By connecting The Killer Inside Me to its contemporary climate of male crisis and sex crime panic, I suggest that Lou Ford is designated as an extreme model of masculine behaviour and, judging by the high sales of The Killer Inside Me upon publication, I would also argue that men in crisis found a kindred spirit in Lou Ford and an outlet for their own frustrations in the explicit sadomasochism of the text. Despite his violent compulsions, Lou is described as a sexually attractive and generally likable character, indeed, as a kind of alternative hero. However, unlike most men, he acts upon his impulses and commits murder. Like many men, narrator Lou Ford struggles with violent impulses, questions his power, and experiences conflicting attitudes towards women. Jim Thompson’s first-person psychopathic narrative The Killer Inside Me explicitly addresses this problem from a pulp fiction perspective. In particular, sex crime panics and theories of sexual psychopathy created fears about the potential violence that lurked beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary men. The conflation of violence and normative male sexuality demonstrates how, during the 1950s, the representation of white, American male sexual identity was both problematized and sanctioned by the figure of the psychopath.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |