ABSTRACT
We are all familiar with world-known reality TV shows such as Big Brother, The Apprentice, and Wife Swap, shows which have penetrated screens mostly since the turn of the 21st century, taking over participants’ lives, challenging personal boundaries and generating debates the world over. Such reality TV frequently claims to offer its audience “reality rather than realism, revelation rather than fantasy, authenticity rather than artifi ce, access to real experience, joy or suffering rather than dramatised emotion” (Biressi and Nunn, 2005: 8). The issues reality TV brings to bear can be likened to those of crime, a subject which “hardly exists outside of narrative” (Peach, 2006: viii). Much like reality TV, contemporary crime narratives have come to erode the distinction between the public and the private, the media and social space, fi ction and reality, entertainment and cultural politics. Whereas reality TV, however, is about representing the ordinary, ‘normal’, or non-elite (see, for instance, Biressi and Nunn, 2005), contemporary crime narratives are about representing the aberrant, the deviant, the abnormal among us. But, as Biressi (2001) put it, this extraordinary violence is often grounded in the everyday. And it is the ‘extraordinary’ violence of multiple killing that concerns the current study, a type of killing that I take to be synonymous to serial killing, following OED’s defi nition of the term as “a series of murders with similar characteristics committed by the same person”. In accordance to this defi nition, I take mass killings (multiple killings which take place at the same time and place) to be a subtype of serial killings. Traditional rhetoric’s ‘kairos’, in reference to the timeliness and placing of things (see, for instance, Cockcroft and Cockcroft, 2005) bears relevance here. In other words, I use serial in reference to killers taking the life of many, regardless of the time (‘serial’) or actual place/moment (‘mass’) aspect of the killings.
