As a plot driver, the traumatic home invasion has long been a staple of both film pulp—movies like Cape Fear, Death Wish, and John Wick—and artier projects like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and Ari Aster’s anxious new Beau Is Afraid. All play into our collective fears of lawless hooligans invading our personal space. But a plot device, as every sane person knows, is simply a tool for the creation of fantasy. ▶
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
NATION
INSIDE
CHINA’S RISKY PLAN IN THE SOUTH POLE
WRITING WHILE BATHING THE KIDS
AMERICANS ARE DYING YOUNGER
In the space of three days, two individuals more than a thousand miles apart kicked back against innocent young people who, they apparently were convinced, posed a threat to their safety. On April 13, in Kansas City, Mo., 84-year-old Andrew Lester, who is white, shot and seriously wounded 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, who is Black, after the teen mistakenly stopped at the wrong house, looking to pick up his twin brothers. In Hebron, N.Y., on April 15, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan shot and killed 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, a passenger in one of three vehicles that had mistakenly driven up the winding quarter-mile driveway leading to Monahan’s house in a remote wooded area.
These incidents are a warped reflection of a mental state we’ve seen over and over again in fiction: not the castle-protecting knight, but the paranoid loner, certain the world is a more dangerous place than it really is, who spontaneously defends his turf with the gun he just happens to have in his possession. These types have always been with us, but the 21st century has brought us a new variation. Many fears of a civilization gone mad—particularly when those fears are of a nation of white people under attack—have been stoked by fantasy factories masquerading as news organizations.
In a CNN interview, Andrew Lester’s grandson described his grandfather as a racist Fox News obsessive, adding that he believes Lester’s views are common among a certain type of older white Christian male. And sure enough, the ballad of the beleaguered white man has been for years the interminable drum solo of the network’s most popular pundit, Tucker Carlson, who was ousted on April 24.
Just how unsafe is the world, exactly? And how does that reality mesh with the public’s perception? In the 1970s, communications professor George Gerbner came up with the phrase mean world syndrome to explain how people’s exposure to depictions of violence in the media can lead them to perceive reality as more dangerous than it is.
Violent crime was indeed rising when Gerbner coined the term. But in the 1990s, both hom
