Thoughts on I Don't Want to Kill You

Trigger warning: Same as the first, found here.

Batman. Batman and serial killers. Yeah, that’s a good hook.

My midnight-reading play-by-play to K. via Facebook while reading I Don’t Want to Kill You: I have got to stop reading your scary books late at night, but: I CANNOT BELIEVE SHE DIED. First the therapist, now Marci the lady friend. BAH. Okay, back to reading. Gotta finish so can sleep. And then 30 minutes later (nearly 1am; which, recalling that I am secretly 80 years old, 1am is cRaZy late for me) upon finishing the book: And now his mother. Egads.

Which is to say, lots of people die in this book. Not John, Wells isn’t pulling a Shakespeare and killing the title character midway through (Julius Caeser in his eponymous play) – but he is perhaps pulling a Whedon, killing the characters the audience is emotionally invested in. And it makes sense for Wells’ story, just as it (usually[1]) does for Whedon’s, but still. It was all very sad and tragic.

And kind of yicky, too, it must be admitted. Marci the aforementioned lady friend didn’t just die, she was possessed by an identity-stealing demon who, while looking for love and acceptance and perfection, discovers that Marci’s life isn’t perfect and joyous and filled with love at all times, and becomes morose, depressed, and suicidal. So the demon controlling Marci’s body causes said body to kill itself (how much Marci is left in the mind is unclear), and the demon moves on to Brooke – thinking Brooke is the one, Brooke has the perfect life, John loves Brooke.

Yes, it’s a little strange. The demon of book 3 isn’t so much concerned with killing John (or even killing the girls it inhabits; that’s just a gruesome side effect) as it is with loving him, and by extension owning him [2]. The first demon had no body – it had to steal parts. The second demon had no emotions – it had to steal feelings [3]. This third demon has no self – it has to steal identities. It is the most supernatural of the three, having no form or mind that we, the readers, can really latch on to. IDWtKY was the most fantastical of the trilogy, and while it was a nice break to not be terrified out of my wits during the entire reading experience, this demon did rather make me roll my eyes.  The tragedy of suicide, and heartbreak, and jealousy, and mother-sacrificing-self-for-son was all very real and present; but the demon itself was just headshake-inducing.

Alright, enough about demons. Let’s talk about Batman.

IDWtKY talks a lot about performance vs. reality. Is John his internal, sociopathic thoughts (the thoughts that want to torture and maim, deform and kill, embalm and destroy)? Or is he his actions: ridding the town of demons, rescuing the women in the torture house, not attacking his mother with a knife? He explicitly ponders this, as people in the town start calling him a hero, praising him for his cool and collected demeanor in the face of dead-body-in-the-lake. John has, naturally enough, trouble reconciling this external hero-accolading with his inner monologue of hit/strike/kill.

Nolan’s Batman trilogy is also all about performance [4]. Yes, the trilogy is about a lot of other things too, but the character of Batman is utterly a performance, along with his alter-ego, Bruce Wayne.  Batman is “what the city needs him to be” and Bruce Wayne is the cover up for that (super)hero performance: by presenting one character to a certain subset of reality (Gotham’s elite), another character is given space to play [5].

As I wrote to K.,  Batman has all the trappings of an actor: he has props and tech -  grappling hook and wing gear so he can fly, because superheroes are supposed to fly. He has a costume: wears a mask, because heroes as far back as Robin Hood wear masks. He has a set: a secret lair, and a silly character name with -man in it, because that's how these things go. And it's a good performance, a necessary performance; a performance that saves a lot of people and does a lot of good. But it’s still a performance, an act.

Then there’s PartyBruce, who buys the Russian ballet, owns an obscene amount of hotels, and sasses CEOs during board meetings. His are the antics of a partyboy; his props are a fast car and a plethora of suits, a magnificent manor house, and several servants. Oh, and money. Lots of money. This, too, is a performance.

And then somewhere, there's the man that performs both of these characters; holds them both inside, can be both of them, and really, at the heart of things,*is* both of them. Is this man somehow separate, or is he the parts he plays? 

Nolan’s Bat trilogy deals with the same issue as IDWtKY: is a person what they think, or what they do? Is John a hero because he saves people? Is Batman? Or are they both just the darkness within, lost little boys who long for a love they can’t achieve?

On the other hand, it is rather a fallacy to assume that these things (what you think vs. what you do) are mutually exclusive. Life is a performance; to live is to act, in both senses of the word. Just because I am both good marshalling large groups of people to complete a task and bad at talking to those same people one-on-one doesn’t mean that one action is true and one action is a lie. They are both true. They are both me. The sociopath who wants to cut people apart to examine their insides and the teenage champion who demon-slays are both John Wayne Cleaver. The Dark Knight and the yacht-partier are both the youngest Wayne.

The demon of IDWtKY wants perfection, immutability, Reality, Truth – and it is driven mad when it realizes, as it moves from girl to girl, killing as it goes, that shifting shadows on a cave wall are the Truth. To live is to act, and to change; to be one way sometimes, and another way later. Not in a hypocritical way (professing one thing and intentionally doing the opposite), but just in the way that life takes many skills and many performances. The stage of existence requires deep, complex characters with many varied strengths and weaknesses, not clownish tropes. Truth is self-perception layered with others’ perceptions – the Truth is that John is both a heroic monster-killer and Mr. Monster.

As with most things, Shakespeare said it: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…

***

And with that, we end my rambles about Wells' trilogy, and most likely also end my foray into the horror genre.

xo,

Devo

[1] I, like much of the fandom, am not entirely convinced that Wash needed to die. Angel, yes. Tara, sure. All those Dolls, probably. But Wash?

[2] ] Maybe? By now, it’s been a while since I read this book, and I’m riffing. So riff with me.

[3] Somebody should have sent it over to tumblr; there are MANY feels to go ‘round, there.

[4] Leastways, it is when the person watching is one who has spent vast quantities of time contemplating the nature of performance vs. reality in Shakespeare’s collected works. Which is to say, if you’re me.

[5] In the sense of “play up on a stage”, to act. English gets very slippery here, because “to act” is both “to do an action” and “to perform a story on a stage” – and both meanings work in the context of Batman.