Link to project: kissinkatebarlow.webs.com/
I was inspired with the idea for my Haunted Media Project while on an old Western binge-watching session prompted by another class. Though I was mostly watching Clint Eastwood-type cowboys, I remembered another Wild West female character I had grown up watching from the movie Holes, based on the novel by Louis Sachar. She only played a minor role in the story, but I was always impressed and fascinated by the femme fatale outlaw Kissin’ Kate Barlow.
(Here’s a link to a montage of her scenes from the movie, if you don’t know the character: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qYFafNPbU)
I initially considered creating a regular online memorial page for the fictional character Katherine Barlow, but I did not find it very compelling. The idea of some sort of tribute website, almost like a fan site, seemed more appealing to me. I decided to base the website loosely around the idea of serial killer fan sites, which actually exist for real-life notorious serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer – some of which are disturbingly popular. There is quite a modern-day fascination with serial killers as celebrities, especially among young female fans, and psychologists and social scientists have sought to explain this unsettling phenomenon. While portrayed in Holes as more of a misunderstood outlaw rather than a serial killer, Kate Barlow nevertheless killed multiple men throughout her robbery spree. I could see how if the Internet existed during the Wild West era, she could potentially gain an online following due to her femme fatale appeal. For my project, I imagined what a website in remembrance of Kissin’ Kate Barlow through the eyes of her fans would look like, and what function technology would bring to the table, as opposed to a traditional print tribute, for example.
One of the articles we read for class, “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation,” examines the modern trend of memorializing the dead on the Internet, and the implications of this method as opposed to traditional graveyards and memorials. The authors write, “Website memorials allow interaction with the dead to continue and for the continuing presence of the dead in both a private and public sphere. In this way, they remain strangely unincorporated and in a state of transition. Social interaction with the dead continues online and their identity is kept alive.” My project was a bit tricky in this regard, because while the website was in honor of Kate Barlow and her life story and legacy, it also featured brief obituary-like blurbs with an accompanying image for each of her victims. However, unlike the memorials discussed in the article, these were not in loving memory or praise of these men, but rather as a toast to Kate. The “Tributes” tab of the website gave her fans a platform to write messages as if they were speaking directly to her – her victims, on the other hand, are not given this honor, so their identities are not kept alive in the same way. The authors of the “Gravesites and Websites” article go on to acknowledge the increasingly different forms of memorializing death on the Internet, explaining how their studies have “suggested how such differences will no doubt be seen multiplying across online memorials: various Internet services and technologies such as Web documents, Facebook pages and gaming environments.”
Another article we read for class, Alexandra Sherlock’s “Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society,” expands on the idea of the Internet allowing the continuation of the presence of the dead, referring to the Internet as “a type of digital heaven.” Sherlock explains, “representational technologies in particular offer a life after death, a symbolic life in which the representation can act as a substitute for the person in the event of their physical absence – a symbolic immortality.” Much like how people often continue to write on a deceased person’s Facebook wall as if they were still alive, Kate Barlow’s fans still write messages to her as if she were. This is where the idea of para-social relationships comes into play. Sherlock writes, “One can identify with someone without ever meeting them, or even if the subject is dead, so forming a type of one-sided para-social relationship facilitated by representations.” This concept is particularly important when it comes to the fans of serial killers because virtually all of their vans have never met them, let alone known them personally. Nevertheless, for as long as serial killers have achieved widespread fame, they have obtained fan mail. Even before the birth of the Internet, in the 1980s, when the prevalence of serial killer “groupies” was thought to be at its peak, fans would often write handwritten letters to the killers in jail.
In order to gain better understanding of the phenomenon of serial killer idolization, I read some of David Schmid’s book, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. I was particularly interested in the intersection of this fascination with serial killers and the age of the Internet, which Schmid addresses. He writes, “The introduction of each new media technology therefore represents a decisive shift in both the types of fame available in a culture and the ability of that culture to disseminate fame” (12). For instance, the rise of American mass media explains the rise of widespread attention surrounding serial killers in the 1980s. Likewise, with the rise of the Internet, serial killer fans have transitioned from handwritten letters to online forums dedicated to their killer of interest.
Schmid also discusses the market for death in his book, writing that “Online shopping is all the rage these days, and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming” (1). He continues, “In order to understand why there is such a vibrant market in contemporary America for representations of death in general and of serial murder in particular, we have to appreciate that the famous serial killer effectively and economically satisfies a double need, both halves of which have grown over the course of the twentieth century: the need for representations of death and the need for celebrities” (17). While I had no idea that serial killer artifacts were in such demand, this segment rang true in relation to the literature we have read in class surrounding celebrity deaths and the commercialization of death. In fact, this ties all the way back to our class discussion about commercialization and the Internet, and how much our online data is worth to the companies that profit off it. I tried to embody this concept in my project with the addition of the “Lipstick” tab of Kate Barlow’s website. Thinly disguised under the veil of commemoration, the fan site seeks to profit off Kate Barlow’s fans through the sale of collectible replica lipsticks. My goal for this addition of the site was to give the illusion of authenticity to gullible fans who sought to emulate Kissin’ Kate’s iconic look, but remain transparent enough for non-fans to realize this was merely a scheme for the site’s creators to make money. I wanted to capture the ever-presence of online marketing, which permeates virtually every sphere of space on the Internet nowadays.
Works Cited
Graham, Connor, et al. “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialisation.” Visual Studies. 2015.
Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Sherlock, Alexandra. “Larger Than Life: Digital Resurrection and the Re-Enchantment of Society.” The Information Society. 2013.