Serial murder, all things uncanny

France's greatest living conceptual artist? And PKD.

January is moving quickly. I’ve been intimidated by just how organised some of my fellow Substackers are, and how many words have been shared already in 2022. I’m quite tempted to - already, at this early stage, take a digression into British Weird, not least since the frontline of UK politics seems to be entering the land of Philip K Dick-inspired paranoid alternate realities. But we shall not; we’re sticking with French Weird for the purposes of this short edition of, well, French Weird.

Philip K Dick, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

I sensed eyebrows around the world raising as I confessed my teenage fascination with Jeffrey Dahmer in my previous post, so I’m going to stick with the serial killer theme for today. I’m equally tempted to follow the Dahmer route, pulling a handbrake turn into the recent Netflix series, The Sons of Sam, based on Maury Terry’s cult investigative book The Ultimate Evil (1989). The series recounts Terry’s obsessive reworking of the so-called Son of Sam killings that took place in New York City in the 1970s. His major, not uncontroversial, angle is that the murders were not the sole work of David Berkowitz who confessed, recalling that a neighbour’s dog told him to do it, but rather of several people, perhaps working together as part of a series of shady, occult rituals. But French Weird we are, and French Weird we will stay - so please do write in and suggest any French occult murders I should really be spending my time thinking about. Most recently, of course, one of the most notorious French serial killer cases has been closed with the suicide of a former policeman, leaving behind a letter confessing he was “Le Grêlé”, nicknamed for his pockmarked face, responsible for a string of murders in Paris in the 80s and 90s.

I will return another day, I think, to the tragic affaire Gregory, a murder case that has gripped the French imagination since the mid-1980s, and was also itself the subject of a recent Netflix series. For me the intense media interest in the case and the troubling encounter of the Parisian legal and media worlds with the rural Vosges community where the murder took place as well as the presence of a mysterious “corbeau” (anonymous tip off, recalling Clouzot’s 1943 film) plays out squarely in the realm of French Weird.

But, serial murder it is for now. At least obliquely in the form Stéphane Bourgoin, formerly France’s foremost expert on serial killers who was the focus of a magnificent investigative long read by Scott Sayare for The Guardian back in November. Sayare follows up on work done by French media, and in particular the forensic work instigated by the social media-based 4ème oeil Corporation. I’ll let you discover the Long Read piece yourself here.

There’s clearly something weird about Bourgoin, not only in his obsession with serial killers and his apparently untruthful insistence that his wife was savagely murdered in the 1970s. It’s not only his commitment, even addiction, to telling what appear to be lies upon lies, not only about the relationships he claimed to have developed with some of the most notorious serial killers: including Berkowitz and Charles Manson, but also about a phantom career as a professional footballer for the Parisian team Red Star. From the perspective of French Weird, though, I’m interested in how Bourgoin’s creation, his persona, falls between the cracks of the French and English-speaking world. It’s noticeable that Bourgoin, an English speaker and reader, was able to base much of his “expertise” on, what Sayare describes as “borrowings and misrepresentations” from books and articles, such as the influential Mindhunter (1995) by John Douglas (another inspiration for a Netflix series), in circulation in the USA, but unknown and pretty much untranslated in France.

One of my gut instincts in launching my French Weird project, and this is a point well articulated by David McKenna a couple of weeks back, is that while it clearly has its own texture, it’s own specificity, it is also frequently strikingly derivative. How much of French Weird is perforative, how much of it is a re-imagining, an imitation or even straightforward plagiarism of the English-language Weird? I’m thinking of Baudelaire’s discovering of Edgar Allan Poe, of Michel Houellebecq’s formative reading of HP Lovecraft. Sayare notes that “fantasy was Bourgoin’s first great love. Early on, he found genre cinema, and devoted himself to the category the French call fantastique, encompassing science fiction, horror and all things uncanny”. I’m inclined to take all of this just a little further since it seems that Bourgoin’s whole creation sees him not stand as an observer, but to himself become part of the fantastique, part of the weird, at a fascinating mid-point between reality and fantasy, between the English-speaking world and the French. Bourgoin, arguably and uncannily, one of France’s greatest living conceptual artists has, it seems, temporarily withdrawn from the pubic eye.