Spectacle, Saturation, and the Industrialization of Human Darkness

Overture — Pacific Place, June 2026

A serial killer exhibit is opening in a shopping mall. That sentence ought to detonate something. It used to. In June of 2026, the traveling attraction Mind of a Serial Killer: The Experience installs itself across two floors and roughly two dozen rooms inside Pacific Place, the upscale downtown Seattle retail complex at Sixth and Pine, a building otherwise devoted to artisanal dining, a multiplex cinema, lifestyle branding, and the ambient music of leisure consumption. Tickets begin at twenty-eight dollars. The walk-through runs 90 to 120 minutes. It is recommended for ages 14 and up due to graphic content. More than twenty killers are staged inside, from Locusta of Ancient Rome to Jeffrey Dahmer of late-twentieth-century Milwaukee, and the marketing copy promises that visitors will stand inside chillingly accurate recreations of the crimes themselves: Bundy’s Volkswagen, Dahmer’s kitchen, Ed Gein’s farmhouse, rendered as immersive sets with virtual reality stations and a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree light and sound finale to round out the evening.

The producer is a company called Exhibition Hub, working through the live-events platform Fever, the same edutainment apparatus that has moved more than thirty-five million people through immersive Van Gogh tunnels and candlelit string-quartet evenings in cities around the world. This is the crucial detail, the one that should make a thoughtful person sit very still for a moment. The murder exhibit and the Van Gogh exhibit issue from the same machine. They are produced by the same hands, marketed through the same channels, priced within a few dollars of one another, and consumed by the same Saturday-afternoon crowd looking for something to do downtown. The exhibit’s own promotional language closes the case before I can even make it: these men, it says, are the real monsters who inspired the creepiest characters in film, the source code of Hollywood’s favorite nightmares. The pipeline from atrocity to entertainment ergonomics is not hidden. It is printed on the ticket.

And so I find myself standing, figuratively, at the entrance to this thing, watching the contradiction breathe. You can buy a candle, a sixteen-dollar cocktail, a pair of expensive sneakers, and then walk directly into a curated multimedia confrontation with sadistic homicide, and walk back out, and finish your shopping. The juxtaposition barely registers anymore. That failure to register is not a side effect of the exhibit. It is the subject of this essay.

The Thesis and the Fault Line

This is not an argument for ignorance, and that must be established before anything else, because the easiest and laziest reading of what follows would be to mistake it for moral panic, for a scold demanding that we look away. No one is being asked to look away. Human beings have always looked. The question that animates this entire essay is not whether we look at darkness but how, and in what posture, and at what volume, and whether the looking has become something else entirely while we busied ourselves assuring ourselves it had not.

There is a fault line running through the human relationship with evil, and the whole of this essay balances on it. On one side sits awareness: the contemplative, difficult, morally engaged confrontation with darkness that civilizations have always practiced, the staring into the abyss that Nietzsche warned would stare back, the integration of the shadow that Jung described as the precondition of becoming whole. On the other side sits indulgence: the repetitive, compulsive, emotionally extractive, commercially optimized consumption of atrocity as ambient content. Awareness transforms the one who undertakes it. Indulgence merely feeds. The first is a discipline. The second is an appetite that an industry has learned to cultivate, harvest, and sell back to us at a markup.

The condition deserves a name, because naming a thing is the first act of resisting it. Call it Overmurder: the condition in which a culture becomes so saturated with stylized, monetized, endlessly circulating representations of violence that murder ceases to function as moral rupture and instead settles into the background as atmosphere, as texture, as a kind of psychic weather we no longer notice we are living inside. Overmurder is not too much violence in the simple quantitative sense. It is the industrialization of intimacy with violence. It is the conversion of the most serious event one human being can inflict on another into emotionally consumable ambiance, played while folding laundry, softly narrated into the ear at bedtime, staged between a food court and a cinema.

Humanity Has Always Looked Into the Dark — Within a Frame

Civilization itself emerged alongside ritual violence. Sacrifice, execution, war, mythologized atrocity, the painted faces of demons on cathedral ceilings: these are not aberrations of culture but among its founding materials. Ancient societies ritualized death openly and without euphemism. Public executions functioned as moral theater, deliberate and instructive; the body of the condemned was made into a text the whole community was meant to read. Mythology, religion, and tragedy have explored evil continuously, across every civilization that has left a record of itself, because the confrontation with mortality and aberration performs genuine and necessary work in the human psyche: survival awareness, moral caution, the integration of fear, and the rehearsal of our own ending.

Consider Hieronymus Bosch. His panels writhe with grotesque punishment, infernal hybrids, dismemberment, gluttony made flesh, the meticulous cartography of damnation. Consider the medieval cosmologies of hellfire, the martyr paintings with their arrows and flayed skin and serene upturned faces, the apocalyptic iconography, Dante descending circle by circle into the frozen center of evil. These works stared directly at horror, and they stared hard. But the staring was nested inside a moral architecture. Hell was rendered with such conviction precisely because Heaven was real to the painter and the parishioner alike. The demon existed on the wall because redemption was part of the doctrine. Evil was depicted in order to be located— identified, named, set in its proper place within a larger order that bent, finally, toward the good. The darkness was a warning sign posted at the edge of the map, not the destination.

And yet I will not let myself off the hook so easily, because here the honesty of the thing demands a complication. Those paintings are beautiful. Bosch’s hellscapes seduce the eye; one lingers over them with a pleasure that has very little to do with theology. The Romantics who leaned into the demonic, the infernal, the sublime terror of storm and ruin and the human capacity for evil, they made darkness gorgeous, and they knew they were doing it. This is the permanent difficulty at the heart of all art that is something other than innocent and good: the grotesque possesses aesthetic gravity. Darkness exerts its own fascination. To depict evil at all is, in some measure, to make it beautiful, and the artist who pretends otherwise is lying to himself. The frame contained the fascination. It did not abolish it. The medieval mind looked at hell and felt the pull and the warning at once, held in tension. What has changed in our age is not that we feel the pull. It is that the frame is gone, and only the pull remains, monetized.

The Difficult Art — Coleman, Pasolini, and the Sound of the Abyss

To understand what we have lost, look at what difficult art actually does, the kind of art that confronts evil without dissolving into the autoplay stream. Look first at Joe Coleman, whose paintings resemble nothing so much as psychological autopsies of America itself. Murderers and religious ecstatics, carnival grotesquery and Catholic iconography, deformity, lust, punishment, sideshow banners and mass-murder relics, all collapsed together into feverishly detailed symbolic landscapes painted, famously, with a single-hair brush and a jeweler’s magnifying lens strapped to his face. Coleman’s work is obsessive, spiritually tormented, intentionally difficult, morally destabilizing. It does not offer the viewer a comfortable seat. It implicates. A Coleman canvas demands contemplation, demands that you stand there and be disturbed and do the interpretive labor, and it gives back nothing resembling the smooth dopamine of a streaming queue. It aestheticizes darkness, yes. It does not industrialize it.

Look at Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, John McNaughton’s 1986 film, which is cold and alienating and morally corrosive by deliberate design. It refuses catharsis the way a closed fist refuses an open hand. There is no satisfying arc, no comforting resolution, no moment where the camera grants you permission to feel that justice has restored the order of things. You leave it disturbed rather than entertained in any conventional sense, and that disturbance is the entire point, the artistic thesis enacted on your nervous system. Henry does not want you to enjoy him. The contrast with what we now call true crime could not be sharper.

And look at Answer Me!, the notorious zine that Jim Goad self-published with his wife Debbie across four annual issues from 1991 to 1994, photocopied outsider rage screaming directly into the face of modernity with no institutional mediation and no corporate smoothing whatsoever. Goad himself is the necessary case study here, because he embodies the exact double pull this whole section is built around. He was a Temple-educated misanthrope who described himself as a loner and a weirdo, a man of genuine literary firepower whose sentences leapt off the page with such vitality you could not put them down, and he aimed that firepower at suicide, at serial killers, at feminism, at race, at every nerve the politically correct world protected, with a wit so corrosive it drew the underground in like family. He is the kind of writer who makes a fellow freak feel finally understood. And then the man beat a girlfriend so severely she was hospitalized, was convicted, and went to prison for it — the moment the persona stopped being persona and became real harm, the moment the satirical glorification of violence revealed a person who could actually do it. He is, in essence, a GG Allin rendered as a prose stylist: a magnetic, repellent, genuinely dangerous figure who pulls you toward him as kindred underground spirit and pushes you off as social deviant and possible psychopath in the very same gesture. That double motion is precisely the difficulty. Whatever one makes of its provocations, and they were often indefensible, Answer Me! represented a mode of engagement with human darkness that was anti-commercial in its very bones. It could not have been optimized, A-B tested, or fed into an engagement loop, because it was built by a sensibility that would have found the very idea obscene — and yet, in Goad’s later drift toward genuine far-right celebrity, one watches the same cautionary line cross that the music will cross in a moment, the line where the confrontation with one’s own ugliness curdles into the advocacy of it.

The lineage runs deeper and uglier than three reference points. Look at S. Clay Wilson, the underground comix savage whose pages for Zap teemed with disemboweling pirates and demon orgies and a gleeful, lawless violence that detonated the polite boundaries of the form and, by his own collaborators’ accounts, frightened even Robert Crumb into drawing darker. Wilson was not decorating evil; he was vomiting it onto the page with a manic specificity that left the reader no clean place to stand. Look at Jörg Buttgereit, the German director whose Nekromantik turned necrophilia and decay into a deadpan study of grief and alienation, a film made to be confiscated rather than streamed, a thing that exists at the absolute outer edge of what a moral imagination can metabolize and was built precisely to test where that edge is. Look at Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, which runs its catastrophe in reverse and stages a single unbroken assault so prolonged and unwatchable that the film effectively assaults the audience back, refusing the spectator the comfortable voyeurism that ordinary screen violence grants. And look, finally, at Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the most rigorous example of the entire principle: a film that confronts the logic of fascism by enacting its sadism in clinical, unbearable detail, a work so morally corrosive that Pasolini was murdered before its release and it has been banned in country after country since. Salò gives no pleasure. That is its argument. It locates evil by making the viewer feel the precise texture of complicity, the way the libertines’ victims are cataloged and consumed exactly as the modern audience catalogs and consumes its murder content, which is why the film remains, fifty years on, the inverse of everything the Pacific Place exhibit represents.

Music has carried this same fire, and here the distinction the essay rests on becomes sharpest of all, because in music one can hear, almost cleanly, the difference between confronting the abyss and simply becoming it. Swans, under Michael Gira, built a wall of punishing volume and repetition meant to break the listener down past comfort into something like transfiguration, brutality deployed as a via negativa toward transcendence rather than as a product. Diamanda Galás weaponized a three-and-a-half-octave voice into the Plague Mass, a shrieking liturgy of grief and rage for the AIDS dead that functions as genuine sacred art, terror in the literal service of mourning and the holy. GG Allin turned his own body into a site of catastrophe, smearing the stage with blood and feces and self-destruction until he died of an overdose at thirty-six, a human being who became a cautionary artwork about the very glorification of transgression he embodied. Leviathan, the one-man black-metal project of Jef Whitehead, recorded some of the most genuinely diseased and isolating sound in the American underground, art inseparable from a deeply troubled life. Gwar, by contrast, drowned the whole impulse in latex, fake gore, and intergalactic satire, the grotesque rendered so cartoonish that it became a release valve, a reminder that not all engagement with horror is solemn. And Sutcliffe Jügend, named with deliberate obscenity for the Yorkshire Ripper, pushed power electronics into pure abrasive confrontation, daring the listener to ask why anyone would name a band after a serial killer at all — which is, of course, the question this essay was written to ask.

When the Frame Falls Away — The Boundary Cases

Music is also where the line is crossed entirely, and honesty requires naming that, too, because the boundary cases are where the awareness-versus-indulgence distinction stops being theory and shows its teeth. Begin with Mayhem, the Norwegian progenitors of the second wave of black metal, a band that did not merely depict death but collapsed into it. Their vocalist, who went by Dead, shot himself, and the guitarist Euronymous reportedly photographed the corpse and used the image for a bootleg cover, and by legend, kept fragments of the skull — and then Euronymous himself was stabbed to death by his own bandmate. The surrounding scene metastasized into a string of real church burnings across Norway, arson against the cultural memory of a nation, and at least one further murder. This is the precise moment the essay keeps circling: the instant art stops pointing at the abyss and simply falls in, dragging real corpses behind it. The aesthetic of evil and the practice of evil became, for these men, the same act, and no frame remained to hold them apart.

From there the descent is ideological rather than merely violent, and it is worse for being so deliberate. Burzum is the solo project of Varg Vikernes, the very man who committed that murder, and his music — some of it genuinely atmospheric, which is exactly the seduction — became inseparable from an explicit neo-fascist, racialist, neo-pagan ideology he has promoted for decades, the sound engineered as a recruiting frequency for a worldview. Skrewdriver traveled the same road from the opposite end: it began in the 1970s as an ordinary punk band and then degraded, under Ian Stuart Donaldson, into one of the foundational acts of the organized white-power music network, a band whose entire later purpose was the manufacture of racial hatred set to a beat. Sutcliffe Jügend, named with calculated obscenity for the Yorkshire Ripper, sits at a different and more ambiguous coordinate — power electronics as pure abrasive confrontation, daring the listener to ask why anyone would name a project after a serial killer at all, which can be read as genuine interrogation or as mere provocation depending on the ear that receives it, and that ambiguity is itself instructive.

The distinction matters more here than anywhere, because it is the whole argument compressed into a single principle. Bosch painted hell in order to warn against it. Salò staged sadism in order to indict it. Diamanda Galás shrieked at the plague in order to mourn it. But propaganda stages hatred in order to spread it, and the man who beats the woman he wrote satirically about beating has stopped writing satire. The frame is not incidental decoration around the dark material. The frame is the material’s meaning. It is the difference between a scalpel and a wound. Remove it, and the identical dark content that can wake a soul up will just as efficiently poison one, because the human nervous system does not, on its own, distinguish between the depiction that liberates and the depiction that recruits. Only the frame does that work, and a culture that has lost the habit of building frames — that serves all darkness flat, unmarked, autoplaying, equally consumable — has lost the only instrument that ever told the medicine from the venom.

These works, the honest ones, share a property that the modern machine has engineered out of existence. They demand something of whoever encounters them. They require contemplation, discomfort, symbolic interpretation, the active wrestling of a moral creature with material that resists easy consumption. This is awareness. This is the contemplative confrontation with evil that a culture undertakes in order to understand itself. The streaming machine does the opposite. It removes the demand, smooths the resistance, and serves darkness as something you absorb passively, beautifully lit, between dinner and sleep.

The Coolification of Evil — Dahmer and the Mechanism

Here is the cleanest specimen on the table. Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story performs, in a single sustained gesture, every contradiction this essay is trying to name. It condemns Jeffrey Dahmer, and it aestheticizes him. It moralizes about him, and it mythologizes him. It critiques the violence, and it constructs, episode by episode, an intimacy with the man who committed it. The cinematography is gorgeous. The pacing is engineered for the compulsion of the next episode. The lead actor is, by the plain reality of casting, attractive, and Dahmer himself was, by the plain reality of the historical record, a good-looking man, and so the series tells a true thing and a corrosive thing simultaneously, because the structure of serialized narrative bonding goes to work on the viewer regardless of what anyone consciously intends.

I do not believe the creators set out to glorify him. The series strains, visibly, toward moral seriousness, toward giving the victims their weight, toward indicting the institutional failures that let him continue. But intention is not the mechanism. The mechanism is the form itself. You begin by condemning Dahmer, and you end, some six hours later, having spent more intimate time inside his apartment and his point of view than you have spent with most of the living people in your own life, and something has happened to you that you did not authorize. You understand him too well. The audience forms an emotional intimacy with evil while believing itself safely outside evil, and the belief in one’s own safe distance is itself part of the machinery, perhaps the most important part, because it is what permits the consumption to continue without guilt.

And then the culture metabolizes it in public, in real time, and the results are genuinely disturbing to watch. Viewers romanticize the killer. Fans obsess over the actor. Women discuss, openly and without much embarrassment, their attraction to violent men, and hybristophilia, the clinical term for that attraction, migrates from an obscure footnote in a psychology textbook into semi-mainstream conversation, into the comment sections, into the texture of how we talk. Serial killer groupies are not new; they wrote letters to Bundy and Ramirez decades ago. What is new is the scale and the smoothness of the apparatus that now manufactures the fascination and then sells the outrage about the fascination as a second product. Figures like Nancy Grace built entire careers on this double motion, the simultaneous condemnation and platforming, the daytime-television ritual that judges the troubled mind on camera while exploiting it for ratings, that performs moral horror while booking the next segment. America condemns evil theatrically while monetizing, sexualizing, and distributing it industrially. The denunciation is not the opposite of the entertainment. The denunciation is part of the entertainment product. It is what lets us watch and feel righteous at the same time.

And there is a gentler-seeming cousin to hybristophilia that runs through all of us, harder to dismiss precisely because it feels so much like ordinary good taste: the love of the badass. We adore the brutal character. Consider Billy Butcher in The Boys, a man who is cruel, vengeful, foul, willing to do nearly anything to anyone, and who is also, unmistakably, the figure the audience roots for and quotes and wants more of. The show is self-aware enough to know this and to indict us for it, and we love him anyway. The same machinery built Tony Soprano and Walter White and the Mandalorian-adjacent gunslinger and the whole modern pantheon of damaged men we are invited to worship. What is the appeal, honestly examined? It is freedom. The brutal character is free in a way the law-abiding viewer is not. He has accepted his own darkness, made peace with his fate, stopped performing the exhausting daily theater of niceness, and acts directly on appetite, rage, and loyalty without the suffocating mediation of consequence and shame that govern every hour of our actual lives. We do not love him because he is good. We love him because he is unbound, and some buried part of us, the part the civilized day keeps muzzled, recognizes in his freedom a permission we will never grant ourselves. The damaged man is a fantasy of release. He bears, on our behalf, the weight of being fully and unapologetically himself, and we pay him in adoration for the carrying.

This is the same nerve the killer narrative touches, only softened and made respectable by fiction. The serial killer documentary and the antihero drama are not opposites; they are two intensities of one appetite for the human being who has slipped the leash. And the danger is identical in kind: the more hours we spend in the company of the unbound man, admiring his terrible freedom, the more the ordinary moral friction of being a decent and constrained person comes to feel like mere cowardice, like a failure of nerve rather than the quiet daily heroism it actually is. Coolness is a moral solvent. It dissolves the seriousness of the act inside the charisma of the actor, and a culture that has made brutality the highest grade of cool has quietly taught itself that the worst among us are, secretly, the most alive.

This is exactly the loop the Pacific Place exhibit closes. Its marketing tells you, in plain language, that these killers are the real monsters behind your favorite films — Gein behind Norman Bates and Leatherface and Buffalo Bill, the whole lineage — which is to say it sells the historical atrocity by way of the fiction it inspired, and then sells the fiction back to you by way of the atrocity that grounds it, a perfectly sealed circuit of fascination feeding on fascination, with the ticket booth at the only exit.

Ambient Murder — The Podcast Economy

If the Dahmer series shows the coolification, the podcast economy shows the normalization, and normalization is the greater and quieter danger. Murder has become one of the most profitable entertainment genres on the planet, and millions of people now fall asleep each night with homicide narrated gently into their ears. My Favorite Murder turned the discussion of brutal killings into comedic conversational companionship, two friends chatting warmly over the details of dismemberment, and built a media empire and a devoted community on the back of it. Crime Junkie delivers a steady serialized drip of cases in a tone of cozy, confiding intimacy. The murder is consumed while driving to work, while folding laundry, while cooking dinner, while exercising, while drifting off to sleep, and in that consumption, homicide stops being an event and becomes a surface, an ambiance, the audio wallpaper of an ordinary domestic afternoon.

The lineage matters here because not all of it began this way. Serial, in 2014, emerged much closer to genuine investigative journalism, an honest grappling with ambiguity and institutional failure and the unreliability of memory, a piece of work that left you less certain rather than more, which is one of the marks of awareness rather than indulgence. But the industry that followed it drifted, steadily and lucratively, toward emotional extraction. The phrase cozy true crime may be one of the strangest constructions the English language has produced in this century, and we should sit with how strange it is. Cozy. The coziness of murder. The phrase reveals, all by itself, exactly how far the flattening has gone, how completely atrocity has been domesticated into comfort content.

None of this means the audience is evil, and it is important to say so plainly. The instincts underneath true crime consumption are deeply, legitimately human: fear rehearsal, the mind practicing for danger; pattern recognition, the search for the logic that might keep us safe; anxiety management, the strange calm of confronting the worst thing while safe in bed; the control fantasy of the solved case, the restored order. These are real and even healthy impulses, the same impulses that drew the ancient listener to the cautionary tale around the fire. The problem is not the instinct. The problem is an industry that has learned to locate the instinct, hook it, and run it on an endless loop, because the loop is what sells. Murder ceases to function as a rupture. It becomes texture. And a mind marinated daily in that texture is changed by it, whether or not it consents to the change, whether or not it even notices.

The Catharsis Economy — Game of Thrones and the Ancient Appetite

It would be intellectually weak to say that Game of Thrones succeeded merely because it was violent. The truth is more interesting and more uncomfortable. The violence functioned as catharsis, as tribalism, as revenge fantasy and justice fantasy, and the deep satisfaction of watching evil play out and then, sometimes, watching it answered. Public execution, betrayal repaid, the cruel lord brought low, the wronged party finally granted the sword: these activate ancient psychological circuitry that modern civilized society outwardly represses and inwardly never stops possessing. We crave punishment narratives. We crave moral resolution delivered through force. We crave the sacrificial spectacle, the scapegoat driven out, the order restored through blood, exactly as René Girard described the founding mechanism of human culture.

Modern humans remain psychologically ancient beneath the technological surface. We have built a civilization that demands civility in every visible interaction, that has, genuinely and to its credit, reduced the actual violence of daily life to historically astonishing lows, and that same civilization sends its citizens home each night to feed an appetite for symbolic brutality that the daylight world gives them no permission to express. It is the same machinery that powered the bloody catharsis of the spaghetti western, that made an icon of Tarantino’s stylized revenge in Kill Bill, that turned the gangster epic from The Godfather to The Sopranos into a national liturgy of beautifully shot murder. The sword era grants licensed access to the buried thing. We watch men hack each other apart in a fiction set safely in the past, and we feel, for an hour, the primal satisfaction our ordinary lives forbid. There is nothing new in the appetite. What is new is that technology has scaled up its feeding to industrial volume, made it infinite, made it available at every hour, and removed every natural limit that once governed how often a person could sit and watch the spectacle of human destruction.

Bodies: The Exhibition — Crossing a Spiritual Boundary

No modern phenomenon captures the spiritual ambiguity more starkly than Bodies: The Exhibition and its several variants, the touring displays of real human corpses, dissected and plastinated and posed theatrically in athletic gestures, stripped of skin, opened to show the musculature, the circulatory tree, the layered architecture of the living thing we each are, and then ticketed, merchandised, and consumed by mass audiences in convention centers and, yes, in shopping environments. I want to be measured here rather than conspiratorial, because the strongest version of this argument does not require the worst possible facts. There have been documented controversies surrounding the sourcing of cadavers, allegations connecting some specimens to Chinese sources, to prisoners, to persecuted Falun Gong practitioners, and one should be scrupulous not to assert the unverified as a settled fact. The legal and forensic questions remain genuinely contested.

But the forensic question, however grave, is secondary to the civilizational one, and the civilizational one is where the real horror lives. Even granting the most innocent possible account of everybody in every case, something happened here that should have stopped a culture in its tracks, and it did not. Human bodies were skinned, posed, aestheticized, lit, ticketed, photographed, and walked past by millions of people on a leisurely afternoon, and the public absorbed it almost without flinching. The man who built this apparatus operated, in front of the entire world, with near-total impunity, and the protests that did arise never reached the mainstream, never became the conversation, never broke the surface of normal life. The thing came, and people came to see it, took their photographs, and discussed it pleasantly over dinner, and then it moved on to the next city.

That numbness is the evidence. That is the whole argument compressed into a single observation: a society reveals itself not only through what horrifies it, but through what has ceased to horrify it. Had such a display appeared three centuries ago, it would have been read instantly and universally as a sign of profound spiritual corruption or imperial decadence, a portent, a thing that the chroniclers would have set down as a marker of a civilization losing its soul. Modernity absorbed it in an afternoon. I will say plainly what I believe: history will likely judge this episode as one of the genuinely dark passages of the modern era, darker than the people living through it could have perceived, precisely because they were unable to perceive it. This is how cultures take their large axe swings at the sacred. Not with announcement and resistance, but quietly, with the larger public going calmly along, cooking dinner a few miles away, certain that everything is normal, because the not-noticing is the mechanism by which the line gets moved.

And consider the man at the origin of the method, because his figure deserves far closer attention than the culture ever gave it. The technique that hardens the inner structures of the human body — plastination, the leaching out of every fluid and its replacement with cured polymer until a corpse becomes a permanent, posable, odorless object — was invented in 1977 by a German anatomist named Gunther von Hagens, born Gunther Liebchen, who adopted his aristocratic-sounding surname from his first wife, who grew up in East Germany and served two years in a Communist prison for attempting to defect before the West bought his freedom, and who has appeared in public ever since, even while cutting open the dead in front of live audiences, wearing a black fedora in deliberate homage to the figure in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Sit with that detail for a moment, because it is the whole psychology in a single accessory. A man dresses himself as a painting of an autopsy while performing autopsies as a theater. He styles himself, explicitly, as the heir to the Renaissance anatomists, and announces his intention to one day plastinate his own body, and to build a permanent “Museum of Man” to house his corpses forever. This is not the bearing of a humble medical educator. This is the bearing of a man who has made himself the master of ceremonies over death itself, and who clearly relishes the role.

I want to remain measured, and so I will keep to what is documented. Von Hagens ran plastination centers in Dalian, China, and elsewhere, and he grew genuinely wealthy from the enterprise, with one analysis estimating tens of millions in net profit across less than a decade. In 2004, he returned seven corpses to China after they showed evidence of having been executed prisoners. A Russian court separately convicted a medical examiner of supplying him with unclaimed bodies. His competing imitators — the very Bodies: The Exhibition franchise that toured American malls — have acknowledged sourcing their cadavers from “unclaimed” Chinese bodies, a category that in that jurisdiction can quietly include the executed. None of this is a conspiracy. It is the public record. And the public record alone is enough to raise the question the essay cannot stop circling: what kind of inner life builds a global industry out of posing dead human beings in lifelike, sometimes whimsical attitudes — a corpse playing chess, a corpse riding a flayed horse, a flayed man holding his own skin aloft like a coat — and then sells tickets to it between the food court and the cinema? One can speculate, and I will, that somewhere in that biography sits a man who looked into the deepest taboo a species can hold, the inviolability of the dead body, and felt not horror but opportunity, and dressed the opportunity in the costume of education and Rembrandt so that the rest of us could consume it without admitting what we were consuming. That is its own species of psychopathy, the high-functioning, fedora-wearing, museum-building kind, and it walked among us applauded.

The essay has been low-key about this, and I notice that in myself, and the noticing is itself instructive. I have folded a likely atrocity of cadaver-trafficking and corpse-commodification into a few measured paragraphs about cultural numbness, which is exactly the move the whole culture made: I have aestheticized it into argument, made it a tasteful example in a larger thesis, rather than letting it stand as the raw obscenity it may well be. And here is where the thread pulls tight: the new serial-killer exhibit arriving in Seattle is not a separate phenomenon from the body show. It is the next outcropping of the same vein. The Pacific Northwest has a strange and documented intimacy with this material — Caroline Fraser’s 2025 book frames the whole region as a kind of incubator of serial violence — and the region’s art and culture keep returning to it, metabolizing it, displaying it, monetizing it, as though the landscape itself had a recurring psychopathic episode that periodically surfaces as a ticketed attraction. The corpse exhibit and the killer exhibit are the same impulse wearing different costumes, the same conversion of the sacred and the violated into a downtown experience package, and Seattle keeps saying yes.

Life Beside the Atrocity

Here, the essay must turn from the cultural to the existential, because the deepest truth in all of this is not about Seattle, Netflix, or any single exhibit. It is about the structure of the human creature. Ordinary life has always proceeded directly alongside horror. Dinner is cooked within sight of the camp. Birthdays are celebrated while the war grinds on in a province away. Office workers sip coffee above supply chains soaked in exploitation they will never see and never have to think about. This coexistence of the mundane and the monstrous is not a uniquely modern evil, nor evidence that humanity is demonic at its root. It is structurally human. We are adaptive creatures attempting to survive an overwhelming complexity, and one of our primary tools for survival is the capacity to normalize, to let the unbearable recede into the background so that the ordinary business of living can continue.

But that same adaptive gift is the vulnerability the spectacle exploits. Cultures normalize incrementally. The line moves a little, and the new position becomes the baseline, and from the new baseline, the next small movement seems no larger than the last, and across enough small movements, a society arrives at a place it would never have agreed to arrive at had the whole distance been proposed at once. This is historically observable across empires, across genocides, across ideological regimes, and industrial systems alike. The frightening reality is not that human beings consciously embrace evil. Almost no one does. The frightening reality is how quietly human beings acclimate to it, how gracefully, how completely, while continuing in every visible respect to be decent people who love their children and recycle their bottles and would be genuinely shocked to be told what they have grown used to.

I sometimes think of it as the makers of the Matrix tweaking the code, adding this or that into the equation, adjusting the parameters, and the natural balance of good and evil holding roughly steady across the centuries while the particular forms shift and the old horrors are corrected and then forgotten and then, in new costume, return. Histories are written and erased and rewritten. A correction holds for a generation, and then the memory of why it was needed fades, and the drift resumes. We are not inherently evil. We are inherently forgetful, and forgetfulness, at a civilizational scale, does much of the work that evil would otherwise have to do for itself.

Seattle as Psychological Microcosm

And so I come back to Seattle, where I started, and which remains one of the strangest cities in America. This is the essayistic heart of the piece, and I will claim the perspective as my own. Seattle drapes itself in progressive language, in wellness vocabulary, in boutique morality and artisanal coffee ethics, and the hyper-educated social signaling of people deeply invested in being seen as good. It is a city of corporate futurism and performative virtue, and beneath that carefully managed surface, it carries an almost casual intimacy with psychological collapse, with serial murder mythology, with an ambient nihilism that the wellness vocabulary papers over but does not heal. The city often feels spiritually exhausted just under its presentation, like a smile held a beat too long.

One encounters the Green River killings in conversation with a strange frequency here, almost as civic folklore, a regional keepsake produced early in an introduction, the way other cities offer their sports team or their famous view. And then, often within the same breath, the conversation pivots to homelessness, to addiction, to inequality, to broad and sincere-sounding moral concern about the state of society, and the pivot performs a quiet magic trick: it directs all the moral energy outward, onto conditions and systems and other people, and never once turns the mirror back toward the psychological architecture of the speaker’s own culture, the one consuming the murder folklore for entertainment. The homelessness conversation, for all its real compassion, often functions as a way of obfuscating any reflection on the people themselves, while broadcasting the speaker’s goodness, their betterness, their safe ethical distance from everything they are discussing. Caroline Fraser’s 2025 book Murderland makes the regional saturation literary canon, mapping the Pacific Northwest as an incubator of serial violence; the region’s relationship to this material is now thick enough to be the subject of acclaimed nonfiction.

The exhibit at Pacific Place becomes, in this light, a form of fashionable cultural capital. Intelligent, educated people will go downtown to experience curated atrocity together, as an event, as a thing one does and then mentions having done, all while maintaining complete confidence in their own ethical distance from the material, the same confidence the Dahmer viewer maintains, the same confidence that is itself the mechanism. Perhaps they are ethically distant from it. Perhaps not entirely. One can ask that question with fair logic and a clear conscience. If the asking marks this as a liberal, progressive artifact under examination, then so be it; that is simply what it is, named plainly, and I have no interest in dressing the observation in someone else’s politics or softening it into something it is not. The stronger and broader critique is not partisan at all: highly educated modern cultures routinely mistake the performance of symbolic virtue for actual psychological or spiritual health, and Seattle is merely one especially vivid manifestation of that very widespread and very human confusion.

The Necessary Contradiction

I am aware, and I have been aware since the first sentence, that writing this essay participates in the very cycle it sets out to critique. I am still discussing murder. I am still directing attention toward darkness. I am still, in some real measure, adding to the pile, another artifact inside the machine, another fixation dressed up as analysis, and the fact that I have given the condition a clever name does not exempt me from being a symptom of it. The honest writer has to say this out loud because the alternative is to perform exactly the unexamined moral distance that the essay is trying to expose in everyone else.

So let me indict myself directly. To write this piece at all, to have it written, in reaction to a serial killer exhibit, is itself a continued and unwanted focus on the very existence I claim we attend to too much. I make the sacrifice knowingly. I do it on the gamble that critical awareness sometimes requires a temporary, deliberate confrontation, a controlled descent undertaken to come back up and report, the way the figures in descent myths went down precisely so that they could return changed and carrying something. Perhaps this essay is another contribution to the pile. Perhaps it is another unwilling fixation. But silence also becomes its own form of complicity when an imbalance goes unnamed, and between the two failures, I would rather risk the one that at least tries to wake somebody, even one person, even myself, out of the long shared sleep. Look at yourselves. I will look at myself. That bargain is the only ground I can honestly stand on while making this argument, and I would rather stand on honest, unstable ground than on comfortable pretense.

And I must go further than abstraction, because abstraction is its own hiding place. I make dark art myself. I make music that wanders through the hypnagogic and the grotesque and the unresolved, and I have built whole bodies of work out of the very impulses I am here dissecting in others. More than that, more uncomfortably than that: I recently wrestled with whether to publish a podcast about a stretch of my life spent living among dangerous men, gangsters, people whose proximity to violence was not theoretical. In it, I described a gang murder that I essentially witnessed, or rather heard — the sounds of a killing unfolding in the street outside my apartment, sounds I have carried for the better part of twenty-five years. For nearly all of that time, I refused to publish the story. It felt shameful. It felt exploitative. It felt like taking a real human being’s last moments and converting them into content, into narrative, into something with entertainment value attached to my own name. So I sat on it for decades, out of something I want to call decency.

And yet here I am, finally publicizing it. For what reason, exactly? If I am honest past the point of comfort, probably for the entertainment value — the same entertainment value I have spent this entire essay indicting the culture for chasing. I am doing the very thing I condemn while sitting in judgment of everyone else for doing it. And do I get to feel better than them because I recognize the contradiction, because I can name it in elegant paragraphs, because I have a clever word for the condition? No. Recognition is not absolution. I am an ugly product of an ugly and partly evil culture, complicit in my own innocent and not-so-innocent ways, and admitting this does not place me above anyone. If it grants me anything at all, it is only a slightly clearer view of the water I am swimming in, and a willingness to be personally honest about the fact that I am swimming in it too, right now, on this page, selling you a dead man’s last sounds inside an essay about not selling dead men. That is the contradiction at its most naked, and I would rather show it to you than pretend I stand outside it.

Coda — Awareness Without Indulgence

I will end without certainty, because certainty would be its own kind of lie and its own kind of indulgence. I am not calling for a ban. I am not asking that true crime disappear, that dark art be taken down from the walls, that the difficult films be unmade, that the study of evil cease. That puritanical impulse is the mirror image of the disease and shares its fundamental misunderstanding. The medieval painter, Joe Coleman, Pasolini, and Diamanda Galás all knew something the streaming algorithm has forgotten: that darkness can be confronted without being consumed, located without being celebrated, and stared at without being fed upon.

What I am naming is an imbalance. It is possible that the culture currently sits in a state of psychic oversaturation, marinating itself in endless forensic spectacle while transcendence, craftsmanship, ecology, communal ritual, genuine spiritual inquiry, and the slow and unglamorous work of beauty all receive comparatively little of its ritual attention. It is possible that the young will probe the darkness as they always have, as a necessary part of individuating into a real and difficult world, uncovering the hard truths on their way to becoming whole, and that some of what looks like crisis is simply that ancient process running its course. It is possible that civilizations drift toward spectacle saturation and then correct, cyclically, and that we are in a trough that will pass. And it is possible, the possibility I find hardest to dismiss, that modern technological media systems have amplified an ancient and once-bounded human instinct far beyond any healthy human scale, and that the boundedness which the old frame provided will not return on its own, because nothing in the machinery has any incentive to restore it.

What remains clear, through all the uncertainty, is the distinction itself and the thing it exists to protect. A healthy culture studies evil in order to understand the human. An exhausted culture packages evil for endless emotional consumption and calls the process neutral. The danger was never the darkness. The danger is becoming so thoroughly saturated with mediated representations of violence that we lose the capacity to feel the true weight of real human suffering at all — that a murder becomes a room in a mall, a body becomes a ticketed pose, a victim becomes narrative fuel, and the moral nerve that was supposed to register all of it as rupture simply goes quiet from overuse. The preservation of that nerve, the capacity to still be ruptured by the real thing, may turn out to be one of the defining spiritual questions of the technological age. I do not know whether we will keep it. I know only that we will not keep it by accident, and that naming the danger is where the keeping has to start.

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