In all likelihood the possible perpetrator-imagined triumphalist ending will not materialize, become literal, in response to Holmes having literalized his murder fantasies. The ritual enactment of the mythological shift was begun, but begins to look like a misunderstanding of sympathetic magic (ritual actions over here create parallel changes over there). Holmes’s behavior will most likely result in a diagnosis of mental illness rather than in the evolution of superhuman power to change things. In the end, his actions propel the survivors, families, and friends “through Hell,” but not in a way that will make a massive difference. The individual criminal will not progress in his evolution toward becoming The Supervillain; Society will not wake from culture-wide numbing as a result of his actions. That may not have been his fantasy, but some mass murders are carried out in the name of helping people wake up to the dire nature of their circumstances.
Stories of mass murder relate to Bluevolution where simplistic fantasies of change create extreme action, reaction, and numb inertia by turns. Evolution and Progress are often salvation fantasies of a literal and heavenly utopia and, as such, are much more likely to end in various kinds of hell. River bottom crossroads is where the blues live and where one may find responses to such questions. The swirling of the Stygian waters through which the underworld is perceived may be clichéd or may be revolutionary, but they are by definition uncomfortable and not in the control of the one who descends. Hillman gives a sense of the bluevoluted application of this descent in The Dream and the Underworld, re-visioning a psychology “of dreams that tries to keep a sense of underworld always present in our work with them.”[i] By Underworld Hillman always also means Death.
New beginnings won’t be possible until this vortex of “underworld always present in our work” reaches bottom and we get more than a little uncomfortable there, the old ways of doing business-as-usual having gone down the drain. Says Hillman, “the dream may not be envisaged either as a message to be deciphered for the dayworld (Freud) or as a compensation to it (Jung).”[ii] Once you spiral down the river of corpses into the world that makes The Shooter possible, you realize that there is no silver bullet to bring back up and load in a literal gun for the killing of the problem. What needs to die is the denial of the dark and the careless literalization of metaphors. Then gun laws can get some actual traction and the practicalities of the courts can take their course without so much prurient sensationalism. The story won’t end anymore anywhere in the vicinity of what a Shooter would imagine.