Psychohistorical Reflections on the 2012 Aurora Massacre

On July 20, 2012, a massacre at the Century Movie Theatre in Aurora, Colorado left 12 people dead and 58 people injured. This brief essay attempts to understand the Aurora, Colorado killings through the lenses of the American love affair with guns, the dynamics of the negative identity, changing gender roles, and the delegation of violence.

The massacre in Aurora must be placed in the historical context of the recent spike of massacres in the U.S., both preceding and following the Aurora killings. Soon after the Aurora massacre, on Sunday, August 5, a U.S. Army veteran and white supremacist killed six people and wounded others in a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Three earlier shootings are part of a much larger sequence of meaning: (1) at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, in which two senior students shot and killed 12 students, one faculty, and themselves, and wounded 21 other students; (2) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16, 2007, in which a disaffected student shot and killed 32 students and faculty; (3) at the army base Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, in which an army psychiatrist shot and killed 13 people and wounded more than 32 people. If the Aurora massacre is part of a prevailing cultural pattern, the psychohistorical question arises as to the psychodynamic significance and underpinnings of the mass killings.

The Fatal Event

According to police and news reports, around 12:38 a.m. on July 20, 2012, the accused mass killer James Holmes entered an emergency exit of the Century 16 Movie Theater in Aurora, Colo-

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rado. Featured was the midnight opening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. The accused killer, having earlier bought a ticket, had sat in the front row, propped open an emergency exit door, and left through this exit to change into his protective clothing: full SWAT team dress in black, including body armor, helmet, throat guard, groin protector, bullet-resistant leggings, load-bearing vest, gloves, and gas mask.

At first, many members of the audience thought it was a prank that he was dressed in a costume like many other viewers. He then tossed tear gas grenades into the audience. In the ensuing panic, he fired his various guns toward the audience and at people trying to flee the theater. He carried an armory of guns with him: an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle (that later mercifully jammed), a 12-gauge tactical shotgun, a Glock 22 handgun, and a hunting knife. He had recently purchased 6,000 rounds of ammunition and numerous magazines for the rifle. During his assault, he killed 12 people and shot 70. He surrendered to police outside the theater.

The American Romance with Guns

I begin my analysis with a brief discussion of guns, for without them the scale of human carnage would have been so much less in all of these instances, and contemporary arms technology is an essential part of the Aurora narrative in particular. Guns are part of the American cultural ethos and central narrative of nation formation, establishment, and expansion. Guns are both a means to an end, and an end in themselves. In the language of anthropology, they are both instrumental and expressive. Guns are inseparable from the romance of the westward expansion for land and gold, the “Spirit of the American West,” the longevity and durability of Western movies and television shows, private land possession and tenure, personal freedom and individualism, the right of self-defense and protection, American democracy itself, and last but not least, children’s play.

If our obsession with guns is irrational, it is also uncanny, for it embodies the compensatory male phallusism of an entire culture over five centuries. It began long ago with the rationalization of the slaughter of American Indians in the name of divine providence, thereby diminishing guilt for genocide. One thinks of the

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power of the male child’s identification with the aggressor (father), thereby reversing powerlessness into power.

Further, as Robert Hill and I wrote in The Ethnic Imperative (1977, p. 53), “America [became the expansive domain of] the eternal male adolescent, as well as his dream, the exclusive claim of the son to virgin land and motherland, the escape from dominating and punitive [European] fathers, the success of the son beyond the father, and the escape from the guilt-inducing oedipal family through spatial and interpersonal separation.” The possession of guns made this all possible and was indispensable to the accused killer James Holmes in translating fantasy into reality and action in the July 20, 2012 Aurora massacre.

The Joker and the Negative Identity

We know little of James Holmes’ inner life, though he did identify himself with the “Joker” character of the Batman movies and comic books that date back to 1940. Aurora, Colorado “became” the fictitious Gotham City, where the Joker is the sworn enemy of the hero Batman. Though made to look like a clown, he is far from a playful trickster. He is a murderous nemesis who appears indestructible. His character is that of the psychopathic master criminal, one lacking a sense of shame or guilt, and he is responsible for many tragedies in the lives of Batman and Gotham City.

Psychodynamically, the Joker could be understood to be the evil double, underside, or alter-ego of Batman. In the model of Erik Erikson (Identity: Youth and Crisis, 1968), Batman can be understood as the “positive identity,” the consciously idealized American person, the “good self,” the “me,” while the Joker can be seen as embodying the consciously devalued but unconsciously admired “negative identity,” the “bad self,” the “not me.” James Holmes, on the other hand, consciously identified with the person and mission of the Joker.

Perhaps, then, the vast audience for Batman, past and present, is unconsciously enthralled with the evil of the Joker, while hoping that Batman will win—but never completely. So, in a sense, we, the American audience, are both victims of the Joker and are Jokers ourselves. How can this possibly be?

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American Rage, Changing Gender Roles, and the Dynamics of Delegating Violence

A recurrent part of the gun-violence of the mass killings since Columbine can be understood as an assertion of “traditional” European American (“white”) masculinity in the face of societal threats to it. Changing gender roles include the threat to American men who have long identified themselves with culturally dominant European American male roles. (There are, of course, numerous tribal, ethnic, and religious masculine narratives in the U.S. I am here referring to a specific, widespread, nationally mainstream masculine gender ethos.) This has been vastly exacerbated by the dehumanizing mass firings of blue and white collar men since the mid-1980s that go under the familiar euphemisms of corporate downsizing, reduction in force, rightsizing, deskilling, outsourcing, offshoring, reengineering, and restructuring.

Lower echelon employees and mid-level managers, largely male, were treated as disposable waste in the name of the sacred “bottom line,” productivity, profit, and enhanced shareholder value—all of which eventually proved to be alluring myths that masked corporate economic reality. The ethos of the American Dream and the long-standing “psychological contract” of reciprocal obligation between employer and employee were shattered, and tens of millions of American men were without employment, paycheck, and identity (as worker, provider, father, husband). Men were not only unemployed or underemployed; they were humiliated.

This was, and remains, a time of narrowing options of traditional American roles (work, marriage, family) available for boys and adolescents to become men. During the same period came the threat to men’s traditional gender role by the various American women’s movements and women’s increasing presence in the American workforce. The experience of symbolic castration and symbolic murder became widespread. Among American males there is a search for a cure for impotence. (Is it coincidence that this is also the age of Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis, medications to remedy “erectile dysfunction” in men?)

Much of the rage was turned inward against the self, or toward fellow employees who had been fired: “I/he must have done

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something to get fired.” Randomness was unthinkable. Political groups such as the Tea Party and numerous white American “hate groups” have attracted many disposed of, unemployed, disenfranchised white Americans who were filled with rage at the injustice of corporations, banks, and the political economy. They felt—and were in fact—betrayed. They felt futureless. Their angry projections contained a grain of historic truth. Further, as Molly Castelloe asks (personal communication, July 23, 2012, quoted with permission), “Is it possible … that these shootings [in Aurora] express collective anxiety over changes in gender roles and in our perceptions of what it means to be a man?”

It seems as if vulnerable men such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, through (presumably) James Holmes, were enacting widespread palpable rage and group fantasy on the stage of contemporary American history. Far from being “isolated incidents” by “lone gunmen” (or, in the case of Columbine, two), the repeated massacres can be seen as psychological repetitions of and metaphors for psychological massacres in the American workplace. That would make the actual massacres an instance of what the late Rudolph Binion termed “traumatic reliving” (“Traumatic Reliving in History,” The Annual of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalysis and History. Volume 31. Winer, Jerome A. and Anderson, James William, Eds., pp. 237-250). The cycle of repetition and sacrifice is never complete.

Uncannily, the psychodynamic stage is set for future outbreaks of mass violence in America: anywhere there are vulnerable men (including young men) for whom the social drama resonates with private, personal life history and family drama. There will be those—few, perhaps—for whom the Joker, or some similar nefarious fictional character, will ring true to their inner life. They will, in turn, bring the Joker to life to wreak havoc and revenge upon a society who will disavow any resemblance with him. He will, once again, have the technical means (guns of frightening sophistication) to make his private fantasy become a public nightmare.

There are two subtler forms of violence that express our current ethos of violence: what Peter Petschauer calls “the noise in American life and our neglect of private and public spaces” (personal communication, August 13, 2012, quoted with

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permission). “Everybody … screams. At airports, in bus stations, on TV, on the radio, sports events, etc.; the noise level is ear piercing.” Petschauer continues: “There is the general neglect of private and public spaces…Maybe this is not violence in the strictest sense of the word, but it is a form of not caring for oneself and others who also need, must use, this space.” Put another way, there is less and less a sense of a shared commons, both spatial and social.

Conclusions

This psychohistorical analysis of the massacre in Aurora, Colorado may make some plausible sense out of what politicians and media writers are fond of calling “the senseless killing of innocent people.” If so, it helps us to understand the often tragic psychological symbiosis or fit between individual and group that is one of the core concerns of psychohistory.

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