Taylor Westmacott

The Id-cel Manifest

Can I make a movie about your dead relative? What if they were a public figure? What if they'd only become a public figure for the fact they were indiscriminately - and brutally - murdered?

At face, these questions do little to help conversations on gun violence.

This thesis inquires upon four periods of discourse and media ecology [Ireland, the Troubles; North America, 1999-2003; Australia, 1996-2003, 2019-present], as well as their counterpart in a cinematic counterficition [Elephant (1989), Elephant (2003), Nitram (2021)].

These seemingly discordant means of history making implicate myriad issues of concern for the cultural reception of the death drive in male delinquents. Through their juxtaposition, alongside the application of Jean Baudrillard’s symbolic death and Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic ontology, this thesis aims to highlight the coercive political potentials of these martyr-narratives in an age of extinctions.

The Body Count Paradox

Body count is a privileged datum: a fetish of the journalists.

Although body count is an essential factor in mass death events, methods of reporting, categorising, and interrogating these events need not be to reduced to it. Such is revealed in comparing the media practices in Australia and New Zealand in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 Christchurch massacre, an historic event which remains unaddressed of its full plunder of practical media ecologies.

Resistance against reporting (and over-reporting) statements of fact pertaining to the Christchurch assailant’s identity and writings, as well as his crime's eventual body count, constitute an implicit recognition on New Zealand’s part towards the archaic practices at the heart of the news reporter’s codex-instincts. New Zealand's media here provides a general schema for future critique of political aesthetic registers; it reveals a propensity for gaps between national policies of social offence and the machinations of 'national interest' reporting and true crime journalism.

In mass death events, the direct counterpart to fatality is not the number of survivors, but casualty. Fatality, pertaining to death, a binary state, is necessarily quantitative, its clarity cuts right through the malaise and ambiguity at the heart of these catastrophes; harm, in contrast, is nebulous.

In mass death events, casualty is typically reduced to mean those wounded during the event itself. This chapter further stresses the importance of wider definitions of harm. Appealing specifically to the phenomena of school shootings, it asks: (how) should parents of children killed at Sandy Hook who go on to commit suicide be measured in relation to the body count? Beyond merely evading the closure of quantitative facts (which is their essence), this approach facilitates coherent mourning in its very aversion to closure. More fully does this recognise the abrupt transience of harm in relation to traumatic mourning: the causalities of mass murder are still ongoing. Wider tools of empathy and understanding can here only be achieved when individual victims are themselves untethered from the totalising structure of the body count.