What fascinates me more about the sequence of events is everything but the fact that he was a 27 year old virgin.
When the photograph of Christopher Cleary came up in one of my daily traipses through the Internet, all I could see was an almost emblematically sad American. Someone whose life had been molded by the late-capitalist Sunbelt world -- making him one of many, of course, who had come out of a landscape of Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's, the persistent smells of fryer grease and Yankee Candle Company, the rows of townhouses hemmed in by dwarfish pine trees, vinyl banners reading "RENTING NOW! CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx!" limply flapping in the wind. One of many shaped by the ideologies that prop up this purely marketed world. The difference is that he was foolish enough to announce that he was going to mow down women.
This being our current iteration of networked existence, we, the general public now have the ability to probe his social-media personality, and you see the way in which he tried, himself, to mold his persona into a brand. Even his threat of murder was accompanied by sad-face and angry-face responses.
His Facebook Intro was reported as saying "I'm Kris. from Denver, sports pa announcer, free spirit traveler and a lonely Starbucks lover."
It's a bit like the "short story" famously misattributed to Hemingway -- "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In that 15-word statement, a life, a picture springs forth. There's something terribly sad and desperate-seeming about the way he switched the "Ch" to a "K," about the way he self-describes as a sports announcer (despite seemingly not being one outside of his own mind), the way he describes as a free-spirit traveler despite the fact that he seems like he's so ensconced in the suburban world and just cribbed the term from a legion of Instagrammers, the fact that he unironically announces a love for Starbucks, a chain that tried 30 years ago to seem like the sort of place cosmopolites would congregate, and which now is just another fast-food joint by the side of the highway, but the way he pairs it with "lonely" seems to conjure up some self-image of a lonely café dweller, a trope that has been a cliché for at least 100 years, but this time buying into a marketing campaign.
Or look to his Youtube channel, with its Intro video showing him cheesing and posing in front of arenas (in such exotic destinations as Las Vegas and Salt Lake City) and simulated backdrops of palm trees, special-effect dollar bills falling over the screen. You see his videos of him eating fast food, CRAZY MCDONALDS BURGER MUKBANG!!!!, and so forth. And you see his painfully superficial analysis of coming sports games, his attempts to mimic the cadences and hand gestures of ESPN talking heads -- "I find it so difficult how the Patriots seem to be in Superbowl contention every year, I'm not saying they're a bad team, but man, like, can't they just give somebody else a chance."
It's the voice of someone who has been told the great lie of the Internet era, which is of course an extension of the great lie of American optimism -- that you too can be a star. All you have to do is implore enough people to hit like and subscribe.
I should hazard right now that it's best not to prematurely project a narrative onto news events. But at the same time, it's hard not to see certain connections.
In the same way that Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver came to represent a specific kind of post-Vietnam malaise and the quixotic male response to this malaise, the Christopher Cleary case seems to be so specifically of an era. This is 2019 in America writ large.
Alone and adrift in a world of ephemera, unable to find personal romantic or financial success, but inundated in images of the same, one particular man, in the grand tradition of failed men, threatened to translate that failure into violence towards women.
I am not trying to defend this would-be Elliott Rodger, and I'm not trying to sympathize with him, but I am trying to illustrate that there's something horrifyingly logical about how the whole series of events manifested itself.
I'm reading various articles in various outlets covering the issue. Regardless of format, every page is accompanied by "Sponsored Stories," in which everything is "legendary," "insane," "genius," "stunning," "tragic." Every stock visual, every aggregated piece of bullshit, every mindlessly assembled listicle, every thinly veiled scam masquerading as a news story that occurred just minutes from where you live, every EPIC WIN and TOTAL CRINGE all repeating themselves immediately below, the immense Ouroboros serpent of our image industry.
That was really good man.
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