Aestheticized Pain and the Artistic Serial Killer

So far we have witnessed that the controlled body came to prominence, aesthetically and narratively, in numerous films in the final decade of the twentieth century. BDSM was at the forefront of the new direction taken, and body modification sporadically but intensely negotiated the thorny issue of consenting to pain. United by themes of marking and controlling the body, plus the concomitant pleasure in suffering, there was, however, no unifying genre in either Chapter 2 or 3. In the current chapter though, a cohesive subgenre is discernible, and one might suggest that it is responsible for sustaining the mainstream’s fascination with pain into the twenty-first century. But unlike the BDSM of Sick, or the body modifications of Crash, its films display no immediate sense of consensual pleasure, for the most visible controlled body in question is the victim of the serial killer. And yet an impression of gratification remains within the text, for in these films a bound and gashed body is not enough to insist upon the murderer’s control. Instead, the creatively staged death scene suggests utter subjection and domination, but also a pleasure in the macabre beauty of the tormented body. The pleasure in pain manifests itself doubly: firstly as an absorption in the aestheticized treatment of the decimated body, and secondly through the investigating detective’s need to engage masochistically with the victim’s suffering.