes inherent
in the S.O.B. include fantasies of death and sex. Why those two topics together? Freud recognized dual instincts which shape
human personality: Eros and Thanatos. Eros
is the drive of life, love, creativity, and sexuality, self-satisfaction, and
species preservation; and Thanatos, from the Greek word for "death"
is the drive of aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death. Freud believed that aggression towards others
and self-destructive behaviour were outward projections of this death
instinct. It is a largely held belief
that narcissists are not suicidal, and yet self-destructive actions which put
oneself in potentially life threatening situations may indeed be subconscious
suicidal ideations. Can it not be said
that in leaving reality behind Windsor has committed his own psychological
death? What is left of him but a vampiric
like creature that stalks the living in search of lifeblood (in this case
wealth and notoriety). Malignant
self-love has rendered him unable to contemplate a world without his existence,
and yet this conflicts with the pleasure principle, his desire to avoid pain.
His final solution lies in manipulating the events of the
suicide to look like murder. If Windsor can trap his victim into pulling the
trigger, Bill dies believing that he has achieved immortality as a martyr and
the ultimate revenge in his victim punished for murder. A narcissist’s suicide then, is an act of
mutually assured destruction.
One more tidbit: Inspired
by Freud, social psychologist Eric Fromm believed the psychologically disturbed
people were unable to love. His theory,
known as the theory of decay and epitomized by Adolph Hitler, recognized three
main disorders: 1) necrophilia, or the love of death and the hatred of all
humanity; (2) malignant narcissism, and 3) incestuous symbiosis, or an extreme
dependence on one's mother or mother surrogate.
Summer is nearly over my friends and the fall is
imminent!