Of course, Don Quixote is also the origin of the realist psychological novel. By repeating the forms of chivalric romance, its knight created something completely new. For the three hundred years between Don Quixote and the emergence of film, the psychological novel shaped how subjectivity thought about itself. I think John Hinckley might have done something similar. In the future, we might remember him as one of the heralds of the internet age.
It’s not just school shooters and spree killers: we are all John Hinckley now. This is the promise of the smartphone. No more passive masses staring at one glowing celluloid image. Instead, everyone gets to turn themselves into an object. Arrange yourself over your highly curated Instagram grid. Pull the appropriate faces on TikTok. Add filters, augment with AI.…Look at the screen too much and the odds of bloodshed start rising. The internet permeates the world with a diffuse, secularized violence and some people, if they’re desperate or bitter enough, will always follow its logic right to the end. But for everyone else, the gun is no longer really necessary; being online means confronting a lifeless object that happens to be yourself. Just look into the front-facing camera, take a picture, and there you are.
John Hinckley has a YouTube channel. He films himself in his house in Virginia, performing songs about love and redemption, or delivering short homilies on peace and harmony to his subscribers. There are just over forty thousand of them. Sometimes he’s shirtless. Every video starts the same way. “Hello everybody,” he says, “hope you’re doing great.” He reads the comments. Most of the time he’s wearing sunglasses, but you can still see it in his eyes. He loves it. The same dream he’s been dreaming since he was nine years old, to melt into the magnetic field and pulse through infinite space. It’s all real. What an incredible world he’s made.