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Little Monsters
"A baby was wandering in a strange country." On Feb. 12, 1993, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables abducted James Bulger from the New Strand shopping center in Bootle, a suburb of Liverpool. Thompson and Venables were 10 years old; Bulger was two. For the next two hours, they beat and tortured the boy as they led him more than two miles away from the Strand, down such streets as Cherry Lane and along the Liverpool-Leeds canal. Finally, near their own homes, they battered him with bricks and an iron bar, hurled blue paint on him, and left him, either barely alive or already dead (accounts differ), on railroad tracks near the Walton Road police station. A passing train cut his body in half. The Bulger case made for compelling television. For one thing, it supplied its own video imagery, which has been in reruns since the killers, now 18 years old, were released last month. An early and still memorable example of “90s reality TV, mall security tapes of the Bulger case fall chronologically between the King beating and the White Bronco chase. Like those cultural touchstones, the Bulger tapes remain endlessly compelling — in a way that, for example, The Real World and Survivor, two faked-up attempts at "reality," do not. If you have no inclination to enjoy the recent tawdry crop of life-based entertainment, if you are too nice, too smart, for the shallow pleasures of Big Brother 2, you can still return again and again to such inadvertent documentaries as the Bulger tapes and experience what life is really like, even if you must live it vicariously. Closed circuit television captured not only the kidnapping, but also its compelling/horrifying/banal prelude. Although it was a school day, Venables and Thompson had been at the Strand since at least 12:23 p.m. (That is when the cameras first noticed them.) For more than three hours till James arrived with his mother, Denise, the boys moved from location to location, drifting apart and then back together, shoving each other, kicking each other, throwing books around, essentially looking to make trouble. (At the boys’ trial, one mother recalled that they had attracted the notice of her children and that they had gone over to speak with Venables and Thompson. Her youngest started following the boys away. She was there to call him back.) At 3:37 p.m., James and his mother appeared. At 3:38, while his mother paid for sausages, he wandered off: The camera does not see him. Denise exited the AR Timms butcher shop, looked for James, and, with increasing panic, began searching for him. She never saw him alive again. But the camera found him. From 3:41 to 3:43 it watched him proceed in the company of the two larger boys toward the mall’s exit. In particular, one grainy shot captures the dreadful moment when James disappeared forever from the mall and from whatever security its enclosed walkways, its regulated temperature, and its strict non-odors seemed to ensure. You saw this photograph in the newsweeklies and on the nightly news back in 1993; you may have seen it in the last month or so as well. In the photograph, one boy leads James by hand away from the camera toward the New Strand’s exit, and the other boy proceeds a few steps ahead. A woman passes in the opposite direction. She is one of several adults in the picture, none of whom see anything wrong going on. James’s posture is entirely natural: He is not resisting the older boy at all but instead seems willing to go with him. Like many good documentary photographs, it hints at more than it shows. Your eyes try to make sense of the smudgy images and poor framing and lousy lighting. Your brain and gut-instinct fill in the documentary gaps. The brilliance of this shot, indeed of the entire three-hour-plus shot sequence, is its artlessness: the herky-jerkiness of time-lapse photography, the actors’ refusal to remain centered in the frame, the confusion you feel when someone you’re interested in, like Venables or Thompson, wanders off-camera. Because the camera is capturing it all, especially its sheer banality, it is entirely captivating. One result of the Bulger case was an odd but altogether explicable alliance of the Luddites at Free Republic with the Luddites at Living Marxism. Their analyses move along similar lines. Only the posters to the Free Republic Web site bother to identify it by literary citation, but both imply the frame of reference. Both acknowledge, then see past, the horror of the murder to propose the real message of the case: The very existence of mall security cameras stinks of Big Brother. While 1984 comes readily to mind, it provides not necessarily the only, or even the best, foundation for thinking about the Bulger case with George Orwell’s brain. Like other real-life crimes that compel our helpless fascination, the Bulger case is perversely entertaining. Murder-as-entertainment is the subject of two of Orwell’s lasting essays, "The Decline of the English Murder" and "Raffles and Miss Blandish." In each, he assumes an absurd pose — one that, in retrospect, we identify as that of the culture critic — analyzing murders as if they were poems or novels or some other "text." "Raffles and Miss Blandish" examines written (if, in the 1940s, critically-dismissed) texts: crime novels. Orwell finds much to praise in E.W. Hornung’s Raffles and much to despise in James Hadley Chase’s Orchids for Miss Blandish. Orwell dislikes Miss Blandish because it is full of horrible violence: "The hero ” is described as stamping on somebody’s face, and then, having crushed the man’s mouth in, grinding his heel round and round in it." The problem with English crime novels of the “40s is that "[t]heir whole theme is the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak." Compared with Hornung’s novels of a gentleman thief (Raffles even plays cricket), “40’s novels are vulgar and mean. Society ought to be ashamed for letting things get so bad. But society’s shame cannot obscure the fact that the Bulger case is highly compelling, even entertaining. Similarly, the real-life murders Orwell describes in "Decline of the English Murder" represent a shift in the culture at large. "Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period," he writes, "seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925." He lists the nine murderers "whose reputations have stood the test of time"; of course, Jack the Ripper is among them, but Orwell excludes the Ripper case from his discussion because it "is in a class by itself." His comparison of the other classic murders with the recent Cleft Chin case leads Orwell yet again to a disappointing conclusion about where violent crime is headed in his homeland. While it once gave birth to such elegant creeps as Dr. Crippen, England has lost its homicidal compass. It is becoming increasingly vicious, favoring the strong over the weak. Thus, an Orwellian reading of the style of murder represented by the Bulger case is almost too easy: What is weaker than a baby? Still, for all its easiness, this reading is satisfying. As a pop cultural text, that is, James Bulger’s murder confirms Orwell’s notion that, increasingly, "might is right," a deplorable decline of homicidal elegance into the sheer brutality of a sadistic century. But on another level, the Bulger case is more complicated. When Orwellian refers to a type of class-inflected writing, such as the novels of Pat Barker, it almost inevitably derives not from his culture criticism but from Orwell’s participatory journalism — such deeply sympathetic works as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. As a sociological text, the Bulger case offers a matrix of class dilemmas available for scrutiny. For example, the British press could not help dwelling on the story’s Liverpudlian setting, perhaps vexingly to most Americans, who know little about Liverpool except that it was the Birthplace of Fab. But the supposed scruffiness of Liverpool and the otherness of Scousers — their almost comic strangeness to the Nice People of England — show up again and again in press coverage, raising a complex of class expectations and repudiations. Described in the journalistic-polemical style of 1930’s Orwell, the Bulger killers were pitiable. One Manchester Guardian article offers details of their lives. Their neighborhood, for example, represents a losing effort to stave off chaos: "Some of the red brick houses were well-kept, others had torn net curtains and grubby windows. A smell of bleach lingered on some of the tiled steps that led up to the front doors. The bleached houses were peppered with burglar alarms, the shabby ones did not look worth the trouble." Robert Thompson’s mother described her neighbors as "people . . . threatening to blow your kneecaps off every moment of the day — that’s just the way they are. They deal with drugs, they deal with everything." Her son and his brothers "lived off bags of chips." (In The Road the Wigan Pier Orwell writes about not only the cheap lives but also the cheap diet of the poor.) Pat Barker has repeatedly located her novels in places like Venables and Thompson’s neighborhood (click here to read Salon’s interview with Barker). Blow Your House Down shows children growing up among women who know better than to sink to factory work: Instead, they maintain their self-respect by working as prostitutes, a better life even if a serial killer is preying on them. (The killer is based on Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who like Venables and Thompson, left chilling documentary evidence of his crimes.) In other early books like Union Street and Liza’s England, she describes childhood in the kind of squalid "estates" Orwell describes in Wigan Pier, places where "bloodthirsty little sods" threaten to turn feral. While she does not exactly tell us to lay the blame on squalor for such children as Venables and Thompson or Kelly Brown from Union Street, she surely reminds us that we ought to. But the Bulger case and public reaction to it helped re-focus her scrutiny and her sympathy. Her most recent books, the first since she completed the historical Regeneration trilogy and returned literarily to the present, suggest that she has begun blaming English culture in general, not only life in the slums, for turning people mean. The vicious children in Another World (1998) live in a big Victorian house: It may not be in the best repair, but the novel’s family is clearly middle class. And yet, paralleling the Bulger case, the older of two boys nearly stones his baby brother to death. Even more directly, this year’s Border Crossing refers to the child killers. In it, Danny Miller, who killed an old woman when he was 10, has been released after 12 years of "accommodation." We learn about his abusive upbringing; like the child criminals in Barker’s earlier novels (and Venables and Thompson as described in the Guardian article), he worked out his traumas using sociopathy as a therapeutic tool. But Barker does not focus entirely on Danny in this examination of children’s bloodlust. His victim’s age, 68, keeps us from identifying him completely with James Bulger’s killers. Another character, this one respectably middle class, is more like Venables and Thompson in the matter of victims’ ages. When he was young, Danny’s psychiatrist and another boy nearly stoned a third child to death, failing only because a bus passenger saw what was happening and came to the rescue: "Three children were saved that day," as Barker has it. Brutality has made it out of the slums in her last two novels, out of the Orwellian hellholes that understandably if still terrifyingly turn culturally-abused children into monsters. They are no longer locked away where nice people need not think about them. Instead, they are living in nice family’s houses, playing video games, watching television, going to the mall. Barker’s re-imagining of the Bulger case as a middle-class phenomenon removes one of the distractions of the real-life crime: the sociological simple-mindedness of blaming poverty for the murder or at least of having poverty to blame. Certainly Venables and Thompson came from poor families and, in Thompson’s case, suffered deplorable parenting. No one rescued them from social circumstances, and thus no one assumed the kind of responsibility that would have kept them from killing James Bulger. Much of England wallowed in collective guilt after the boy’s death. The Press pointed horrified fingers at the 38 people who had seen Venables and Thompson taking James away and done nothing, called them "The Liverpool 38," and still did not deflect attention entirely from media that played the story for all that it was dreadfully worth. Society ought to be ashamed for letting things get so bad. But society’s shame cannot obscure the fact that the Bulger case is highly compelling, even entertaining. Because Venables and Thompson made such a fascinating videotape, we keep welcoming them back into our homes. Barker’s assessment of the Bulger case, both in her novels and in subsequent interviews, follows that of the Orwell who wrote about murders as if they were music hall entertainments. She herself has said that the case and her books reflecting on it may be more understandable to the English than to Americans, but she is wrong about one thing. We Americans may not understand how killers can be released after only eight years — when we lock up child-murderers, we lock them up for good — but we understand good entertainment when we see it. You and I are nice people who would never dream of renting Faces of Death at the video store. But isn’t it great that there are books and TV programs and Web sites that give us thrilling glimpses of the abyss? Jimmy Dean Smith is an associate professor of English and communications at Union College in Kentucky. Related Sites Read the crime issue |
