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He may be languishing in a 1.5-metre Berlin jail cell awaitingdeportation back to Canada, but Montreal dismemberment-murdersuspect Luka Magnotta is just beginning to attract attention in theEuropean capitals that were the venues of his nine-day flight fromjustice. More Related to this Story Public editor: Globe s coverage of body-parts case was justified Police eye charges against man who hosted alleged Magnotta video Body parts sent to Vancouver schools; possible link to Lin killing In Berlin, his crimes have quickly faded from public attention, ashis capture occurred at almost the same time as crime involving aman who beheaded his wife in front of their six children in thecentral Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg, not far from theInternet caf where Mr. Magnotta was caught by police whilelooking at pornographic pictures of himself. In Paris, on the other hand, the cultural elite have begun to takenotice of the bizarre figure who passed through their midst lastweek, and conclude that he is a perfect illustration of their ideasabout the alienating and distorting nature of the Internet. Like acharacter from one of Michel Houellebecq s French novels, Mr.Magnotta appears to be the ultimate example of the atomizing,de-personalizing nature of online life. Under the banner headline The assassin of the Facebookgeneration, the Paris newspaper Le Figaro launched this theme onWednesday with an essay by cultural critic Marc de Boni. Without the web, the butcher of Montreal would not exist, Mr.de Boni concludes. This killer character is a narcissistic anddeviant avatar, one of many virtual identities he invented in orderto create celebrity. What else do you say about an alleged psychotic killer who has 70Facebook accounts and whose self-made video of his murder,dismemberment and cannibalistic attack on student Lin Jun somehowattracted 600 likes on the Facebook page where it wasoriginally posted? After all, Mr. de Boni notes, the Montreal killer appears to havesearched for the most popular genres on the internet goryvideos, low-rent porn, Facebook narcissism and thrust himselfinto their midst in a grotesque, hyperbolically attention-seekingway. Even the most quintessential and popular of internet memes, the LOL-cat (an ironic picture of a kitten) appears to have been hijacked byMr. Magnotta: His initial source of media infamy, the videos inwhich he sadistically murdered kittens using snakes and plasticbags, weren just fodder for police and animal-welfareinvestigations, but were specifically modelled after theinternet-kitten craze. And Mr. Magnotta seemed to be not so much a unique individual as apastiche of images from Hollywood, pornography and the internet.Among his many other avatars and Intenet identities was CatherineTramwell, the name of Sharon Stone s psycho-killer character inBasic Instinct a movie whose poses and lines he mimicked in hismurder video, right down to the use of an ice pick as the murderweapon. For a musical score for the video, he chose True Faith bythe 1980s British group New Order, the same music that is playedduring murder scenes (filmed in Toronto) in the movie AmericanPsycho. Through these, Mr. de Boni writes, he knows he can arouse thecuriosity of a class of heavy Internet users, quick to seeeverything and share everything. In most European countries, Mr. Magnotta is known in the media asthe porn-star killer, even though it has become apparent thathe didn t star in any pornography, notwithstanding the grosslypornographic nature of his own apparent crimes. But the French seem poised to dub him the Facebook assassin, and on a continent where the Web is still treated with suspicionand is subject to a much higher degree of government regulation,Mr. Magnotta may have become the avatar of a wider insecurity. More Related to this Story In wake of Magnotta case, police forces dust off unsolved files Magnotta could be back in Canada in a month They ve taken a monster off the street You got me, Magnotta tells police in Berlin caf. We are high quality suppliers, our products such as Tree Wall Stickers , China Wall Flower Stickers for oversee buyer. To know more, please visits Wall Flower Stickers.
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