The Importance of Fictional Murder—Jillian Grant Shoichet
A few weeks ago, I called my thirteen-year-old son in the middle of the day.
I subject both of my children to surprise phone calls as a way of asserting my motherhood. I reach out to nag them to get out of bed or do their homework, or to tell them I love them.
Often, they don’t pick up. My son typically responds with the automatic one-button reply Please text me, particularly annoying if I’ve put the phone on speaker so I can do other things with my hands, like laundry or driving.
This time, I called him at his dad’s house, after school hours, thinking I’d catch him as he got in the door. But he’d been sick and had stayed from school, spending much of the day watching videos on his phone.
He told me he’d just seen the news of American political media figure Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
I’d only just seen the headlines myself (I work in a political environment and many of us have the news “on” all the time). But while I appreciated the seriousness of the event, I hadn’t yet had a chance to process what the death of the young conservative-activist-slash-white-supremacist might mean in a broader philosophical, political and social context; in those first few minutes following the incident, no one had.
I am embarrassed to admit that, on the phone with my thirteen-year-old son, I immediately tried to minimize things, with all the banal platitudes we use in our misguided attempts to soothe suffering or smooth the world’s ugly countenance.
“Yes, polarizing politics bring out the worst in people,” and “He had strong views and some people disagreed with him,” and “There have been a lot of political assassinations in the US lately, across the political spectrum.” Then, “That’s what happens when everyone has easy access to guns and defends their right to use them.”
On the other end of the line, my son was silent. Then he said, wisely, and with absolute conviction, “Mom, no one deserves what happened to him.”
I immediately pivoted: “Of course not, you’re absolutely right. No one should be killed by another human being.”
He said, “I saw it, Mom. It was horrifying to watch. Just horrifying.”
We ended the call. I sat at my desk and thought about the conversation, particularly his use of the word “horrifying,” a word I’d never heard him use.
It wasn’t until that evening, after watching the surging tide of troubling public response, that I understood what my son had witnessed. Having been plugged into the phone at the exact time of the event, my son had seen real-time footage streamed from the Utah campus before social media and news platforms scrambled to remove it.
Had he known what he was about to witness, I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t have chosen to view it—he puts on a tough front but has a gentle soul. Yet before he was given the opportunity to decide for himself, he watched Charlie Kirk raise his hand to his neck, fall from his chair, and bleed out on the stage. From many different angles, again and again.
That evening, I set aside my opinions about the ideas Charlie Kirk espoused and the manner in which he shared them. I set aside my distaste for the sort of public interaction that currently passes for political debate, which rewards those skilled at barbed hyperbole rather than those who are truly interested in thoughtful, nuanced discussion. I also set aside the idea that “deserving” one sort of death over another has any meaning at all, life and death having little to do with what anyone deserves.
What was clear to me, however, is that none of us deserves the spectacle that Charlie Kirk’s death has become.
Mortality is serious business, and it must continue to be so. Contemplating our own end—grappling with the knowledge that all of what we love and experience is temporary—is what enables us to identify meaning.
Fiction and creative non-fiction allow us to explore our relationship with death, its effect on our intellectual, social, political, and spiritual life. As we write and read about death, we think about how it shapes our lived experience. Each piece we read or write deepens our insight and informs our next lived experience, our next relationship. Our horror of death remains, but our capacity to make meaning of our mortality enriches our relationships with others in a way that is difficult to measure but which seems—to me—to be fundamental to our purpose as human beings.
My son has watched more violent movies and has read more violent books than I had by the time I was thirteen; he’s certainly played more violent video games than I ever did. He engages with these forms of entertainment with the knowledge that the violence is fictional, a narrative tool. He doesn’t always agree with the storyteller’s choice of tools, but he knows the violence is manufactured for a purpose. His insights into manufactured violence further our discussions about what might exist beyond our physical world and our limited perspective.
My son’s visceral horror at the footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination illustrates his instinctual understanding of the difference between real violence and manufactured violence. He can spend hours killing zombies or running down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto—but cannot erase from his mind the real-life murder of a young man in front of his eyes.
I never wanted him to witness an execution; now that he has, I hope he never forgets the horror of it.
For if real death becomes entertainment—something to rewatch, refashion into memes, reformat for prime-time consumption, re-edit as propaganda—how can we avoid losing our sense of horror? I don’t fear that running over pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto will encourage my son to run over pedestrians in real life. But I do fear that if we watch public executions like that of Charlie Kirk again and again, we begin to lose our horror. And if we lose our horror, we lose our humanity.