ZOMBIE: Why ZOMBIE?

Why ZOMBIE?

"Why would you want to adapt and perform in something so depressing?" well-meaning people have asked.

There's no doubt - ZOMBIE is provocative, challenging, disturbing.

So is Picasso.

Whenever a serial killer strikes - people ask, "How can this happen?"

ZOMBIE is Joyce Carol Oates' answer to the question.

She takes you deep inside the mind of serial killer.

You begin to understand how he thinks and feels. You follow his logic - it actually begins to make sense to you.

Which is horrifying. But he is human - so we recognize many of his habits and traits as our own - taken to the most extreme limits.

By the end of the play, you might even feel a little sorry for him. You might feel some empathy for a man who has done horrible things. Because he is a human being.

Even though the play is distressing, ultimately it is humanistic.

And very worthwhile doing.

--Bill Connington


nytheatre.com Interviews Bill Connington:

NYTheatre.com: What is your show about?

BC: ZOMBIE is about a Jeffrey Dahmer-esque serial killer. The most arresting thing about the character Quentin is he seems so “normal”. He’s almost bland, like someone you would see at the hardware store. When serial killings occur, people always ask “How could this happen?” ZOMBIE answers the question by taking you inside the mind of a sexual psychopath. It’s scary because what he talks about is graphic and violent—but you begin to understand what he’s thinking and feeling. By the end, you might even feel a little sorry for him.

NYTheatre.com: Why is your show pertinent to today’s times and/or why should your show be the choice for audiences to see?

BC: Serial killers are usually white males between the ages of 18 and 40. America has the highest number of serial killers in the world. At any given time there are 500 at large in the USA. Why is that? Just last week they solved some serial killings that went back 30 years. What happens when outwardly “normal” people snap? The play gives some insight into this question. The show is a ride through the dark side, but the drama is tempered by black humor—it’s certainly not like a sociology lecture!

NYTheatre.com: Why did you choose to present this show?

BC: Joyce Carol Oates--one of the greatest writers in America--plus a narcissistic sexual- predator-killer? The combination was irresistible. ZOMBIE is like a great Edgar Allen Poe story, but it’s based on truth, so the horror is real. The scariest thing about the story is the serial killer’s urges are so human. We’ve all felt some of the things he feels, but he takes things to the most terrible extremes--and acts on them. A great part of the fear is thinking, “I’ve sometimes felt things this killer is feeling. Is there something wrong with me? Am I like him?”

JEFFREY DAHMER, NOVEMBER 1994 by Joyce Carol Oates

Included in the book "Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose" by JOYCE CAROL OATES

"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires," the English visionary poet William Blake counsels in the "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". Jeffrey Dahmer was no pedophile, however: His seventeen acknowledged victims were young men between the ages of fourteen and thirty-three. He cruised bars, bus stations, "adult" bookstores seeking prey. He was Caucasian, his victims mainly black, Hispanic, and Asian--by sexual preference, or by chance? Or did he shrewdly reason that, perceived as "marginal" human beings, his victims, should they have survived to testify against him, would not appear so convincing to police or in a courtroom as he? In an extraordinary and now notorious confirmation of Dahmer's racist assumptions, two Milwaukee police officers, in May 1991, actually returned to Dahmer a fourteen-year-old Laotian boy when the boy was found dazed and bleeding in a city street. (After the case broke months later, this incident stirred a good deal of public outrage, since it exposed the racist attitude of the Milwaukee Police Department; even under fire, police officials were reluctant to censure, or even criticize the officers.) Dahmer was finally arrested a few months later, following the flight of another abused victim into the street, tried, and convicted of fifteen counts of homicide; at the time of his bludgeoning death on November 28 at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin, Dahmer was serving fifteen consecutive life terms.

The "serial killer" with no apparent motive for his monstrous crimes except the gratification of desire has become, in the 1990s, an icon of pop culture. The most difficult of criminals to trace, since his connections with his victims are almost always wholly imagined, such a killer is a romantic figure in reverse: sexually obsessed, isolated by his compulsions, the very portrait of demonic possession; one whose entire outward life has been constructed as a means to satisfy the forbidden.

When Dahmer sighted a potential victim, a young man or boy who aroused him, his first thought was "How can I get him?" His second thought was "How can I keep him?" Dahmer lured his victims to his apartment with promises of drugs, alcohol, and money; he then trapped them, killed, and dismember them, storing body parts on the premises (not all of them refrigerated: Dahmer's neighors in this apartment building complained of the stench, but no investigation was ever made). Though Dahmer had a history of sexual misbehavior, and was in fact reporting to a Milwaukee parole officer at the time of most of his killings, he seemed to have operated, like so many serial killer, in a dreamlike suspension of ordinary logic and common sense; the remarkable thing in such cases is the blindness or indifference of the authorities, the purposeful lack of curiosity, or denial, of family and relatives. (What did Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin's mother and sister, with whom he lived, imagine he was doing on his nights out, with his accumulating mementos of female victims, and an occasional decomposing body in his truck?) So long as the serial killer chooses his victims from the ever-shifting population of drifters, prostitutes, the disenfranchised of contemporary America, those seemingly lacking identity, he can operate with impunity for a very long time. He will only be caught through some blunder of his own, not through police investigation.

Media fascination with lurid crimes feeds a seemingly insatiable sensation-hungry public, yet such treatments generally focus upon the criminal as freak, as monster, a "stranger" in the midst of the presumably normal. What is less known, or acknowledged, are the odd, disturbing, yet surely significant connections between extremes of psychopathic behavior and behavior considered "normal," if not enlightened. The notorious fetishism of the serial killer, for instance, is simply a heightening, to a point beyond parody, of the lover's obsession with some aspect, or part, of the beloved--"part," in some quarters, taken literally. (Dahmer's most cherished love objects were not young men, nor even the bodies of young men, but parts of their bodies.) There is the impulse, too, to memorialize an "erotic" interlude by way of mementos or souvenirs, or even art; the grotesque exaggeration of the lover's mock-wish to "devour" the beloved that manifests itself in actual acts of cannibalism. Dahmer, for instance, seems to have had artistic impulses of a kind, painting the skulls of some of his victims, taking Polaroid shots of their dismembered bodies arranged as "still lifes." So too Dahmer's necrophagy, or cannibalism: He explained that he wanted to keep his victims with him, and there was no other way except to kill and eat them. (At least in theory. Dahmer in fact seems to have been fairly abstemious.) We know that acts of cannibalism defined as "ritual cannibalism," thus not in violation of taboo, have been a feature of peoples and and religions considered "primitive" by contemporary Western standards of civilization (and sanitation), but, in metaphor at least, they are a staple of most religions, including Christianity. "Take of my body and eat." The communal incorporation of the divine being, or life force, into one's own (mortal) body by way of the mouth; the mystic conjoining of lover and loved (or worshipped) object; the "transcendence" of the merely physical, finite, and ephemeral. Mere sexual gratification, so quickly achieved, is hardly the point of such willfully, riskily extended "perverted" behavior; that it is of enormous significance to the killer explains why he keeps such evidence close at hand, in fact enshrining it, instead of disposing of it.

What an enigma, the "serial killer"--he who murders not for monetary gain, which we might understand, but for passion's capricious sake! This is the stuff of poetry, even if bad poetry; of art, even if repellent art. The serial killer is not even a savage beast, but an anomaly in nature itself, for if, in Darwinian terms, nature is compulsively concerned with the propagation of the very best genes of a species, it is impossible to read the serial killer as "natural" in any way; even in the disagreeable, politically incorrect way in which some sociobiologists see rape (of female by male) as "natural." So the serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer remains a riddle, a koan, not simply in human terms but in biological terms as well. We understand him, finally, no better than we understand ourselves.

I HAD NO OTHER THRILL OR HAPPINESS: THE LITERATURE OF SERIAL KILLERS by Joyce Carol Oates


Included in the book "Where I've Been, And Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose" by JOYCE CAROL OATES

"...Of these unsolved murders, the FBI estimates that at least 3,500 are committed by serial killers who will kill again, and again, and again, so long as they are capable, since these are individuals whose self-definition, whose sole HAPPINESS, is bound up with killing. The FBI also estimates that there are at least five hundred serial killers currently at large and unidentified in the United State and that, with only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States produces and astounding 75 percent of the world's serial killers."

"...Norris makes the point that serial killer, the overwhelming majority Caucasian males between the ages of twenty and forty, are physically and psychologically damaged individuals; most of them have suffered brain injuries from childhood beatings, and most of them are visibly scarred; nearly all are chronic alcoholics and drug users. ([Charles] Manson, for example, was an unwanted, battered child, already pathologically brutalized by the age of twelve.) None of them is "sane" if to be "sane" is to exercise volitional control over one's actions."

"...According to Norris, the compulsive killings of serial killers constitute "morality plays" in which, repeatedly, with different victims, the same tale is enacted; committing and recommitting murder may be interpreted as "a sum total of the perceived childhood horrors and [the killer's] chronic damaged physical condition..."

"...The serial killer has no free will, no free intelligence, no "self" apart from the psycholpathological predicament of his fate."

"Yet a mechanistic model can't account for the obvious fact that, though battered children are unfortunately no uncommon, serial killers are; in fact they constitute a statistical rarity among murderers. Why do some "damaged" individuals grow into active psychopaths and others, the great majority, do not? (Conversely, why would "Son of Sam" David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, Dennis Nilsen, and Jeffrey Dahmer, among others, who had in fact not been brutalized as children, become murderers?)"

"Every commentator I have ever read on the subject of serial killers, including Norris himself, makes the point that the serial killer is virtually impossible to "reform"; he is often highly manipulative and "charming"; he tells psychiatrists, parole boards, judges, and interviewers what they what to hear. Short of locking these "damaged" people up permanently, or implanting electrodes in their brains, it is difficult to imagine what can be done to prevent them from killing, in a democratic society in which civil liberties are honored. Can, and should, the potential for violence be, in effect, punished?

And then, what faith have we in psychiatry, psychology, social work, parole, and probation officers? Even when not cruelly overburdened with clients, these professionals are often gullible and self-serving. Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance, was already a convicted sex offender on supervised probation at the time he killed fifteen men and stored parts of their (partially cannibalized) bodies in his apartment; in theory, he was under the jurisdiction of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, but his female probation officer never visited his residence and clearly knew nothing essential about him. (Several of Dahmer's murders were within hours of visits to his probation officer.)"

"The serial killer has come to seem the very emblem of evil, for his crimes are flagrant and self-delighting violations of tabbo so excessive as to beggar any measure of punishment. Merely "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is inadequate here...Our fascination and revulsion for the "monstrous" among us has to do with our uneasy sense that such persons are forms of ourselves, derailed and gone terribly wrong...as the schizophrenic is a mirror of oneself trapped in a dream life endured in consciousness. The psychopathic serial killer is a deep fantasist of the imagination, his fixations cruel parodies of romantic love and his bizarre, brutal acts frequently related to cruel parodies of "art." The serial killer's immersion in fantasy; his apparent helplessness in the face of his compulsion...the ritualistic and totemic elements of his grotesque "art"; the seemingly insatiable need to orchestrate, and reorchestrate, a drama of hallucinated control; the mystical-erotic "high" released by the consummation, after a lengthy period of premeditation--all suggest a kinship, however distorted, with the artist. If is as if the novelist, playwright, visual artist were incapable of translating his fantasy into words or images but was compelled, by powerful unconscious urges, to locate living individuals to perform for him, at his bequest."

"Necrophilia is a cure, for some, (male) impotence; at any rate, an imaginative attempt for a cure. The necrophiliac exerts control over the dead body as, he believes, he would never exert control over the living. (In Dahmer's case, as it came out at his trial, the necrophiliac's preference was to have sex with the viscera of his victims, as if the "whole" were too intimidating. Cannibalizing of the parts came next.) Or it may be, as Brian Masters quotes Erich Fromm, that necrophiliacs are deeply whose aim 'is to transform all that is alive into dead matter; they want to destroy everything and everybody, often even themselves; their enemy is life itself.'"

"[From Ann E. Schwartz's "The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough"] Many people came to court to see if they could sense any underlying evil in Jeffrey Dahmer by looking at him. I remember being filled with a strange sense of anticipation as I waited in the courtroom to see what a serial killer looked like. I was shocked to see that he looked just like an ordinary fellow. I had thought the pupils of his eyes might do spirals. What he had done was awful, but I could not get over how ordinary he looked. The times I saw him up close, I saw nothing there. He did not appear crazed, like mass murderer Charles Manson, nor did he exude the charm of serial killer Ted Bundy. There was just nothing to him."

"[Referring to Dahmer's father, Lionel Dahmer] But how can one deal with a budding Jeffrey Dahmer, laconic, deeply secretive, a chronic liar as a teenager? How does one even begin to comprehend a son who steals a full-sized department store mannikin--"a male figure, fully dressed in t-shirt and shorts"--ad hides it in his bedroom closet, with the vague mumbled excuse that he'd taken the mannikin "only to demonstrate that he could do it.'...How does one confront a zombie-son with no interest in educating himself, no friends, no future? Is it a defective gene? Or simply bad luck? The blunt fact of Jeffrey Dahmer, as it would appear to be the defining fact for male serial killers in their adolescence, is that, while their coevals are establishing friendships that may last for decades, while they are "dating" and fantasizing romantic and sexual relations of the kind presumed "normal," the serial killer-to-be is fantasizing violent sadistic acts that empower him sexually and yearning for the day when he has the opportunity to make them real. I HAD NO OTHER THRILL OR HAPPINESS.

WHY IS YOUR WRITING SO VIOLENT by Joyce Carol Oates


A New York Times article by JOYCE CAROL OATES, that appeared on May 29, 1981

March 29, 1981

It was on a chill but sunny May morning in 1980 in an antiquated auditorium of steeply tiered seats at the University of Warsaw that the question was asked of me by an earnest young man of about 25, who, like most of the Poles we met, spoke excellent English: Why was my writing so violent? Might it be that my "personal experience," "perhaps my childhood" and, in any case, my "unique temperament" had so "distorted" my vision of mankind and history that the fiction of "Joyce Carol Oates" represented only an "extreme attitude," unfortunately prevalent in contemporary American literature?

That this familiar question was asked of me in Warsaw, where in September of 1944 the insurrection against the Germans by the Polish underground had begun, with the eventual consequence that 200,000 Poles were slaughtered; that this question was asked of me in a city blown up by the departing German Army (the Red Army having discreetly paused on the banks of Vistula to allow five weeks of destruction before crossing to "liberate" what remained of Warsaw); that it was asked of me with a hint of reproach that clearly resonated throughout the crowded gathering struck me as so painful and so ironic and so dispiriting and, in a sad way, so amusing that I could only offer some judiciously chosen and diplomatic words in response.

"Why do you focus on the violent?" The question was asked in Oslo, in Helsinki, in Brussels, in Budapest and in that dramatically "Western" city in Eastern Europe known for its encircling wall. Text: In West Berlin the question was asked with great courtesy and tact, not many miles from where Adolf Hitler proclaimed the Second World War and Dr. Goebbels advanced the notion of "total war." This time the question came with the thoughtful addendum that perhaps my "vision" as a "novelist" had been much influenced by the fact that I had lived for many years in Detroit, Mich. (which appears to have the reputation throughout the world of being a "violent city.")

"You had an unhappy childhood, Miss Oates?" -asked with quizzical smiles, some measure of pity, sympathy. "You were often frightened by life?"

What are we to make of the stubborn bitter truth that one's legitimacy is judged by whether one appears to be "happy" or "unhappy"; that one's work is somehow assessed in terms of spiritual uplift it offers? "Happiness" is predicated as a cultural norm, so that any deviation from it, however justified, however inescapable, arouses not only pity but reproach. As true as this might be for male writers, it is all the more true for female writers, since there is a violation of some unspoken rule in the very fact that a woman writes - that is, thinks.....

"Why is your writing so violent?" Since it is commonly understood that serious writers, as distinct from entertainers or propagandists, take for their natural subjects the complexity of the world, its evils as well as its goods, it is always an insulting question.....

The serious writer, after all, bears witness. The serious writer restructures "reality" in the service of his or her art, and surely hopes for a unique esthetic vision and some felicity of language; but reality is always the foundation, just as the alphabet, in whatever motley splendor, is the foundation of "Finnegans Wake.".....

If the lot of womankind has not yet widely diverged from that romantically envisioned by our Moral Majority.....the lot of the woman writer has been just as severely circumscribed. War, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes evidently fall within the exclusive province of the male writer, just as, generally, they fall within the exclusive province of male action.

Occasionally, however, a woman writer is told gravely, "You write like a man." Since this is the highest accolade, presented as a judgement from above and closed to any further discussion, it would be impolite to ask, "Which man? Any man? You?"

"Why is your writing so violent?".....

When I point out that, in fact, my writing isn't usually explicitly violent, but deals, most of the time, with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath, in ways not unlike those of the Greek dramatists; when I point out that, in any case, writing is language and, in a very important sense, is more "about" language than "about" a subject- the interviewer will nod, and take notes, and inquire about my childhood: "Was it tragic? Have you been frightened by life?"

In recent years a variant has been added: How do I defend myself against "critical charges" that my writing is "violent"? How can I "justify" myself?

"Would you ask that question of a male writer," I responded, the last time it was put to me, not very long ago. After some hesitation, the answer came: "No." "Why not?" I asked. Herewith, a long pause ensued. My interrogator knew the answer to the question but declined to answer it. Or perhaps he was thinking. I hope he still is.