A Monster with a Thousand Hands. Amy J. Rodgers

      Discursive Iterations/Fearful Symmetries

      For if … our youth seriously listen to such unworthy representations of the gods … hardly will any of them deem that he himself, being but a man, can be dishonored by similar actions; neither will he rebuke any inclination which may arise in his mind to say and do the like.

      —Plato, The Republic, c. 386 B.C.E.

      As soon as he saw the [gladiator’s] blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. He found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which he had joined … He looked, he yelled, he was on fire, he took the madness home with him.

      —Augustine, Confessions, c. 400

      Also, sithen [miraclis pleyinge] makith to see veyne sightis of desgyse, aray of men and wymmen by yvil continaunse, eyther stiryng other to leccherie and debatis, as aftir most bodily myrthe comen moste debatis, as siche myrthe more undisposith a man to paciencie and ablith to glotonye and to othere vicis, wherefore it suffrith not a man to beholden enterly the werde of God over his heued, but makith to thenken on alle siche thingis that Crist by the dedis of his passion badde us to forgeten.

      —Anonymous Wycliffite author, Miracle Plays, c. 1360

      As the style and subject matter of stage-plays is scurrilous and obscene, so likewise it is bloody and tyrannical, breathing out malice, fury, anger, murder, cruelty, tyranny, treachery, frenzy, treason, and revenge … which efferate and enrage the hearts and minds of actors and spectators; yea, oft times animate and excite them to anger, malice, duels, murders, revenge, and more than barbarous cruelty, to the great disturbance of the public peace.

      —William Prynne, Histrio-mastix, 1633

      The spectator at the play experiences too little; he feels like a “Misero, to whom nothing worth while can happen”; he has long since had to moderate, been obliged to damp down, or better direct elsewhere, his ambition to occupy a central place in the stream of world events; he wants to feel, to act, to mold the world in the light of his own desire—in short to be a hero.

      —Sigmund Freud, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” 1905

      Where once the dime and nickel novels suggested ways of crime to unbalanced youth, the motion picture has come to make a more ready and more potent appeal. The printed word is never so ardent with an impressionable mind as the acted word.

      —Richard Barry, Pearson’s Magazine, 1911

      The young men who opened fire at Columbine High School, at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and in other massacres had this in common: they were video gamers who seemed to be acting out some dark digital fantasy. It was as if all that exposure to computerized violence gave them the idea to go on a rampage—or at least fueled their urges.

      —Benedict Carey, New York Times, 2013

      Imagine you were asked to create a profile of the prototypical spectator using the above seven epigraphs. Demographically, the subject is young and most likely male. Intellectually, he is underdeveloped. Emotionally, he is immature, exhibiting a tendency toward emotional and behavioral extremes. He finds it difficult to distinguish between representation and reality, more often attaining catharsis through projection and identification than through lived experience. These qualities make him susceptible to wild emotional vacillations, misprision, and injury. In short, he is a potential danger to himself and to others.

      Of course, creating a composite from these fragments that span over two millennia is ridiculous. It is impossible to assemble any sort of accurate representation from them. But in many cases, at least up until the twentieth century, such scintillae are all