Monsterating

“i don’t know what to draw”

“i always mess up”

“BUT I SUCK”

Tate Langdon of AHS Season 1 is a good conversation point for our discussion on gun violence and the motivations of school shooters. I think we need to redefine the language we use to describe the motivations of school shooters. I think it’s very possible that school shooters aspire to what they perceive as heroism, rather than villainy. Perceiving these actions as heroic, rather than deplorable or villainous, is a byproduct of our cultural relationship to guns as a symbol of masculine empowerment:

Exhibit A)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=Gtw54F_-2LE

When describing his murder fantasy, Tate Langdon states, “I prepare for the noble war. I know what’s coming and I know no one can stop me. I kill people I like. Some of them beg for their life. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel anything./ It’s a filthy goddamn helpless world, and honestly I’m trying to take them away, from the piss and the shit and the vomit on the streets. I’m trying to take them somewhere kind.”

The tail end of this rhetoric, the bit about taking people away from the world and bringing them somewhere clean, positions Tate as distinctly confused and “mentally ill”. It demonstrates that Tate believes murder is a benevolent favor to his victims. BUT, Is death the “Somewhere kind” Tate is discussing? Or is the “somewhere kind” a direct comment on how we perceive victims of school shootings, wherein the entire country feels sympathetic and celebrates the otherwise ordinary lives of the deceased? Is it an illness to recognize that victims are also elevated and glorified simply for having been victims of a heinous event? 

This bit about the filthy, goddamn helpless world also suggests Tate feels powerless against his fear of the world, even though his decision to kill is very much an emboldened decision. 

So essentially this extra bit of dialogue insidiously supports the idea that school shooters are victims themselves with benevolent intentions, and undercuts the otherwise apt description of the mentality of a school shooter– which could be paraphrased as; “What I am doing is heroic. I am killing others so that I will be remembered as a man who stood up for what he believed in, like my ancestors did when they colonized this country.”

While discussing death as a haven, and addressing the problems of the “filthy goddamn helpless world” suggests Tate feels powerless against the influence of the world. However, after killing 5 kids, Tate does not kill himself to end his own suffering and take himself to a better place. When the cops arrive in his home, Tate deliberately points his finger at his head like a gun, and then they shoot him. This gesture instructs the cops to kill him. 

So the writing here is designed to show us that Tate’s actions are not cowardly. If Tate had killed himself, we may have thought he truly believed the world was terrifying and he needed to leave it. Additionally, we would likely perceive his suicide as a cowardly decision not to face the consequences of his actions. Yet, Tate demands the police kill him: he makes the decision to become a victim of the police, rather than to kill himself. By forcing the police to kill him, he even dies in a “noble” or “heroic” fashion. He will not be dismissed by his intended audience as a coward who took his own life. 

Tate is actually making a LOT of decisions to ORCHESTRATE his post-humous image as that of a martyr.

 In other words, Tate is not mentally ill: Tate is powerfully, problematically sane.

The real problem here is that Tate’s concept of heroism is what leads him to take innocent lives. It’s not villainy he’s looking for, it’s HEROISM. Even though, after his crimes and his own death, he’ll be berated and discussed with ire in the public, among his white able bodied toxically masculine peers, he will be HEROIC. All things considered, Tate is not mentally ill. He is an entitled shithead. He is white, able bodied, reasonably wealthy and educated, and hates his mother due to her autonomy and rejection of his father (Tate does not know his mother murdered his father, so that’s besides the point).

Throughout AHS, Tate demonstrates his “noble” sadism by terrorizing “bullies” throughout his relationship with Violet. Tate is not mentally ill. He is entitled. He believes his view of the world is the only view of the world, hence his comfort in killing people and “taking them away from it”. He assumes, albeit indirectly, that his viewpoint is the only viewpoint. He embraces his status as God, a status which is only supported in the world outside of his mind by his access to weapons. And Tate’s belief that his white male hetero ableist view of the world is the ONLY VIEW is supported and enforced by the culture he lives in. Tate’s skewed concept of Heroism and gun violence is OUR skewed concept of heroism, one that we ONLY call Villainy when it happens in real life, outside of the media and texts we consume. 

Even the narrative shows us, via flashback, that Tate’s “vision” of mass murder is not a “vision” at all, but a FANTASY. Take, for example, the difference in his clothing. In the fantasy, Tate has a painted face and expensive garments and slicked back hair: he is the epitome of glamorized (and valorized) American Violence. 

However, when Tate actually commits his crime, he’s wearing an ordinary dirty sweater and some jeans and his hair looks like shit and he’s not wearing any slick, sexy makeup. I believe this deliberate distinction in Tate’s image has the rhetorical purpose of communicating Tate’s (normalized) fetishism of gun violence. 

It’s ironic then, that so many people love Tate Langdon, and up until yesterday, I was one of them. But the truth of the matter is that Ryan Murphy glorifies Tate as a character in his writing: despite his status as a school shooter and a murderer, Tate is perceived as HEROIC whenever he defends Violet from bullies. Even when it’s revealed Tate is a rapist and a murderer and actively homophobic, the narrative is written to make all of Tate’s actions PATENTLY UNSELFISH. He rapes Connie for the benefit of another woman, Nora Montgomery. He kills the gay couple because they can’t reproduce and have given up trying to adopt, and Nora “needs” a baby. When he later “tries” to keep Violet from taking her own life, he reads as a hero. But truthfully even Tate Langdon’s character, or having that image of coolness and romance of a school shooter present in the media we consume both MIRRORS and PERPETUATES  the “PROBLEM OF TATE LANGDON” (OR YOUR LAY MASS MURDERER.)    

And at the very end here it seems worth noting that plenty of sane people kill people every day. Cops, for example, are “sane”. The CIA agents whose horrific crimes against humanity are detailed, in full, in the CIA Torture report, were certainly not declared insane. George Zimmerman was not declared insane. Even that little jackass from Aurora managed to skirt by without being declared insane. Tate himself is no different. Using mental illness as your primary scape goat for this act of terrorism simply doesn’t hold against what we know about mass shootings. You can’t call living out an American dream a mental illness, can you? It may be a problematic dream, a violent dream, a grotesque dream, but it’s a dream nonetheless– domination, control, and destructive heroism as link to the symbol of the gun is a toxic masculine fantasy; one fostered by media representations and you know, the foundational and historical basis of our country.“ 

In other words… It’s “crazier” to not want a gun, than it is to perceive the entire world as a potential threat to phallic power. #masculinitysofragile

— Caitlin Schneiderhan (@SchneiderJamz)