For years, sanctions on Iran have done obviously little in slowing down pockets of the regime obsessed with nuclear arms.  This fact is one of psychology.  If the will is there, it will get done, no matter how much curb-stomping you do around town.  Furthermore, any mechanism designed to curtail a behavior must directly address the psyche that propagates said behavior.  Diplomacy is much like parenting.  If you take away your kid’s computer because he’s not doing his homework and he has a final paper due the next day, that’s slightly self-defeating.  Consider a guiding principle of Kissinger’s- means must match ends to achieve effective policy outcomes.

Another round of sanctions on Iranian oil is absurd.  10% of Chinese petroleum imports are from Iran.  Good luck getting them on board.  Plus countries like Germany, Italy, India, Japan, and South Korea, all of whom import Iranian oil and are either disinterested in sanctions for valid economic reasons or have in the past agreed to sanctions while still bypassing them through other means, i.e. Germany and India.  Sanctions on Iranian oil will only raise oil prices for the benefit of the oil producer, not the consumer.  That boils down to economic common sense.  Besides, right now there’s not much wiggle room in the global economy for splinters.

The issue with nuclear proliferation is that it takes a massive degree of insanity to even begin to find the idea of anyone owning a bomb that can wipe out entire cities appealing.  Which explains why North Korean leadership finds it so thrilling.  Many half-sane politicians, primarily in the west, argue that deterrence therefore validates their retention of nuclear arsenals that cost a fortune annually to maintain, let alone slowly disassemble.

There’s an old Red Skelton joke adapted into Alan Moore’s ‘Batman’ graphic novel that fits this catch-22 perfectly.  Two insane guys escape from an asylum, the first guy leaps from roof to roof, but the other stays behind and says he’s too afraid to leap.  So the first guy offers to shine his flashlight across so the second can walk across it, but he only laughs and says ‘What do you think I am? Crazy? You’d turn it off when I was half way across!’ 

Cover of Batman: The Killing Joke

We stay in darkish times. Just this week, the town of London was thrown into chaos by a bunch of rioting youths. With no political will, these have been simply senseless acts of violence by gangs wishing to put in fear and violence throughout the capital. What began as a small remoted incident, rapidly escalated into nationwide pandemic of violence. It was then I realised just how related the Batman character is to our modern society.

What I find most interesting about Batman is his origin. After witnessing his parents being gunned down at the age of eight, Bruce Wayne might have gone off the rails and grown up to be a revenge pushed psychopath. An attention-grabbing thought was raised in Alan Moore’s ‘The Killing Joke’. The concept is that Batman and Joker are two opposite parallels. Each had been victims to what Moore describes as “one bad day” that sent them on the path to insanity. The prompt origin of the Joker is that the lack of his spouse and baby, adopted by his disfigurement sent him insane. It is the choices of Batman and Joker that hold them apart. Batman chose to harness his inner demons and use them to seek honest justice and fight crime. Regardless of his horrific experience, Batman primarily remains ‘a good guy’. This is additional conveyed by his decision to hunt justice under honest means. While beating criminals to a pulp pushes moral boundaries, his choice to capture criminals and let the justice system decide their fate retains the Dark Knight’s ethics in the best place. Capturing them down, or murdering his victims, makes Batman no completely different from enemies. On the risk of sounding delusional, how many people can say that they don’t take satisfactions within the thought of a hero praying on the type of criminals we noticed within the UK final week?

One other great side of the Batman character is that he can match into any storyline/subtext. He can be used in storylines with political subtexts such a Frank Millar’s amazing ‘The Darkish Knight Returns’ or fantasy subtexts as seen in a few of Grant Morrison’s latest work. So long as the key mythos is the same, and that Batman is an strange man searching for to fight crime and evil, Batman works in any storyline. His mission is endless. As seen in the Nolan films, Batman fights for a day the place he’s not needed. He sees himself as a way to an end. A intelligent theme explored in ‘The Darkish Knight’ is that a day will not come where both Bruce or Gotham do not want the Batman. Frank Millar’s ‘The Darkish Knight Returns’ additionally explores the notion that Batman had become crucial to society. With out him, crime will finally seize Gotham. You will not find many heroes that carry as a lot gravitas as the Caped Crusader.

Regardless of the rise of Marvel’s heroes on display, Batman will all the time stay essentially the most compelling comedian e book character ever created. Batman is relevant to the screwed up world we live in. His option to struggle crime is something many individuals can relate to. He carries more emotional weight than another comic guide character and his storyline potential is endless.

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Remember remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder, treason, should never be forgot…

The most likely reason for the choosing of this date is from, Alan Moore and David Lloyd who made the date more memorable, when they used it in ‘V for Vendetta’, the comic book series they created (which was also later converted into a movie), where the main character ‘V’, whom runs around wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (something which has since become a symbol for anonymous protest aound the real world).

Recently, the Syrian Ministry of Defence, had it’s website replaced with one owned by the hacktvist collective, claiming that, come bonfire night (as the day is celebrated in the UK), we will destory Facebook, the medium of communication you all so dearly adore. It also goes into a shout out calling for other hackers “For the sake of your own privacy, join out cause.”

They have made claims of Facebook selling information to government agancies and bodies, as well as to people being spied on world wide with security firms being allowed clandestine access to information. emphasising on, as they put it, ’so called whitehat infosec firms, working for or on behalf of countries such as Egypt and Syria, and other such authoritarian governments.

Being antagonistic at best, and insensitive to all those caught up in the violence at worst, it’s mission statement has one line that points towards the events that have taken place in London and other major cities across England, “The riots are underway” states Anonymous.

One factor Anonymous should seriously take into account, is that, it did not work out to well for Guy Fawkes now, did it?, plus he did not advertise his intentions to the masses. But what’s the betting that if it does manage to succeed and take down Facebook, it will happen at 16:05 GMT (in honour of the year that the original attack on the British government happened).

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If there is one word to describe the emotions I felt when running through the first pages of the book is this: Godsmacked! 

Allan Moore, rightfully proclaimed as the “most imaginative and blunt writers of our century”, makes you a part of a story that no matter how hard you try, you face the inevitable conclusion, that the story of Jack The Ripper is somehow true, as it is portrayed in the novel. Along with Campbell’s illustrations and Moore’s literal pictures each page you flip by, moves you right in the turn of the century, where all was black, and people needed a breakthrough through the passing to a new century. 

The level of sophistication regarding the search for the original Free Mason rites, the validity of the pictures and descriptions of the era, the conspiracy theory behind the story, all adds up to a magnificent piece of work that captivates even the non-comic book readers. 

I strongly urge everyone to have a read, and you’ll find yourself afterwards, typing in your browser “Jack The Ripper” to find what actually happened! 

In other words: Awesome! 

During the 1970s, a magazine called Hustler is born as a sleazy club owner in Cincinnati named Larry Flynt gets the idea to advertise the naked bodies of his dancing girls. Playboy and others had already done this, but what Hustler did was something brand new — showing “pink”. No publisher in history had ever showed pictures of a woman’s vagina so graphically, spread out, so that the insides could be seen. Flynt put these pictures amongst, not necessarily text as much as his own propaganda. It was essentially his job at the Hustler club…but in a magazine. Flynt will be charged over and over again by outraged politicians, convicted several times in cases that would be overturned by appellate courts, because all of this…was free speech. He is gunned down by an unknown assailant in 1978 and paralyzed from waist down. Heavily medicated since getting out of the hospital, he made a spectacle of himself to get the attention of the nation, and then once there, hit them with a parody liquor ad in which his biggest hater — Jerry Falwell — is “describing” losing his virginity in an outhouse to his mother. Falwell would sue Flynt on the grounds of libel and emotional distress — only to lose the libel case because he made the mistake of admitting that nobody could possibly believe it. Yet he won the emotional distress suit. Then Falwell, knowing Flynt’s wife had died of AIDS, spoke on television about how AIDS is the cure for eliminating “sinners”. Larry Flynt has his lawyer appeal this case to the Supreme Court, and he is in fact heard. His lawyer Alan Isaacman argues brilliantly in his defense, and what happens here is the ultimate case for freedom of speech in America. If they would protect Larry Flynt, they would protect any single one of us. Because he’s the worst.

The decision was unanimous — “at the heart of the first amendment is the fundamental importance of the freeflow of ideas. Freedom of speech is not only essential to the lifeblood of democracy, but essential for truth and society as a whole.” Larry Flynt’s ad, while being completely heinous, was nonetheless protected by the first amendment. Larry Flynt won, and Reagen’s attempts to curb the media in the 80s…was given the middle finger. 

1988

May 20, 1988 was a famous day in history. Chicago has a suburb called Winnetka, where a deranged woman named Laurie Dann tied up the kids she was babysitting, tied up the mom and dad becuse they came home early, set the house on fire (the fire department got there in time), and then left and headed down to a local elementary school with a gun. She walked into the school at a time when elementary schools didn’t have metal detectors. She heads directly into a third grade classroom and opens fire. Then she goes to the boys bathroom and opens fire on some little kids standing at the urinals. She maims several, but it is not until the bathroom where she makes her first killing — 8-year old Nicholas Corwin.

Laurie Dann flees and a nationwide search is made for her. Every network sends out their helicopters and Mary Ann Childers. It takes the bulk of the day for them to find her. She finally sneaks back home and locks herself up in her house. At about 11 P.M. that night, with the place surrounded, she shoots herself dead.

Laurie Dann would set the tone for what becomes the only thing in the world that Jerkoffs in this upcoming decade of the 2010s have to stand on — school shootings. The idea that a kid could watch too much Japanese Akira and it would make him slice people up?!

School shootings will be how they keep all hippies in the 2010s from emerging, leading to a continuance of the phenomena where the Western World’s best and most caring people…are the only ones who despise the holiday when Jesus Christ was born.

School shootings are the reason that anything truly cool has been sidemarked for its’ R-rated content. The same jerkoffs who tried to convince married couples that the sexually explicit material of Larry Flynt was bad for the country…realized that they would be crippling Cool People by making parent groups ban the cool graphic novels that were enjoying massive exposure due to kids. Watchmen, Sandman, Maus, and all the Frank Miller stuff.

DC Comics began as Detective Comics, which is one of the great things about the movie Dark Knight — this was how Batman felt and looked and functioned in 1939. There were district attorneys, judges, a defined chain of command when it came to police. DC under the rise of their old friend Marvel in the 60s (oh stay tuned) would have to find a way to not become irrelevant. DC was the grand innovators of the very characters that Marvel got to transcend. There was a point when it appeared that DC would somehow, someway…become toolish!

Enter, in the 80s, Frank Miller and Alan Moore.

Frank Miller and Alan Moore are the reasons why kids were always into comics. They were masters particularly at taking the trials and tribulations of the smart ass-kicker doomed for Northwestern in the accelerated programs, and making them the mythology of Batman. The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge and The Long Halloween, etc.

Is it a coincidence that Laurie Dann occurs with about a fourteen month frame before Batman is all finished being recreated? DC must have realized that they were about to go bankrupt if they didn’t do so!

Everyone rags on Warner Brothers for what they did to the Jack Nicholson Batman. And my point here is that I believe that producer Jon Peters was doing us a favor by at least giving us the Beetlejuice and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure director to make him child-friendly, know what I mean?

Frank Miller also wrote the RoboCop 2 script. I know you thought it was a lousy movie. But rent it again and imagine it at the comic book level. He did a good job.

Frank Miller began his legacy by recreating an old Stan Lee homework assignment — Daredevil.

Alan Moore meanwhile is a funny dude.

Everybody who’s cool at some point from 1986 on has wanted to be like Alan Moore.

Watchmen was even gloomier then I can take. As faithful as they are (eh), the book would have been great to draw and the plot is very interesting if you have to read it over. Alan Moore and Hollywood don’t get along. In addition to the Killing Joke (Batman) and Watchmen, Alan Moore is the creator of Swamp Thing, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and V for Vendetta — three shitty movies, very inspirational books, every one. The fact that they’re inspirational…is his downfall.

There are a few reasons this happens. 

1) People want to show that they’re innovators, but they don’t want to try to use their own stuff. They do it by tainting Alan Moore’s.

2) People who think that all Quentin Tarantino does is steal and borrow…assume that it’s good enough to simply bring up and reference stuff that they like.

3) Alot of it is Alan Moore’s fault, because he draws and writes his stuff to purposely show you things that could only be shown in a comic book. There are certain things, thus, that would be hard as hell to translate into film.

Coming up next: We discuss a whole slew of events that take place as the Reagen administration proves too strong to let go and end, and just like here where we talked about DC Comics…in the next hub…we talk about Marvel.

End of Part 16 of 25

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People continue to speculate on the identity of Jack the Ripper, not because it matters, not because it is in anyway important (countless have died in the intervening years, not knowing) but because people don’t like the idea of being beaten by a mystery. To die never knowing seems to be a torture to them. The absolute impossibility of knowing, the frustrating horror of pure, black ignorance is something that has to be escaped by any available means, including baseless speculation and fiction. The big mysteries of life, the ones that no amount of scientific knowledge can truly satisfy, the ones about what happens after death and what happened in the undocumented past (who was Jack, really?), those are torture to the brain that demands answers, that wants to break the nature of life and time, to bring it under control. Some escape into science fiction where fantasies of time machine and alternate dimensions exist, and into religion where, if you roll your own you can basically devise anything for an after life that you want, confident that you will not be proven wrong in this life. 
A great deal of human efforts seem to involve wishful thinking, creating and substituting fiction for fact where the facts, or the lack of them, cannot provide satisfaction. Like a dildo to a wife with an impotent husband. 
Jack the Ripper, whoever he was, got away with it. He broke the law and he won. He showed up at the right time in history and he did what he wanted to do and there will be no closure. There can only be theories.
This is where all of your plans become pointless and stupid. Everybody seems to think that they will live forever, so that what happens a century from now is supposedly their business, and what a hundred years back still somehow matters, like we, we the individuals, are connected to those places in some way when we are not. Everything that happened before you were born and everything that will happen after may as well take place on another planet, or else not take place at all. You rent one lot in a neighborhood and you may be evicted at any time. What your neighbors are up to behind closed doors should be of no interest to you. 
Is this to say that history is not important? No, it is not. History is important in the way that it can be a study of human nature and as entertaining as fiction. It is a story written according to human tendency and the unpredictability of nature. It is not a science, and it does not have some big, practical influence on our lives. All it the possibly true anecdotes of people you don’t know, written by people who may or nay not know how to research, and who may or may not have an interest in lying to you.
The whole Jack the Ripper thing, being useless as it is for anything practical, and not being an entertaining mystery in that there is no solution, no answer, no satisfying conclusion to the whole thing gets used to shed light on the miserable lives of women in Victorian London, or it gets used to show how backward detectives of the era were. It is used for entertainment because it is sordid (involves prostitutes), and allows any writer to take on a resolution of his choosing. It comes with a built-in audience, people who have read Alan Moore’s From Hell or some other book full of speculations and enough history to make you feel invested. It’s about marketing, a relatively sure thing for a writer to use to make money.

1904 January 2nd: Nemo Quatermain makes his untimely return from the assumption of being dead and declares “Seven days and I shall show you the future!” His announcement is met with laughter but intrigue was powerful and brings a great many number to ask for where this great future awaits.

1904 January 9th: Hyde Park London became a home to a crowd of hundreds. Many stood in wait of Professor Quatermain to unveil what many had heard rumours spread through word of mouth—suspicion was rampant as he came out from a tent, raised a hand for silences and spoke his now famously ironic statement: “I shall show you something beyond the dream of man. It shall send us sawing!” The words were a reporter’s dreams as some stood scribbling away at the sight of Quatermain unveiling a locomotive from within the tent. It was like no other at being a truly extraordinary machine to stand on legs in an almost human wat—though it was rather clunky in comparison to any man or machine to ever grace the reciprocal of anyone able to see it stand proudly within the tent opening up.

Quatermain turned to the locomotive on legs and began to climb up inside to the open chest compartment, where multiple ropes forming a net of pulley’s and vapour of steam escaped from pipe work outside the contraption. Steam hissed as assistants closed up the front plate like a coffin, clunky metal noises sounded out to surprised spectators as it began to move in heaving steps—the sight was impressive until it blew up to take out everyone within a four metre radius.

1904 January 10th: The next day grounded the irony to all with newspapers declaring “Nemo saws high in several directions”. Hilarious, indeed, for disbelievers of such a tragedy to occur within London town itself, but a fantastical sight for the few seconds the locomotive on legs moved steadily—this part of the news went unmentioned beyond a brief note (in small print) at the end: “Success for a man who did saw above us all”.

1910 January 9th: Six years after the first (and only) attempt to progress machinery onto legs, it becomes a motivating point for some to attempt to work from what remained of the original framework of the locomotive on legs and re-examine the reason behind its original failure when notes left by Nemo claim it to have been a success during the last year of his self imposed three year isolation from the outside world. Two days later the examination begins on the framework left, notes acquired from the Quatermain estate and a one witness account from those close enough (and unscathed) to catch any indication of what might’ve caused the horrific explosion of that cold winter day.

Thought of the Day: September 16th:

I’m bored, so I’m going to write a false history of mecha for the next few days.

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I freaking love me some Alan Moore books. V For Vendetta and Watchmen are the two superhero books I look to when I want to read about a hero trying his damnedest to save their worlds because he creates people first and puts them into the situations that unfold. But he does more than just write people as super heroes, he has an agenda.

When writing Watchmen Alan Moore thought that he was writing the best comic book to ever be printed, he openly admits this, and hoped that it would change the way people write super hero stories and I believe this is why he and Dave Gibbons worked so hard on the project and made sure to put everything they had into it. They weren’t looking for a movie check and didn’t expect that the characters would eventually be handled by someone else, they said This Is It and made it the best possible comic they could imagine.

In Alan Moore’s book on writing comics he talks about panel transitions, rhythm and character development but after his lesson in what comics are and how they function he says point blank to forget everything you’ve read and to develop your own tricks. He says to visit people in prison and get a sense of who they are and to study people who are in trouble and to be a good person and try and find the humanity in everybody.

And he couldn’t be more right. That is what story tellers are attempting, after all. We want to find humanity in other people and this is why Alan Moore’s comics are the best comics on Earth. Watchmen isn’t good because the mystery of who killed the Comedian is so dramatic and engulfing. Watchmen is good because it is the only time in my life that I had ever felt a connection to an openly racist, homophobic man with extreme right wing tendencies.  Alan Moore is an Anarchist and has stated that he intended Rorschach to be so dark and disturbing that people would look at super hero comics in a new light and he did. He made us care for someone who would, in other comics, have been the bad guy.

In V For Vendetta we care, not about V himself but about Evey, the woman he saves and introduces to the world. We care also about the woman who wrote the letter to V while he was imprisoned, which V passed onto Evey.

We even understood the people who had been the bad guys, the corrupt government and their quest for safety and truth and their love of order, the very thing V had wanted to destroy. Alan Moore hadn’t intended for some US film makers to come along and make an allegory out of his film to discuss their disapproval of the Bush administration. His intent was clear. He was afraid of Fascism in his own country when he heard politicians talking about putting gay men and women into concentration camps.

Lost Girls, a pornographic book he wrote with artist Melinda Gebbie (who later became his wife) is about the sexual hang ups people develop based on their introductions to the world of sex as children. He took characters from classic stories and found sex, often in the form of abuse, and how it shaped girls into women.

His other works, such as From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, Miracle Man and such feature people in difficult situations overcoming surmountable odds and are often deep in historical accuracies. Swamp Thing features some of the most brilliant writing I have ever seen and gave warmth and humanity to a creature that would otherwise be the Scary Monster of a b horror film.

This is the face of madness and his name is Alan Moore. He dares to take people on as they are rather than see the stiff ideologies that so many of us hide behind. He doesn’t believe that people are all good or all evil, but rather that people are problematic and that they do what they think is best. He often tries to figure out why people think the way they do and that is what makes his stories far better than anything else out there.

      It is certainly possible that Jack the Ripper has given birth to the 20th Century Man (a being coping with being flooded with post-Industrial availability– knowledge and experience brought by easy access, mass resources, transportation and expansion of land– and the fear, strange but seemingly inevitable, in constantly changing cities where the claustrophobic proximity of worlds of people makes them unavoidable yet distanced, alienated and alienating) and the serial killer or, more correctly, the media’s serial killer. No one knows for sure if serial killers existed before The Ripper– it’s doubted but, if true, irrelevant, as we the writer, the readers, and society at large are dealing with the serial killer as formed by the 20th century’s new waves of technology creating the concepts of media and coverage and sensationalism. The serial killer itself in our post-Industrial society ceases to be a human being not based on more complicated thoughts of morality and the deeds of killer making him a “monster,” “animal,” or “demon”; he ceases to be a human because, once in the media he is in himself a concept, an idea, a symbol used in media, in propaganda to illustrate (and carry the burden of) a threat, a danger, a chaos supposedly only the city knows.

      So it is possible Jack the Ripper birthed (or merely illuminated, unearthed) the mentality of 20th century society but it certainly can be turned around and said the 20th century urbanization gave birth to him for the same reasons and with the same effect.

      The 2001 film, From Hell, directed by Albert and Allen Hughes, adapted from Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel of the same name, opens with the above quote. The Hughes brothers film street stories. Menace II Society, Dead Presidents: ghetto life, the crimes of the impoverished, the ‘hood– street stories. While initially it may have been surprising to see them herald a project about Victorian London and Jack the Ripper until one realized it was still a street story in someone else’s ‘hood but with the same tragic life of impoverished criminals.

      The focus of this paper, however, is does not include From Hell for simple technical reasons but mention of it must be made for the fact of it being a film about the world’s first covered serial killer, born of– or giving birth to– the city. The focus of the paper is the portrayal of the serial killer in the fiction films M by Fritz Lang and Summer of Sam by Spike Lee.

      The fact that David Berkowitz of Summer of Sam was a real man (or, for that matter, so Jack the Ripper must have been) and M’s Hans Beckert was not is irrelevant. In fact, it can and will be argued that Berkowitz and the Ripper as we know them from media and stories are, too, like Hans Beckert, inspired by real figures but aren’t actually real. As it is unnecessary and, indeed, irrelevant for a reader to agree or disagree with the actions of any fictional literary character, it is unnecessary for film audiences to take a character on film, even if based on a real person, as the real being. It is absurd. That aside, the writer of the paper can treat these serial killers as the allegorical figures of urban hysteria as their respective films portray them.

      Lang and Lee’s films don’t pretend to be about the killers themselves. These are not the killers’ biographies documenting the degradation that led to murderous desires or day-in-the-life films focusing the acts of murder; these are films, essentially, about the city the killers are part of and the fear gripping its citizens, the hysteria and chaos that makes monsters of all, bringing the worst assumptions and suspicions to the surface– assumptions and suspicions where one can say, as said in M, “the killer is all of us. Your neighbor could be the murderer.” Tom Gunning, in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity argues how M’s Hans Beckert is only an embodiment of an ideal with which to illustrate the depravity of the expressionistic, chaotic city: 

…the city in M seems to possess a will of its own…it could be seen as the protagonist of the film. The film’s lack of an immediately identifiable protagonist …marks its greatest difference…the film co-ordinates several points of view, presenting a number of semi-autonomous episodes, all centered around the search for a murderer of children. The film does not pivot around Hans Beckert, but around his absence rather than his presence, around the search for this mysterious and initially elusive figure….he is the film’s blind spot, its aporia, rather than its point of coherence. (Gunning, 164) 

      In a 1999 interview with Prairie Miller, collected among the many in Spike Lee: Interviews, edited by Cynthia Fuchs, Spike Lee makes clear that: “[The film Summer of Sam] is not about David Berkowitz. It’s not about Son of Sam. It’s about his evil energy that affected 8 million New Yorkers…Our intention was never to do a film about a serial killer…our intention was never to go into the mind of a psychopath and to follow him…that’s not the film we made (Fuchs, 179, 182).

      Lang and Lee both made a conscious effort not to show their respective killers’ faces throughout the movie. Instead, both directors found ways to represent them symbolically and as symbols themselves. When we first see Hans Beckert in M, he is but a shadow looming on the screen, standing over his latest child victim, Elsie Beckmann, who herself is represented by the ball she plays with, bouncing off of a wall with, coincidentally, the police poster announcing the presence of the murderer on the streets of Berlin. Beckert’s face is never seen outside of his own home as he stands in the mirror, making grotesque faces as, in voice-over, police commissioner Lohmann describes how he and his police teams are following specific strategies in trying to find the killer. In Summer of Sam, Berkowitz is always shot from the chin down or from the rear, stalking his victims in shadows further cloaking his identity. He is represented by the large lettered and/or numbered toy blocks he uses to spell out “Murder” and “Victims 1,2,3,4,5,6, and 7″– always shown with strategic editing after he’s committed another murder and before or during newsreel radio voice-overs or television footage, as if taunting the police with more than the physical letter he’s written to Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin warning he “won’t stop”, just as M’s Beckert writes to Berlin’s newspaper for publication of his warning to kill again.  Only in his house, surrounded by rotting food, walls covered in his own insane graffiti where he writes about his love for blood and killing, is his face shown, his body nearly fully naked– in their homes are the killer’s exposed, vulnerable as victims of themselves.

      In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer describes M’s Hans Beckert: “[Beckert is] Cesare as his own Caligari,” alluding to Carl Mayer and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligeri, an original German Expressionist film that undoubtedly influenced Lang. The idea that internal forces, even those imagined in the crazed mind as external, are driving these killers is expressed in the M and …Sam: Beckert, defending himself at the kangaroo court at the film’s end, and Berkowitz, in his confession in a letter to Jimmy Breslin, both admit to voices or demons compelling them to murder. “I can’t help it,” Beckert sobs helplessly. “…this cursed thing inside me…this fire, this voice, this agony…screams and cries out inside me when I have to [kill]…” Berkowitz claims his god or devil, Sam, “commands me to kill…he loves to drink blood.” It is often unclear, even to Berkowitz, whether Sam is the one he follows/worships, or himself. He uses Sam and “I” or “me” interchangeably while simultaneously calling him “Father Sam” that instructs him to murder. Furthermore, he claims a 1,000 year old dog named Harvey also barks inside his head and won’t quiet until he’s killed. These killers, possessed of “evil” spirits or of themselves, are victims– helpless against the raging of the voices.

      As the killers in the films are represented by objects associated with them, so are their victims. As previously mentioned, Beckert’s victim Elsie Beckmann is never shown onscreen physically after she’s been snatched by Hans– her death is revealed as the ball she’s played with her entire onscreen time rolls out slowly on the grass and the balloon Hans buys for her, released from her lifeless hand, floats on the wind and is tangled in a group of telephone wires– the balloon, a strangely deformed human-like shape, tangled in the wires seems to suggest the plight of Elsie, Hans’ other child victims, and perhaps all of the city dwellers as victims tangled up in the terror and alienation of urban life where good and evil are available in floods at one’s fingertips and people, piled on top of one another without being able to touch, see, and understand each other, are forced to collide into each other only in violence in fear and hysteria. In Summer of Sam, Berkowitz’s victims are represented by their cars as they are almost always out late, parked in lover’s lanes or abandoned lots, when they are murdered. Though we often do see the victims’ faces and their deaths, we might as well haven’t seen them at all– whenever we see a car onscreen at night we almost certainly expect a murder, the tension rising as audience connects in the mind the victims to their cars– there is more focus on the car than the actual victims.

      The concept of justice in the two films is immensely complex and there is no real distinguishing between the “good guys” and “bad guys”– or, more appropriately, the guys who should be credited with ridding the streets of the evil force looming. This is brilliantly emphasized in both movies by both directors’ skillful cross-cutting between the police and vigilantes as they plot to find the killer and race each other to catch him first.

      The police force, often taken to be an allegorical representation of upstanding, though evidently inefficient democracy– and vital to the argument of whether it is wise to compromise democratic individual rights for public security. The vigilantes who seek to find the killer mostly because he– Beckert and Berkowitz– is “bad for business,” bringing more attention to their own criminal activities as the police search through their turf. In Lang’s film, one of the thieves laments, “Cops are crawling the streets like ants again…on your back even if you’re with a broad…every night I have to check under the bed to see if the murderer’s hiding there. You can’t do business anymore for tripping over cops anymore…measures taken by the police and the daily raids…are hampering our activities…the police have been after this murderer for eight months now– we can’t wait. We have to catch him” The vigilantes in Lee’s film are Italian-American gangster wannabes, pushing small time drugs and starting petty street fights for restlessness, following orders from (perhaps) legitimate Boss, Luigi, who echoes, “We gotta catch this rat bastard! We gotta do it– because [the police] can’t…” The vigilantes are merciless, lashing out on anyone suspicious, and in M are allegorical representations themselves of the Nazi Party, “cleansing” the city and country of all threats to the “good” German ethics– whether psychological, racial, or religious. In Summer of Sam, they lash out on foreigners, out-of-staters, minorities, even targeting the Punk Rock Ritchie, friend of Vinnie, one of the “boys.” Ritchie, in fact, could be extended to represent that “one little girl” saved in M by the hurried, merciless efforts of the vigilantes, however, Ritchie is caught by the vigilantes, assumed to be the Son of Sam based on extreme (to them) music and fashion tastes. Ritchie is tortured by Luigi’s puppets and is saved only when the news is announced that the police, unlike the police in M, have caught the real murderer. Ritchie is an inadvertent, offhand victim of Sam (or Sam’s influence), and is, like Elsie and her ball, Berkowitz and his dice, and Beckert and his shadow, represented symbolically by his guitar and, in turn, represents the new revolution rejected vehemently by mainstream society at the time– it is interesting to note the parallels between the excesses and artistic progress of late-70s to 80s New York and Weimar Berlin, both movements eventually crushed by new political powers.

      Spike Lee and Fritz Lang both go to great lengths to explore the social circumstances that enable the serial killer to thrive in modern cities as well as the cycle of hysteria that both creates and is created by the serial killer. Both films are less portraits of psychopaths than portraits of cities. Both films are saturated in allegory– Lang’s admittedly more than Lee’s but both are allegorical just the same– and provide vital social commentary to, hopefully, help viewers to reflect on the problems of urbanization and technology, industrialization, and overpopulation.