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    Contract Killing in the Information Age
    Contract Killing in the Information Age
    Contract Killing in the Information Age
    Ebook66 pages1 hour

    Contract Killing in the Information Age

    By Jason Ray Forbus

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    About this ebook

    Everything there is to know about contract killing in a book that covers the mythical early origins of murder as a profession, to present-day availability of hit men on the open market.
    A personal vendetta or self-driven interests are typical motives for pulling the trigger. In recent years, however, crime records have seen a staggering increase in the number of cases involving hired guns. This book explores why and how the phenomenon is growing to threaten all strata of a highly destablizied society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAli Ribelli Edizioni
    Release dateDec 20, 2017
    ISBN9788833460109
    Contract Killing in the Information Age

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      Book preview

      Contract Killing in the Information Age - Jason Ray Forbus

      978-1-326-48004-2

      FOREWORD

      A street thug and a paid killer are professionals - beasts of prey, if you will, who have dissociated themselves from the rest of humanity and can now see human beings in the same way that trout fishermen see trout.

      So speaks the American psychiatrist Willard Gaylin. His view seems to confirm one of the many myths and legends that surround the mysterious figure variously known as the professional (or hired) killer, the assassin and the hit man.

      Such a person is widely thought of in modern society as standing alone, outside of the common run of humanity, coldly and calculatedly observing fellow human beings as if they were animals to be hunted or as mere objects to be manipulated at will.

      Such a view is perpetuated in countless popular fictions.

      At the current time the comprehensive online film database IMDB lists 1015 movies that have the keyword ‘hit man’ attached to them.

      The related term ‘assassin’ yields some 841 films that concern such a figure.

      The majority of these films seem to date from the last twenty years or so, indicating that the hit man has become one of the central figures in contemporary popular culture, ranking along other sinister but compelling personages as the zombie and the vampire.

      Something about modern popular culture finds the professional killer a highly fascinating figure, a character that is constantly resurrected and reworked, from the existential loners of Le Samourai and Ghost Dog, to the ‘ordinary’ guys who just happen to murder for a living, as in Grosse Pointe Blank.

      Perhaps the key characteristic of the fictionalised assassin is his (or in the case of La Femme Nikita, her) cool.

      This is coolness in two senses: the level-headedness needed to make a hit successfully, evading capture and pocketing the fee; and the coolness of the lone individual handling high-specification, hi-tech hardware with minimum fuss and maximum expertise and precision.

      Any fool can (mis)handle a gun, says popular culture; but only the hired killer knows and understand the aesthetics of the rifle barrel and the silencer, the silence of the kill, and the cleanliness of a job well done.

      If we were to believe what we watch and what we read in films and magazines, the professional killer is cool personified, walking and shooting cool.

      This myth has particularly been proposed, reiterated and reworked since the 1960s. The two great source-texts are these.

      First, the films of Jean-Pierre Melville (such as Le Samourai noted above), where trench- coated, trilby-wearing assassins stalk the streets of Paris, presented as emblems of humankind’s existential predicaments – the human creature quite alone in a world not of his own making, at odds with and utterly removed from all other human beings.

      Melville can be credited with turning the Sartrean existential individual of the 1950s into a hired assassin, a person whose one meaningful connection with other people is when he trains his sights upon them.

      The author major source of the modern fetishisation of the hired killer as the epitome of cool is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, turned into a highly influential film in the early 70s.

      As the Jackal speeds around summertime Italy and France in his open-top white convertible, preparing the means for an impossible hit – the assassination of de Gaulle – the viewer is left to wonder – could I do that? Could I kill people – rich and powerful people, perhaps wicked and depraved people – for a living? Even the most mild-mannered person may be tempted to engage in such thoughts, even just for a moment.

      Popular culture has set up the assassin as a powerful attraction figure, someone who – at least in the best cases – is truly Nietzschean, being thoroughly beyond good and evil. The assassin, like God, sits in judgement on the lives of those below him. While God sees all from the sky or some transcendent viewpoint, the professional killer sees all through his telescopic sight, while perched on a rooftop.

      Like God’s the hit man’s gaze is downward and panoptic, as well as being able to home in on the minutest details of its target.

      There are theological resonances in how we imagine the doings and characters of those who kill for money.

      It is particularly remarkable that the hitman should have such a positive image. Of course, one need not be a fully paid-up Lacanian to realise that popular culture is full of the most peculiar perversities.

      After all, the serial killer is widely presented as someone that has a certain sort of allure, from the warped morality of a Dexter to the ineffable charm of Hannibal Lecter.

      But the striking thing is

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