Taylor Westmacott

Violence, Boredom, Extinction: Artistic Depictions of Symbolic Death and Masculine Delinquency

Delinquency and a resentment of one’s own society can develop throughout any stage of adolescence, and has a litany of influences. This work examines two broad intersections of influence—violence and boredom—within the greater context of contemporary planetary extinctions. 

In order to reexamine the various meanings and implications of 'extinction', the thesis draws upon artistic and cultural artefacts constructed throughout two historical turning-points.

The first of these turning-points, nuclear extinction, is explored in the post-war corpus of Yukio Mishima. The second, a more nebulous, almost ‘background’ extinction, arrives in the fallout of globalisation, material surplus, and secular positivism, and is assessed via fictional accounts of adolescent mass violence. These works include Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) and its film adaptation, directed by Lynne Ramsay (2011), as well as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), Frida & Lasse Barkfors' Raising a School Shooter (2021), and Justin Kurzel's Nitram (2021). 

These seemingly discordant turning-points and narratives implicate identical motivations in the death impulse of male delinquents. Through their juxtaposition, alongside the application of Jean Baudrillard’s symbolic death and Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic ontology, this thesis ultimately contributes to the dialogue of several disciplines—moral philosophy, gender theory, psychoanalysis—and aims to highlight the coercive political potential of death in an age of extinctions.