A teenager’s vision of utopia: Kill off the criminals!

'Death Note' is a clever, absorbing manga series about a teen who acquires supernatural power to kill people.

"Death Note" is the clever, absorbing, illustrated tale of a teenage boy who stumbles across a supernatural tool. Simply by writing someone's name into the so-called Death Note, a book originally belonging to a death god, the teenager is able to determine the time and manner of their death.

The book's new owner doesn't write in the names of his personal enemies, as one might expect some teenagers to do. Rather, as an excellent student and the son of a police officer, he immediately begins a social experiment by writing in the names of jailed criminals. He believes he is crafting a crime-free utopia over which he will eventually rule as a righteous dictator (after he graduates, of course).

His mentor in this project is the death god himself. The being's name is Ryuk, and he is one of many shinigami, the Japanese word for the death gods. Ryuk does not outwardly express loyalty to any particular person or social agenda, but he occasionally reveals one of the supernatural rules that govern the use of the Death Note. He also proffers the Faustian bargain of additional magical powers in exchange for a reduced lifespan.

Ryuk wins the award for the creepiest, most evil invisible friend ever. In the art by Takeshi Obata, the death god has the physique of an orangutan and the wings of a pterodactyl. He has bulging, unblinking eyes and a freakish, fixed grin that looks as though it was carved into his face with a knife, revealing pointed teeth. He follows the protagonist around, but no one else can see him or hear him.

The godlike power to kill people mainly by the power of imagination is reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," based on a 1953 short story by Jerome Bixby. In that episode, a six-year-old boy can make anything on earth die or disappear simply by wishing it. The narrative flaw in "It's a Good Life" is that the existence of the entire planet depends on a boy's petulance, so the world - and therefore the story - ends too quickly.

Death Note's writer Tsugumi Ohba avoids this plot pitfall by restricting its protagonist's powers. The teenager who possesses the death god's notebook can ordain anyone's death, but only if he knows the victim's name and face. This is a clever restriction, as it enables potential victims to protect themselves by remaining total strangers and hiding their identities, and it also enables them to guess at the killer's identity based on the assumption that all the victims' names and photographs were available to the killer.

The mystery is not resolved in the first volume. The full story is told across 12 volumes.  It is available in English translation with "unflopped" art – that is, it is still laid out to be read from right to left, as originally designed for Japanese readers. The font used for the English-language Death Note is both funny and creepy.

At the time of Death Note's publication in 2004, Japan was the only industrial democracy apart from the United States that still practiced capital punishment. (This remains true in 2013.) This, no doubt, helps drive the teenager's assumption that it is acceptable for him to target incarcerated people by imposing his own death sentence. He thus plays into the death god's ruse.

Originally posted to Helium Network on Sept. 9, 2012.

Image: Soul Eater cosplay - Shinigami, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Originally posted to Flickr by user 'Gurney5'. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Frank Cauldhame: Murder 'was just a stage I was going through’

Frank Cauldhame is the fictional narrator of "The Wasp Factory," a novel by Scottish author Iain Banks (1954-2013). Published in 1984, it won the Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis in 1992. It is a controversial novel because of its graphic, unremitting depictions of animal and child abuse.

Frank's character, born in 1964 and "nearly seventeen" when the book opens, appears to be a psychopathic teenager enduring childhood traumas with a flat affect. He perpetrates crimes against others with no conscience. The main problem that drives his unusual personality is only partially known to him and is not fully revealed to him and the reader until the end of book. Because of his lack of self-awareness, Frank may be considered an unreliable narrator.

Crimes and psychopathy

Frank reveals at the beginning of the book that he killed a playmate, a brother and a cousin in separate incidents, the last murder occurring in 1973. The manners of their deaths are revealed over the course of the novel. In no case did he use his own hands or a weapon to directly injure his victims. Instead, in all cases, he abused the victims' trust and engineered booby traps in which the victims' actions triggered their own deaths. Each scenario was more elaborate than the last. However, he does not intend to continue, he assures the reader: "It was just a stage I was going through."

Frank had an atypical childhood. His parents did not register his birth, so he has no legal documentation, "nothing to say I'm alive or have ever existed," and cannot attend school on the Scottish island where he has always lived. Publicly, he is supposed to pretend that his father is his uncle and that his brothers are his cousins. He is unclear what his father does for a living. His mother abandoned the family long ago, and he cannot remember her. His older brother, the one he didn't kill, is mentally unstable. Noting that his father keeps an explosive in the basement, Frank interprets it as "something about a link with the past, or an evil demon we have lurking, a symbol for all our family misdeeds; waiting, perhaps, one day, to surprise us."

There are additional stresses. When he was three years old, the family dog, Old Saul, bit off his genitals, according to family lore. His father shot the dog, recovered the body parts from his stomach, and preserved them in alcohol. This was said to occur on the same day that his brother Paul was born and their mother abandoned the family. His father only pokes fun at his castration, occasionally making comments that refer to "better men than you." Frank refers to the matter as his "little accident" resulting in his "unfortunate disability" and "my loss"; he is "not a full man," but perhaps "an honorary man" with "uncastrated genes." Based on what he believes about his hormones, he complains about being "too plump," and would prefer to look "dark and menacing" as he feels would befit a murderer. "It isn't fair," he says.

Faced with this double erasure of his existence – no legal substantiation of his family relationships or his right to attend school, and no physical testimony of the gender to which he believes himself to belong – Frank craves power. He is impressed by the power of the sea. "It does things to the world, and so do I; we should both be feared." His only friend is Jamie, identified as a "dwarf," whom he sometimes carries. After committing his first murder, Frank lies to a playmate and says that the "accidental" death appeared to be a judgment from God, clarifying that "the one I believed in was" a god who would mete out judgment like that. His father, by contrast, he says, only enjoys "little bits of bogus power" by attempting to keep secrets from him. These details reveal how he interprets life in terms of power that can be exerted.

Contradictory beliefs

With some frequency, Frank contradicts himself. Of his brother Eric, who burns dogs and sheep, rants and raves, and has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, he says: "He is mad and I am sane." The assertion of sanity is not convincing to the reader, arriving, as it does, immediately after the comment: "I would try to contact Eric through the skull of Old Saul." (Frank dug up the skull of the dog he believed castrated him, places a candle in it, and uses it as an occult device for spiritual communication.) He feels that one of his powers is "imaginative intelligence" and that, if he can't use it to deal with Eric, "then I deserved to be destroyed." Diagnosing himself as sane while reporting many details that imply the contrary is one way in which Frank is unreliable.

Another contradiction is his misogyny. He claims that women, who he knows best from fictional representations, "cannot withstand really major things happening to them" without breaking down and committing suicide. He acknowledges, however, that his own male relatives – not the female ones – committed suicide. Other assumptions about women's weakness compared to men is demonstrably untrue (including by using his own life as a counterexample, for reasons to be seen later).

While he claims that "there has always been a part of me which has felt guilty about killing Blyth, Paul and Esmerelda," this conscience, like an "opposition party in a parliament," is "not in power and unlikely to assume it." Later, he contradicts his own claim to having any conscience at all: "I am convinced that only my genuinely clear conscience let me convince the adults around me that I was totally innocent." He pretends to feel guilty about not being able to save his brother only for the purpose of throwing the adults off his scent. He even details a "romantic vision" of his cousin's final hours, saying, "I would like to think that...she died of starvation and dehydration..." This does not sound like guilt.

He excuses the murders with the analysis that "children aren't real people." They are "a separate species" that will one day become adults. This is an odd comment coming from a teenager, especially given that he was a child himself when he murdered three other children.

And, while his first murder was an act of revenge against a child who had burned rabbits, Frank himself burns rabbits, years later, and takes satisfaction in it. For all of these reasons, it is hard to trust what Frank says. However, he is the reader's only source of information about his life.

No longer a psychopath?

At the very end of the book, after learning that he is female, born with the name Frances, the character seems to soften. "My fathers' truth has murdered what I was," he says. He acknowledges his past crimes as "appalling" and begins to analyze his motivations for having killed: maybe he wanted to prevent other children from becoming adults, as he felt he had "no purpose in life or procreation" and regretted that he could not become an adult himself. ("There wouldn't be much point to me getting married perhaps," he said earlier in the book.) "I believe that I decided if I could never become a man, I – the unmanned – would out-man those around me, and so I became the killer, a small image of the ruthless soldier-hero almost all I've ever seen or read seems to pay strict homage to." The truth was always available to him, in his own body, but he never wanted to see it. "I was proud; eunuch but unique; a fierce and noble presence in my lands, a crippled warrior, fallen prince...Now I find I was the fool all along."

This transformation of the character at the end of the novel is a bit unrealistic. In real life, psychologists believe that the lack of a conscience is an inborn trait. It can be somewhat exacerbated or softened by parenting or culture, but it is basically unchangeable. The emotional abuse of Frances wrought by her father's story that she was a castrated boy would not be expected, on its own, to turn her into a psychopath, nor would the revelation of the truth be expected to cure her psychopathy. However, "The Wasp Factory" is probably not intended as a representative depiction of teenage psychopaths. It is, instead, a symbolic exploration of various kinds of power dynamics and the effect of family secrets.

Image by Nicholas Chevalier, oil on canvas, 1887 ("Seeking Fortune" or "Emigrant Boy") © Public domain due to expiration of copyright Wikimedia Commons.

It's better with conscience

In "The Sociopath Next Door," Martha Stout makes impressive contributions to psychology and moral theory. She is a psychologist who has worked with "hundreds of survivors" of "the damage caused by the sociopaths among us," and presents a thirteen-point checklist for avoiding being victimized by manipulative people. She also gives her account of what conscience is.

She begins by paying homage to Robert Hare, saying that his "Psychopathy Checklist" is "now accepted as a standard diagnostic instrument for researchers and clinicians worldwide." Hare penned "Without Conscience" (1993) in which he described psychopaths as people who lack empathy. They are not delusional; they simply choose to do things that they know are considered to be wrong, because they lack the interpersonal bonds and complex emotions that would lend meaning to social rules that otherwise seem arbitrary.

They are not interested in being "cured" because they do not believe there is anything wrong with them. Hare explained that he was developing a Canadian program for psychopathic violent offenders that would "convince them that their current attitudes and behavior are not in their own self-interest, and that they alone must bear responsibility for their behavior." As for everyone else, he advised them simply to avoid psychopaths.

In her book "The Sociopath Next Door" (2005), Stout works from Hare's definition — her preferred term "sociopath" means essentially the same thing as Hare's term "psychopath" — but she goes beyond the scope of Hare's book. She develops extended fictional stories that illustrate the key features of sociopathy. She also provides a working definition of the presence, not just the absence, of conscience. These positive passages are often inspirational, and they read beautifully. (Occasionally a sentence rings like the beginning of a poem, as in "We never asked for conscience. It is just there," and "Do not set her up to be gaslighted.")

Calling conscience an "essential seventh sense" (coming after the "sixth sense" of intuition) and identifying it as operating on autopilot most of the time, Stout points out that most people cannot even imagine what it would be like not to have one. What would it be like not to care about family and friends? Never to feel a sinking sensation in the stomach upon wondering if you might have inadvertently injured someone? This seems to require imagining not being human at all, but instead being some kind of robot.

For the estimated 4 percent of Americans who are sociopaths, Stout writes, "the intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all." They treat their dealings with other people as a zero-sum game.

To win is to manipulate others and not to get caught. Sometimes they believe their own lies, which "makes self-awareness impossible, and in the end, just as the sociopath has no genuine relationships with other people, he has only a very tenuous one with himself." Sociopaths are disproportionately represented in the prison population, and among prisoners they disproportionately represent those convicted of the "most serious crimes."

Some sociopaths do not believe that there is such a thing as conscience; not being able to feel it themselves, they believe that others are faking these emotions. Other sociopaths recognize that others have moral feelings, and they simply view these "conscience-bound" people as weak, because their consciences limit them from pursuing self-interested goals, whereas the sociopath has no such limitation. The sociopath will try to exploit the moral feelings of others by seeking their pity.

Stout says that the numbers of sociopaths in Asia today are much lower than in North America — for example, only one-tenth of one percent of the population in Taiwan is said to be sociopathic. While research has found that genetics plays a significant role in the development of sociopathic personality traits, culture also plays a role. "Perhaps a culture that insists on connectedness as a matter of belief," as many Asian cultures do, she writes, "can instill a strictly cognitive understanding of interpersonal obligation" where an intuitive emotional understanding is lacking.

In other words, a culture that preaches the interconnectedness of all living things can teach someone with a limited emotional life to act as if they cared, whereas a culture that preaches ruthless capitalism gives them free rein to act like a sociopath. Her dramatic pronouncement is that "a Western family by itself cannot redeem a born sociopath. There are too many other voices in the larger society implying that his approach to the world is correct."

Stout explores why conscience-bound people claim to prefer having a conscience and do not express a wish to live without one. The conscience is not merely the imagined voice of the parent, inducing guilt and fear, what Freud called the "superego." It's a positive drive based on genuine caring. It gives meaning to life, a deeper happiness than can be achieved through the mere fulfillment of selfish desires.

She also explores the difficulties of being conscience-bound. People with conscience often refuse to admit the possibility that some people "live in a permanent and absolute moral nighttime," preferring to rationalize sociopathic crimes as if the criminals erred in their moral calculations rather than monstrously succeeded. As a result, to normal people, "most of the sociopaths are invisible." When people do become suspicious, they tend to overcompensate by prejudicially distrusting large swathes of the population; such approaches are "irrational strategies that readily become lifelong superstitions" and "tend to produce anxiety and unhappiness in our lives." Another difficulty is that people can become temporarily detached from their sense of right and wrong. There is a statistically effective way to disable an individual conscience: "we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences." She references Stanley Milgram's famous experiment and the book "On Killing" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.

This book covers a lot of territory while often seeming just on the edge of breaking out into lyricism. It will be fertile ground for many students of psychology and ethics.

The ‘prostitute with a gun’ was a middle-class high school girl

For background on the Amy Fisher story, please read Panic Around Pagers: Old and New (5 min read)
Thirty years ago, parents worried bad people would place beepers on their kids. The risks have mutated.
When we were reading Amy Fisher headlines 32 years ago and worrying about what pagers might do to our lives, most of us did not imagine them as explosives.

Anyhow:

After Fisher was sentenced to prison on Dec. 2, 1992, media attention continued. There were to be multiple movies and books, as well as the trial of Joey Buttafuoco.

Several movies aired on network television. NBC aired "Amy Fisher: My Story" on Dec. 28. CBS aired "Casualties of Love: The 'Long Island Lolita' Story" on Jan. 3 during the same hours that ABC aired "The Amy Fisher Story", which, according to Sheila Weller, was a competitive approach "unprecedented in TV history." All of the movies received high Nielsen ratings.

Additionally, Fisher's memoir Amy Fisher: My Story, written with Sheila Weller, was released in 1993 while she was in prison. The book reported huge amounts of detail about her affairs, her prostitution, and her premeditation of the murder attempt, but it did not have much to say about feelings of remorse, other than a grunting acknowledgment (filtered through Weller) that she knew she deserved to be in prison.

Joe Buttafuoco initially said he knew Amy Fisher only insofar as he'd serviced the Fisher family's cars at his auto body shop. But on Oct. 5, 1993, he pleaded guilty to one count of statutory rape for having sex with Fisher while she was still 16. He served several months in prison for it. Even after this revelation, the Buttafuocos remained married. They moved to California and stayed together until Mary Jo filed for divorce in 2003. The shooting had left her with permanent nerve damage and chronic pain.

When Amy Fisher was released from prison in 1999, she married Lou Bellera, a former cop, and they had three children. She took a job as a columnist for the Long Island Press and released her memoir If I Knew Then in 2004.

Following the Buttafuocos' divorce, Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco came back into contact. In 2006, they participated in the coin toss at a football game, and in 2007, they appeared on television together. At this late date, however, a decade and a half after the original events, it seemed there was little of great national interest to add to their story.

On Feb. 11, 2008, Fox News published an interview in which Fisher called her shooting victim a "nonentity" and complained that she was making money off her ordeal:

"I feel no sympathy for Mary Jo the multimillionaire! The fact that Mary Jo has a bullet in her head means nothing! I still have silicone in my boobs, and you don't hear me complaining. She can't feel her bullet, and I can't feel my silicone."

(Fisher also bragged that she'd recently had sex with Joey Buttafuoco during a week-long affair and that she didn't enjoy it because he'd aged.)

The following month, she appeared as a commentator on truTV's "The Smoking Gun Presents: World's Dumbest..." show. Former figure skater Tonya Harding has also appeared as a commentator there. Similar to Fisher, Harding became a notorious media figure in the 1990s after rival figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was attacked with a tire iron. Harding denied knowing of the attack before it happened, but she admitted to helping her ex-husband and bodyguard cover up their involvement. The implied bad-girl comparison between Fisher and Harding – neither of whom managed to regain successful careers, and who have been reduced to performing in degrading verbal and physical fights on television – was not promising for either of them.

In 2009, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, by then engaged to marry a new man, released her book Getting it Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved With Sociopaths Need to Know, written with Julie McCarron.

In 2011, Fisher appeared on "Celebrity Rehab" discussing her pornographic performances and use of alcohol. The televised charity fundraiser "Celebrity Fight Night" pitted Buttafuoco against Fisher's husband Bellera in the boxing ring, while Fisher was matched against Nadya Suleman (famous only for deliberately having fourteen children as a single mother).

In 2012, Joey Buttafuoco claimed he was writing his own memoir. “It's going to have every single detail that hasn't been out there yet," he said. "It's called 'Closure' because I think without full disclosure you have no closure." Whether the memoir will ever be completed and published, and whether there will be a market for it over twenty years after his various crimes – both the alleged and the admitted – remains to be seen. Public interest has moved on. As of 2024, it seems no memoir has been published.

Image: You never know who might be standing on your doorstep. Photograph of a doorbell by Jim Kuhn, Wheaton, Md. Uploaded by Yarl. © [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.