The ‘Good Murderer’ Gary Gilmore: The Re-sacralization of the Scapegoat in the Age of Public Reason

If Sister Helen Prejean’s anti-death penalty book Dead Man Walking (1993) suggests the return of the scapegoat in a narratively light manner, then The Executioner’s Song (1979) does so with nothing less than bloody vengeance; as Norman Mailer made clear on multiple occasions the sordid tragedy of Gary Gilmore constitutes nothing less than the wholesale refutation of the secularist conceits of liberal America. Gilmore presents us with a remainder so indivisible, an accursed share so unassimilable, a lacuna so perfectly empty, that the legal system lacked the vocabulary to successfully name him: an accused sentenced to death who wages all-out legal warfare against those who were trying to stop his execution. By so adamantly, and so publicly, calling for his death at the hands of the State of Utah out of his own free will, Gilmore had improbably seized for himself the mantle of sacrificial victim within a post-theistic world. Even more noxious to the liberal pluralist was Gilmore’s motivation for doing so: religious belief. Mailer accepts in toto Gilmore’s professed belief in reincarnation; so compelling was Gilmore that Mailer himself converted to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Even more interesting from a Girardian perspective is the astonishing account provided by Gary’s brother Mikal in Shot in the Heart (1994): Gilmore’s seemingly pre-destined pilgrimage toward his mimetic enactment of Mormon blood atonement as a skandalon to public reason. On the issue of sacrifice Mikal Gilmore’s text vastly supersedes Mailer’s otherwise excellent The Executioner’s Song; with the latter we move into the domain of the uncanny, Gary Gilmore having been literally marked at birth as a sacrificial offering of spilt blood—death by firing squad.