Abstract
A Murder over a Girl, Ken Corbett’s artful Russian nesting dolls of a book (a junior high tragedy inside a psychoanalytic character study inside a story about boys—gender-variant and gender-panicked—inside a courtroom drama), breaks new ground as a psychoanalytic work. It also provides inspiration to those of us who recognize the value of a psychoanalytic perspective not only in therapy, but also outside, in the public sphere. Corbett tells the profoundly moving and tragic story of a fifteen-year-old California boy who had recently begun to identify as transgender and was murdered at school by a male classmate. In writing the book, Corbett immersed himself deeply in his subject, not only attending the entire murder trial, but also interviewing key participants extensively and throughout the ordeal. Having done so, he is able to contextualize the human story within the social, cultural, and gender dramas surrounding it. Though the incident occurred eight years ago, the book, considering the current social and political climate, could not be more timely.
Like Corbett’s previous book, Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities, this one is highly theoretical. Yet it communicates subtle and sophisticated thoughts in clear language and an emotionally present voice that is intimate to the experience of the two teenaged boys, one dead, the other accused of the murder, and to all the people he meets or observes: students, family, community members, lawyers, witnesses, jurors. While staying close to his subjects, Corbett inserts his own measured thinking on the psychological and social themes the story evokes. Child development, gender, psychopathology, trauma, family relations, and sociocultural dynamics are all attentively explored and interwoven.
In its first pages, he presents a key courtroom scene in which a teenage witness to the murder takes the stand; through a sensitive accounting, Corbett immediately provides an emotional closeness to his subjects. His evocation of the scene allows the reader to experience what can be called “psychoanalytic listening,” that is, attending carefully and simultaneously to everything in the interpersonal and social environment. Everything— gestures, glances, exclamations, silences, tone of voice, movement, language, turn of phrase, and his own emotional temperature—is taken in, relationships are considered, and meaning is reflected upon as his and the reader’s experience unfolds. Listening closely and thinking carefully, Corbett allows the stories to come alive: the internal worlds of the characters emerge as their complex relationships take shape. We come to know them all, both gently and empathically.
The central story is the relationship between the two boys, both from broken families, and the intersecting contexts of their lives. Larry, or Leticia as he had begun to call himself, was a mixed-race brown boy who grew up in foster care. Brandon, the killer, was a white heterosexual boy from a working class community whose parents were so severely drug addicted that he was practically orphaned as a young child. Neither appears to have received needed support from adults in his teenage struggles with identity. Larry’s foster parents were ill equipped to understand his expressions of gender variance. Brandon, similarly, needed assistance with his own struggles in development and without it turned to the violent ideology of white supremacy. The two boys were bound together, not as friends or even classmates, but by forces outside their awareness. Larry’s gender fluidity is captured by Corbett from the perspective of a child’s bid to claim his subjectivity, a libidinal adolescent’s defiance, with trauma as a backdrop. Larry’s is a lonely, tattered journey in which he finds bits of support from a teacher here and a friend there, but is largely shunned and teased by classmates. At the same time it’s a hopeful path, one leaning toward realizing identity and finding acceptance, until hope is murdered. In Brandon, who sits taciturn and unremorseful throughout the trial, we come to know as a boy struggling with a masculine identity that is gravely imperiled if not already lost. Precarious and vulnerable, his shame turns to rage as he tells his classmates of his plan to “get rid of the problem” that is Larry. His friends, apparently having already incorporated the evolving, more flexible gender norms, tell him to chill out. Abandoned and isolated, Brandon’s rage hardens to murderousness.
I grew up and went to school in the 1970s and as an adolescent needed to make sense of my homosexual feelings. I clearly remember the Brandon-like boys in my school. I felt their darkly conflicted gazes and troubled, volatile attention. What I sensed, but couldn’t articulate at the time, was how their own insecurities around masculinity and sexuality were directed at me. Looking back, I can appreciate the stark emotional difference between the boys who didn’t experience me as a problem and the ones who did. With the latter, I learned to give a wide berth, avert my gaze, and keep myself away from serious confrontation.
Much has changed in schools since that time. We have had a monumental shift toward “safe and supportive schools,” and the environment has gotten better for many kids who would once have been targets of humiliation and violence. On the other hand, one can’t read this book and reflect on Brandon without placing him among the extended legacy of white male teenage school shooters. These depressed, alienated, violently suicidal and homicidal boys came into focus in 1999, the year Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold put Columbine on the map. Brandon is their brother and heir. Corbett never explicitly explores this angle, but with Brandon’s choice, conscious or unconscious, to murder Larry at school in the middle of a morning class, he joins what Malcom Gladwell (2015), writing in the New Yorker, called a virtual gang perpetrating a “slow-motion, ever-evolving riot.” These rioters seek not only violent disruption and revenge for perceived humiliations, but heroic notoriety. A Murder over a Girl exposes a critical element of the riot, one enacting an extreme protest against the loss of white male heterosexual dominance.
This part of the story is given further credence by the local community’s response to the shooting and the trial. We meet members of the community, the Silver Strand, a low-income, primarily white seaside neighborhood of Oxnard, California, a place rife with social dysfunction and clinging to its only remaining privilege, access to a stretch of the California coast. They find their own alienation personified in Brandon. The community rallies around Brandon, seeing him as a “normal boy” who was “provoked” by his “deviant” classmate and abandoned by the school. Whether due to their own guilt for not taking better care of him or to their helplessness and anger faced with social forces beyond their control, they see not a murderer, only a victim.
Once again, Corbett’s thoughtful psychoanalytic perspective clarifies. While explicit about describing some of the more paranoid psychological defenses that arise as the community confronts trauma, shame, and loss, he is also on the lookout for the same reactions in himself and, by extension, in us. It would be easy to join in pathologizing Brandon and his supporters, or look for heroes and villains in the story, but that would serve only to relieve us of our own guilt and responsibility. With Corbett’s guidance we can both mourn Larry/Leticia and stand more solidly behind youth as they express ever evolving gender identities and also find empathy for Brandon’s predicament.
And the same story continues in various forms today. We read in the news disturbing accounts of angry white voters. While many are horrified by the expressions of extreme anger and intolerance these people betray, others are recognizing the economic and cultural dislocation that underlies this roiling resentment. Other voices advocate providing more support to demographically similar communities devastated by the opioid epidemic and a dramatic rise in illness and suicide. In related discussions we even hear calls for a broader and more sustained effort to redefine the masculine role to release it once and for all from its narrow, emotionally constrained and rigid frame (see Brooks 2016). At the end of the book, Corbett wisely eschews easy prescriptions. The last pages are some of the most moving in the story, as he pays a visit to Brandon’s mother, years after the trial. The two sit together, pained with lingering questions about what was in Brandon’s mind at the time of the murder, and share their frustration about his continuing refusal to speak, which deprives them and us of the ability to incorporate his experience into our meaning making. The silence also leaves the grieving and guilt-ridden survivors more isolated and unmoored. Here again, we appreciate Corbett’s approach, which tolerates the tension in the encounter and appreciates its significance, shares the vulnerability of the moment, and uses it to find greater connection to Brandon’s mother. In this simple emotional act he models an attitude we’d all do well to emulate, especially during times of division and uneasy social transition.