With Halloween just ending, the non-fiction book I’m reading, and what I’m doing my definitional argument paper on, I must admit that yes, Americans do live off of fear. I’m terrified of spiders, but that means that if I see one, I just scream and then feel like things are crawling all over me. But after a minute, I’m distracted by something else and I’ve forgotten about it. After reading part of my book last night though, I’ve experienced a new type of fear. It made a reference to Jack the Ripper. Yeah, I’ve heard of him, but honestly, I didn’t know anything about him. I always associated him with the Grim Reaper which, in a way, they are connected. But Jack the Ripper was a murder in the late 1800’s who is known best for the murder of Mary Kelly. She was a prostitute that he completely mutilated. He slit her neck nearly to the spinal cord; cut her from her throat to her pubis, carved out her breasts and set them on a table next to her nose which he also hacked off… you get the point. What’s worse? She was 3 months pregnant at the time. Now, for some strange reason that… description, for lack of a better word, has stuck with me and disturbed me beyond what I thought was imaginable. Disturbing has turned into fear.
But what causes this fear of mine? I’ve always been fascinated with psychology and the way that the human mind works and all the different ways a person can approach a situation, and what reasoning goes on in their head to make them come to a conclusion. That’s why the movie American Psycho with Christian Bale is one of my favorite movies. Besides me being madly in love with him, he depicts a psycho in a terrifying, yet truthful way. He plays the part of Patrick Bateman, a worker on Wall Street who is obsessed with his image just like every other worker displayed in the film. His opening soliloquy ends with “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping you and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.” This description also fits with Jack the Ripper, or H.H. Holmes, the main character in my book. I think that is what caused me to go from being disturbed to experiencing this new fear. Being able to see a person like that, touch them, relate to them. But when in reality they are just some sort of a machine that mimics a normal human being so perfectly, that it’s nearly impossible to put your finger on something specific that makes them not real. It’s the knowledge of not knowing that frightens me.
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