Games archcriminals play: Mabuse vs Fantômas

Abstract

The modern understanding of crime and criminals is rooted in game-playing. Videogames engage players as active participants in fictional crimes, and news stories routinely present the heads of powerful criminal organizations as players, distinguishing the archcriminals who head these organizations from the more proletarian lackeys they employ. Archcriminals have been particularly common in serial fiction, where the longer narrative arc allows for the unfolding of successive and increasingly complex criminal schemes that escalate in audacity and consequence. As Ruth Mayer has shown, the link between supercriminals and seriality goes even deeper, establishing these criminals as liminal, deceptively flat and indeterminate figures whose viral presence is everywhere but whose identity remains hidden behind their public branding: ‘Whatever the master criminal instigates is geared toward and subject to spread and expansion. And, more generally speaking, so is the figure itself.’1 Mayer, who identifies Fu Manchu as an incarnation of ‘the yellow peril’, contends that ‘The serial mode through which the Fu Manchu stories have been disseminated is in perfect concord with the stock imagery illustrating yellow peril scenarios’.2 Mayer and Shane Denson have gone on to argue that ‘the seriality of a serial figure is really not that different from the seriality of a serial killer’, because the liminality of the serial figure – its existence at the intersection of various contradictions and material contingencies – proves to be its most crucial attribute. The serial enactment of recurring figures, figure constellations, or plot lines revolves, in all of our case studies, around fundamental conceptual or ideological inconsistencies which are dramatised or showcased, rather than ‘reflected’ or resolved. […] the ideological parameters of a serial figure are manifested in the serial structure of its enactment; ideology works as series.3