On the 30th of March, 1981, John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 “Devastator” round into the chest of the president of the United States.

At the time, people didn’t fully understand what had happened. Two hours after the shooting, there was a press conference in the White House briefing room. It was led by a junior official, since Press Secretary James Brady had a bullet lodged in his skull at the time. The questions were on conventional topics, like Ronald Reagan’s health, and the chain of command. The reporters wanted to know if the president was conscious. Had he been sedated? Who was with him in the hospital? While the bullet was being extracted from his chest, who was currently running the United States of America? Vice President George Bush was somewhere in Texas, apparently aware of the situation, but not in Washington yet. The deputy press secretary said he couldn’t answer that one. Moments later, he was yanked offstage, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig took over the podium. “As of now,” he told the media, “I am in control here in the White House.”

Haig was also concerned with predictable subjects. He was worried that with Reagan out of action and the nation’s attention elsewhere, the Soviets might take the opportunity to strike. Satellites had detected troop movements near the Polish border. Russian submarines seemed to be moving closer to the Eastern seaboard. Strategic Air Command on high alert. Missiles on standby. Haig made sure he had a duplicate of the president’s nuclear football, the satchel containing a list of cities and installations in the Soviet Union along with the missile launch codes. Meanwhile in the USSR, they were also focusing hard on the things that used to matter. When the president was shot and Haig went on live television to announce that he was now in charge, it might have looked a lot like the United States had finally gone through its first coup. Maybe Bush was being held in an underground cell in Texas; maybe he was in on it. He had some creepy connection to the man who’d just taken down Reagan. The shooter’s father was a family friend. They had the same lawyer. Bush’s son Neil was supposed to be having dinner with Hinckley’s brother Scott the very next evening. It all stank of conspiracy. Somewhere, in a nuclear command center in the unthawing wastes of Siberia, men were striding around with a little more panic than usual. Staring at their monitors with just the slightest tremor in their fingers. You can push a button with such a tiny motion. You barely even need to think about it.

All these people still lived in the old world of force, where if you point a weapon at someone it’s because they’re your enemy and the two of you are in some kind of struggle for dominance. They didn’t realize that world was over. While all this was happening, Hinckley was being kept in a D.C. police station with only one man on duty. Eddie Myers was a local homicide detective; he’d been confined to the station because of some minor feud with his commanding officer, which meant he was the first person to interview the man who’d just shot the president. “Come on now, John,” he said, “you must be a Democrat.” Hinckley laughed. He wasn’t a Democrat. He wasn’t anything. He didn’t have any particular problem with Reagan. He hadn’t tried to kill the president of the United States because of anything as meaningless as politics. That had nothing to do with it at all.

Even now, we don’t quite get it. John Hinckley was released from St. Elizabeths Hospital—the same psychiatric facility that once housed Richard Lawrence, who tried to kill Andrew Jackson, and Charles Guiteau, who successfully killed James Garfield—in 2016. In 2022, the last of his court restrictions expired. He’s now free to speak to the media, and the media is interested. There’s been a long New York Times Magazine profile by the Irish writer Mark O’Connell. There’s been a documentary, Hinckley: I Shot the President, narrated by Hinckley himself. He says he doesn’t like dwelling on his past. He makes music. As far as he’s concerned, he’s first and foremost a struggling singer-songwriter. He’s upset that venues keep canceling his gigs. I don’t think he understands it either.

The line everyone knows is that he tried to kill the president because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. That phrase is repeated in all the stories about him, those exact words: impress Jodie Foster. He was stalking her, he was in love with her; somehow he thought that assassinating Reagan would help. But that’s not what really happened. What happened in 1981 is that John Hinckley discovered the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.

I. JODIE

When Jodie Foster was fifteen years old, her mother bought her a nude photoshoot.

Brandy Foster had decided it was time. No more fluffy Disney movies; from now on Jodie would be focusing on serious adult roles. To make it happen, casting directors would have to be able to see her daughter’s nipples. She hired out a house in Los Angeles for the photoshoot and an Italian photographer to take the pictures. At first Jodie wore a swimsuit, but her mother and the photographer gradually cajoled her into taking her top off for the camera, and then finally everything.

Brandy was very practical about that sort of thing. Jodie had been born years after her parents split up. Lucius Foster was a former fighter pilot, womanizing, occasionally violent, mostly absent. A court had ordered him to pay his ex-wife a hundred dollars a month for each of the three children they had together, but he never did. Brandy had to drive over to his office to beg, plead, scream for the money, throw a red snotty tantrum over it in his bright and well-lit office. He was buying something with that money, which was her indignity. According to Jodie’s brother Buddy, one day he made her an offer. “If you take off your clothes and let me fuck you,” he said, “I’ll give you all of it.” So she did. Nine months later, Jodie Foster was born.

Both stories come from Foster Child, Buddy Foster’s biography of his sister. Buddy was also an actor. At eight years old, he was the family’s main breadwinner. He played the kid in the Tootsie Pop commercial who asks how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. That was probably the high point of his career. When he was nine years old, he auditioned for a Coppertone ad; while he was performing, a four-year-old Jodie wandered in. “She really put on a show, flexing her muscles and going through a repertoire of poses … They immediately decided Jodie was their model. They apologized to me and showed me out of the room.” Twenty years later, bankrupt and addicted to morphine, Buddy Foster crawled under his dining-room table and shot himself.

In a way, this is part of the deal. Former child stars tend not to do so well. The best-case scenario is that you’ll turn into a notorious mess, drug-addled, divorce-stacking, bloating beyond recognition, a gray mutant version of the face everyone remembers from the screen. The worst-case scenario is that you end up like Buddy Foster, blowing a fist-sized hole into your own flesh. (He survived: too fucked up to aim right, he ended up missing his head and perforating his thigh instead.) But it must have been particularly bad for Buddy, because he suffered all the negative effects without even becoming a star. Meanwhile, his sister, who’d grown up in the same family under the shadow of the same mother, and who then had to deal with being a major element in an attempt to assassinate the president of the United States, didn’t just become a star; she survived.

I think the reason Jodie Foster survived is that she understood something: that she was, like almost everyone, not one person but two.

●

In his 1890 work The Principles of Psychology, William James observes that we all have two entirely different names for ourselves. Sometimes we’re an “I,” and sometimes we’re a “me.” “I” is the self as subject, something without attributes, the raw experience of existing in time. “Me” is the self as an object, the thing other people see. James calls it the “empirical self,” an “empirical aggregate of things objectively known.” It consists of your body, your clothes, your home, your stuff. It seems more solid than the “I,” but it does get hazy around the edges. At the furthest fringe, there’s the “social self,” the image of yourself that lives inside the mind of the people who know you. The bigger your “me” is, the more it ceases to actually belong to you.

A lot of early human societies put a taboo on the depiction of human beings. Cave paintings show vast animal herds, beautifully detailed, but humans are always scrawny stick figures, or animal-headed. Maybe it would be an affront to subjectivity to represent someone’s outward form. Or maybe it was a safety measure. Don’t let the “me,” which is expansive and self-replicating, take over; don’t give it too much substance; don’t let it escape. It escaped. Greek coins often showed the face of the local ruler on one side, and the head of Medusa on the other: the thing that turns a living human being into an objective image of themselves, made of stone. Some societies have stronger defenses against this stuff. In parts of Africa, anyone with too much authority or charisma, a surfeit of social self, was assumed to be a secret witch, killing people in the night to feast on their flesh. Meanwhile, Western society, which had decided that witches aren’t real, invented cinema. Shortly afterwards, with their objective selves freely wandering the world, stars started drugging and killing themselves.

If Jodie Foster survived, it’s because she understood exactly what she was dealing with. A year and a half after the shooting, she wrote everything she’d come to realize in an article for Esquire. “I knew,” she wrote, “that there were two Jodie Fosters. There was one as large as the screen, a Technicolor vision with flowing blond hair and a self-assured smile. She was the woman they had all been watching. But the second Jodie was a vision only I knew … a frail and alienated being.” The piece is titled “Why Me?”

When she turned eighteen, Jodie Foster went to Yale to study literature. She put her acting career on hold, just when she was becoming a superstar, so she could learn about semiology and the philosophy of language. “The idea of returning to a dressing room in a Winnebago, being called Miss Foster, seemed foreign, unnatural.” She wanted to retreat a little from the enormous image of herself that kept being projected around the world. She liked Rilke. She signed up for creative-writing classes. She couldn’t wait to be something other than an actor. The other Jodie Foster had other plans.

She never actually knowingly saw Mr. Toxic Shock with her own eyes, but her roommates did. They described a nervous, furtive man blundering into corners. He didn’t belong. Not because he was a boy: the princess suites on the top floor of Welch Hall were supposed to be women-only, but there were always a good number of blond-haired rowers sneaking in or out. But Mr. Toxic Shock could never have been a Yalie; the man didn’t have a stitch of Lacoste in his wardrobe. He was visible to the women of the princess suites at Welch Hall only because of how enormously invisible he would ordinarily be. “He was heavy,” one of them told the Washington Post afterwards, “and sort of greasy.” An unfuckable man: a stalker, a creep. That was how he got the nickname: if by some miracle he managed to actually get inside a human pussy, it’d cause a deadly staph infection. He sniffed and prowled with watery eyes, and he left little notes under Foster’s door. Love notes. This creature was in love.

I know a girl who is beyond words;
I don’t know her well but I know her.
I know she knows that I know her
And she knows that I love her.
I don’t know her true feelings towards me
But she knows that I know her name.

Someone other than Jodie Foster might have been appalled. No, you don’t know me, you don’t know me at all. But she understood.

Her Esquire essay is a strangely under-examined piece of the Reagan assassination canon. Understandably, Foster doesn’t want to be defined by the ordeal; she used to walk out of interviews whenever it came up. For decades, the essay was her only extended comment on the affair. It was also her first piece of published writing. Esquire paid her eight hundred dollars for it, which was not all that much for a magazine feature even in 1982, and definitely not all that much for a magazine feature from a woman who’d been nominated for an Oscar and two Golden Globes. She could have sold her story to the tabloids for a lot more if she’d wanted, but she didn’t. What she wanted was to express herself in prose.

The result is not entirely polished. She starts by talking about how much she used to shit herself as a baby. There are also some extremely nineteen-year-old passages in there. (“Love should be sacred. It should be uttered in a soft breath, on misty mornings, in secret hideaways.”) The subhead reads: “Nearly two years after the attempt on the president’s life, an innocent bystander offers further testimony.” But Foster doesn’t describe herself as an innocent bystander, not entirely. Instead, at points, she almost seems to be on the edge of admitting responsibility. She did this. She told him to put a bullet in the president. She writes:

I raise my eyebrows, you think I’m sexy. I dart my eyes, you think I’m smart … The most frightening thing is that when we “turn on” to the camera—when we insult it, make love to it, comfort it—we aren’t only manipulating a lens and some glass fragments. We’re talking to ten, twenty, or perhaps thirty million people. We’re manipulating and influencing them all with every careless gesture and gleaming smile. That’s art. That’s mass media. A man can buy a poster, pin it on his locker, and imagine the most minute details about a slinky starlet. He’ll know her through and through. He’ll possess her external reality. So of course Hinckley “knew” me. That woman on the screen was digging in her bag of tricks and representing herself for everyone to assess, to get to know, to take home.

After all, he wasn’t the only one. Unlike her classmates, Jodie Foster received about a hundred unsolicited letters a day. Wherever she went, people knew her name before she introduced herself. There was a polite fiction, in which her fellow students pretended to ignore her enormous celluloid second self, but they could see it just fine. Some were selling information to the tabloids. Not long after the shooting, People published a detailed account of her life on campus. “I had been watched,” she realized, “from the first day I set foot on campus. They all noticed the color of my Dolfin shorts on the day of orientation. … No, the Hinckley ordeal did not destroy my anonymity; it only destroyed the illusion of it. Every man or woman in this world had the right to stare at, point at, and judge me because… that was my job.”

She had wanted so badly to be normal. Before she’d gone to Yale, her new life there was all she’d thought about. “My summer of 1980 was spent in anticipation of what I was ‘going to be,’ how I was going to walk into the framework of the Ivy League. I bought a good deal of Lacoste clothing, pumped my three-pound dumbbells each morning, played tennis in the afternoon. I wanted to be the kind of girl who’s friendly, well-liked, social. … Maybe I was kidding myself.” Maybe she was. She was trying to build a “me” for herself on her own terms, but her self had already spread inside the heads of millions of strangers. It didn’t belong to her any more. It belonged to Mr. Toxic Shock.

II. JOHN

Afterwards, his parents pored through all the crates of their son’s old papers stacked up in the garage. Between the schoolbooks and the scraps of homework, they found his poems. This is how John Hinckley introduces himself in one of them:

Pretend you are a virgin on fire
An outcast in the midst of madness
The scion of something unthinkable
Satan’s long lost illegitimate son
A solitary weed among carnations
The last living shit on earth
Dracula on a crowded beach
A child without a home
The loser of a one-man race
Rare meat thrown to a hungry lion
A faded flag on a windy day

Welcome to the truth
Welcome to reality
Welcome to my world.

He was not the illegitimate son of Satan. He came from a nice wholesome Christian family. His parents had been teenage sweethearts. Jack had been a naval officer; on his evenings off he played drums in a jazz band. Jo Ann watched him from the crowd. Once they got married, he put his drums away and never touched them again; their job was done. His new dream was to start his own oil company. The young couple moved fourteen times in their first five years. Jack would sleep in his car for weeks at a time, out at a drill site in the middle of nowhere. He believed that with hard work and self-confidence a young man could get anything he wanted in America. But while he knew how to find the oil and how to drill for it, he didn’t know how to raise the capital needed to extract it. There was something his competitors had that he didn’t: a sliminess greasing them through the world. A good oilman has to be a good con man as well. Jack was too sincere. His companies always failed. And so, in the end, he was forced to slink back to one of the big firms and accept his humiliation: a job, and a big house in the suburbs, and money. A nice life.

They had three children. The first two were lively, hardworking and popular; a boy and a girl. The third was Mr. Toxic Shock.

Some people are born to fail in the ordinary world. Maybe they’re made from different stuff. When the other children are busy running around, boisterous and screaming, this child trembles and hides, clings to his mother’s legs at the supermarket. He’s too delicate: if a snotty hand ever pushed him, he’d shatter when he hit the ground. He can’t come out and play. And then later, when the other children are moistly experimenting with each other’s bodies just to see how it feels, this one can’t do that either. Nothing bad has happened to him, but nothing good either. Nothing happens at all. The parents of these people usually think they’ve done a good job, at first. This boy isn’t out all night committing crimes or impregnating his classmates. He doesn’t seem to be interested in drugs. He is sensitive: wounded by the injustices of the world, devoted to his favorite books or music, and always kind to small animals.

That’s what other people see. The child doesn’t see anything of the sort. He doesn’t live with other people; he lives with media. TV screens and record players; electronic signals bleeping in the dark. He feels things by their magnetic fields.

Like seventy million Americans, the Hinckley family were first exposed to the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Jack and Jo Ann didn’t get it. They make this very clear. In Breaking Points, the book they wrote together about their son, they never mention the Beatles without registering their distaste for “those awful Beatles records,” the “hysteria over the Beatles” and “the baffling appeal of rock music.” But John was transfixed. Not even by the Beatles themselves, but by the crowd. You can still watch that broadcast online. The music is barely there, just a kind of metronome giving time to the screams from the crowd. A sound like a jet turbine powering up, or the nightmare strings of a Penderecki composition. See how the camera lingers on one teenage girl in the crowd. Twitching and convulsing like a demoniac in her seat. Mouth hung open, eyes stretched wide. No girlish composure, just ugly biological delight. All because of a man saying he wants to hold her hand. You can understand why so many decent American parents found it so threatening. “I was so enthralled by the Beatles,” John remembered later. “The whole scene, the girls screaming.” Imagine being so adored. Imagine being such a beautiful object. He was nine years old.

In April 1976, John wrote home. “By the time you receive this letter, I will no longer be in Lubbock. I have dropped out of school.” A month later, he told his parents that he had moved to Los Angeles. He was going to be a rock star like the Beatles. His parents had waited his entire childhood for him to get over his obsession with them, but it never happened. His room at home was full of the Beatles: every album they ever cut, scattered among magazines featuring articles about the Beatles, decaying, and books about the Beatles, mostly unread. As a teenager he’d lock himself in there for days at a time, listening to Beatles albums and strumming along on his guitar. He never played for anyone else. He’d never been interested in college. “College isn’t all that important for a musician,” he’d told his parents. They tried to be supportive. Maybe, they suggested, John could go to music school instead, learn how to read sheet music, learn about scales and harmony and counterpoint. John hadn’t seemed interested. Plenty of rock stars couldn’t read sheet music. His parents didn’t get it. They thought being a rock star was about rock music, while he knew it was about being a star. The world is full of musicians more talented than the Beatles, better at singing and playing the guitar, but it doesn’t matter. None of them have that same magnetic pulse.

Letters from California. John had rented a room in Hollywood, where all the record companies have their offices. He said that any day now he’d get a deal and become famous. What’s more, he had a girlfriend. The two had met in a laundromat, because even beautiful young actresses sometimes need to wash their clothes. Her name was Lynn Collins and she didn’t exist. In his letters, he described the arc of their relationship: the trips they took together out into the Californian hinterland; the contacts she’d been making for him with United Artists; their cute petty arguments, shading into bigger and bigger fights as both of them started to realize that they weren’t really right for each other after all; and then, at last, the end. “Lynn and I are apparently through,” he wrote. “No more comment on that.” None of it was real. John had barely left his dank rented room. A few furtive trips to fast-food restaurants at midnight, ordering four or five burgers and methodically eating his way through them the next day. When he came home again five months later, he was almost unrecognizable. The trip had left him balder and bloated, pale as a fistful of worms.

The next four years were spent shuffling around: sometimes he hung around the family home for a few months, playing the guitar and talking to no one except the family cat; sometimes he went back to Texas Tech. Sometimes he went back to Los Angeles to be a rock star. He started buying guns.

The other thing he did in those years was watch Taxi Driver. By the end of 1976, he’d seen the film maybe 25 times. He thought Travis Bickle, Robert de Niro’s psychotic cab-driving protagonist, was an image of himself. As he recalls in his documentary: “Travis was alienated, isolated, estranged from his family, and I was the same way, so I could really relate to the character.” But it wasn’t just a question of relating. In the film, Travis Bickle wears a green army-surplus jacket, so John got one for himself, and a pair of army-surplus boots too. In the film, Travis Bickle pours peach brandy over his breakfast cereal, so John told his mother to buy him some peach brandy. (He drank a little and then replaced it with apple juice.) In the film, Travis Bickle tries to assassinate a presidential candidate, but his plans are foiled by the Secret Service. So John followed Jimmy Carter around the country for a while, until he was arrested at Nashville International Airport with a suitcase full of guns. They confiscated his weapons and set his bail at $62.50, which he paid. He never returned to face the justice of the State of Tennessee.

All this was because John Hinckley had still only ever wanted one thing, which was to be the image on a screen, magnetic and adored. What he’d learned watching Taxi Driver was that there are other options besides being a rock star like John Lennon. You could be Travis Bickle instead. Either way, it meant the same thing. Tear off his flesh, shed his useless “I” and become something clean and perfect, made of electricity, celluloid and light.

●

In the autumn of 1980, John Hinckley told his parents he was taking a creative-writing course at Yale. There was no creative-writing course. He was going to stalk Jodie. According to him, and everyone else, this is because he had become obsessed with her. But it wasn’t really her that obsessed him. She was never his object; what he needed was access to the weightless world of the image where she lived. He had to rescue her, because that’s what Travis Bickle does. She had to fall in love with him, because if she could see and recognize him it meant they were made of the same stuff. He wouldn’t just be another fat lonely man in a movie theater, mesmerized by the image: he would have passed through the screen into the other side.

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle tries to talk a child prostitute called Iris out of her particular line of work. “You should be at home now. You should be dressed up. You should be going out with boys. You should be going to school.” Iris thinks he’s a square. So he takes a gun to her brothel and kills her pimp, her client and a bouncer before attempting to kill himself. In the film, Iris is played by Jodie Foster.

John had to rescue Jodie Foster in the same way. But from what? He slid little notes under her door, explaining who he was and that he was coming to save her. Nice notes, full of kind feelings and good humor. “jodie foster love, just wait. i’ll rescue you soon. please cooperate.” For some reason, she didn’t appreciate them. He even managed to phone her. She said that it was dangerous for her to talk to people she didn’t know. She said it in a strangely cold, firm, authoritative voice. “I’m not dangerous,” he replied. He couldn’t understand. “You just don’t ever want me to call again?” he said. “No!” she said. “Really nice talking to you though!” She didn’t sound like she meant it. When he came home, he told his parents that New Haven was nasty and dirty. “The students dress like total slobs. … Is anything sacred anymore?” Anyway, he didn’t need a college course to be a writer. He had been in Connecticut for no more than four days.

In February 1981, John Hinckley stood in front of the Dakota, the building in New York where John Lennon was murdered, and thought about killing himself. He had a revolver in his pocket; the idea was to blow his brains out right where Lennon was shot down, so everyone could see. But there was nobody there. Thousands of people had come here after the murder, just two months before, to leave flowers and weep in public. He’d been one of them. But then they drifted away and went back to their lives. As if nothing had happened, as if it was possible to keep living in the world that killed John Lennon. He wrote a poem about it:

For an entire week after the assassination
of John Lennon I cried like a sick baby…
What I cannot comprehend is the fact that
people are trying to carry on with life now.
What’s the use?

In America, heros [sic] are meant to be killed. Idols
are meant to be shot in the back. Guns are neat
little things, aren’t they? They can kill
extraordinary people with very little effort …

John Lennon died a couple of weeks ago and I
did too. Bang, bang, we’re all dead. The stupid
earth keeps revolving and the stupid people keep
the faith but they are actually walking corpses.
Everyone is dead …

I am an American and boy am I proud! Let’s see
how many more idols we can wipe off the face of
the earth…

I don’t think he was entirely wrong. Heroes really are meant to be killed, and not only in America. When godlike Achilles danced from one great deed to the next, he was tugged along by his heel. Kleos aphthiton, immortal fame, is purchased at the price of death. J. G. Frazer saw, in every culture in the world, a trace of the sacrificial king. One day, he’s garlanded with flowers; the next, the same adoring crowd picks up stones and pelts him to death. If extinction is the price of celebrity, maybe it’s because fame is already a kind of death. It means becoming an inert object. The hunger for fame is a kind of death drive: as Freud described it, “the most universal endeavor of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world.” To become an object for others and not a subject to yourself. But John Hinckley was the first person in the magnetic age to really follow this equivalence all the way to its conclusion. If you want to make yourself visible to the apparatus of electronic media, you don’t need to be good at the guitar. You don’t need to sing. You don’t even need to drink the same peach brandy as a Scorsese character. All you need to do is kill and die.

III. RON

In 1964, seventeen years before his encounter with John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan gave the commencement speech at a private boarding school for boys in Arizona. Afterwards, some of the boys came up to him to have their photos taken with the famous man. He was very charming with them all, shaking hands, asking their names. As it happened, his own son Michael was graduating that day. Michael hung back for most of the ceremony; maybe he was bashful. But at the end of the afternoon, he went over and looked his father in the eye. His father stuck out a big meaty hand. “Hi there,” he said, full of sincerity and warmth. “My name’s Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”

In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard described two kinds of madness, the inward and the outward. “One shrinks from looking the first one in the eye,” he writes, “lest one discover the depth of his frantic state, but one does not dare to look at the other at all, for fear of discovering that he does not have proper eyes but glass eyes and hair made from a floor mat, in short, that he is an artificial product.” John Hinckley had an inward madness. He was all “I,” empty juddering “I.” He didn’t have any idea who he was. Ronald Reagan, who was Hinckley’s secret twin, had the opposite. He could joke and charm and do everything that was required of him, but underneath the image of himself was a huge placid nothing. A Hollywood actor, a constellation of different roles floating in space. He was not there. He did not exist.

Like John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan was born out of the great belly of inner America. Like Hinckley, he grew up around religion, strong ranting Protestant churches. Like Hinckley, the young Reagan took the long trip out to California to become a star. He was also disappointed. For years, he was stuck on the B-movie circuit, playing small roles in mostly forgotten films. His big break came in 1942, when he was cast in Kings Row as Drake McHugh, a playboy whose legs are unnecessarily amputated by a vengeful surgeon. In the scene that made Reagan’s career, McHugh wakes up from his bed in horror and yells, “Where’s the rest of me?” (The line would become the title of his autobiography.)

John Hinckley confused the images on a movie screen for his own real life, and Ronald Reagan did the same. He was fond of telling people that he’d been a tail gunner in the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War. He had not; he spent the war in California. But he did feature in the wartime film Desperate Journey, in which he and Errol Flynn take turns using a bomber’s rear gun turret to mow down dozens of Nazi soldiers. Later, he’d tell the prime minister of Israel that he had personally been present during the liberation of the concentration camps. He’d done nothing of the sort. But during his service with the First Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, he’d processed footage brought back from the front and dreamed himself into the frame.

Like any actor, Reagan needed a director. Ever since he’d first entered politics in the 1966 California gubernatorial race, he’d been the joint project of a small circle of California businessmen. Luminaries like Joseph Coors, inventor of the one-cent return on empty beer cans. Or Justin Whitlock Dart, who made his fortune moving the pharmacy counter to the back of the drugstore. Giants, but seedy giants, drab men in a country breaking out in psychedelic swirls. Reagan was their creature, the big thick stick they could use to beat down the hippies and the student protesters and everyone else, for a California where everyone ate roast beef for dinner again. They can’t have known what they were playing with. The magnetic field of stardom and entertainment absorbs everything it touches. They’d just fed it the United States of America.

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Wilson Reagan gave a speech to the National Conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO, at the Washington Hilton Hotel on the corner of T Street and Connecticut Avenue. He started by mentioning that he was the first U.S. president to hold a lifetime membership in an AFL-CIO-affiliated union. He spoke about individual freedom and ingenuity. He spoke about the government deficit. He spoke about a letter he’d received from an unemployed factory worker from Peoria, Illinois, who said that while cuts to government spending might personally hurt his family, he still had faith in America. Reagan said that people like this unemployed factory worker could build a new America, if only the government would get out the way and let them do it. He said that he would cut nearly fifty billion dollars from the federal budget, cut 10 percent from the tax rate across the board and eliminate excessive government regulations. He told the story of a neighbor in California who was trying to build his own house. In the end, this neighbor got so sick of all the government forms involved that he pasted them all together into a strip of paperwork 250 feet long, pitched it over some poles, and slept in it like a tent. Reagan said that the one area of government he wouldn’t cut was national defense. He spoke about the military buildup in the Soviet Union and the plight of workers in Poland. He saluted American workers for their family values, their religious faith and their strong patriotism. He promised to make America great again. The speech lasted 24 minutes and was well received. Reagan stood for the individual. Everyone should aspire to stand apart from the world. Everyone should aspire to be special. Afterwards, he left the hotel, and as he was walking back to his presidential limousine, John Hinckley—who was, in a way, a very obedient Reaganite—shot him in the chest.

It worked. Any talentless nobody really could break out of the world and live forever inside the screen. The way to do it was through spectacular acts of violence.

John Hinckley spent the next 35 years in a secure psychiatric ward, but he was not anonymous anymore. Millions of people read his poetry; billions of people learned his name. The world couldn’t think about Jodie Foster without thinking about him. He was famous. It’s been nearly fifty years, and people are still talking about him. I’m one of them.

Hinckley might have been the first person to walk through this doorway, but plenty of others followed him. Lonely scribblers, people captivated by the pictures on the screen. Virgins on fire, outcasts in the midst of madness, sensitive boys who can’t see their selves reflected back in anyone’s eyes, and settle instead for the whole world knowing their names. In 1998, the future Columbine killer Eric Harris kept a journal in which he planned out his own great act of transcendental violence. He also imagined it in terms of mass media, but for him those media weren’t movies or music but video games. “It’ll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, Duke and Doom all mixed together,” he wrote. “I want to leave a lasting impression on the world.”

In his 2014 manifesto, Elliot Rodger wrote: “I am not meant to live such a pathetic, miserable life. That is not my place in this world. I will not bow down and accept such a horrific fate. If humanity will not give me a worthy place among them, then I will destroy them all. I am better than all of them. I am a god.” Rodger’s grievance against the world was supposedly that he wanted a beautiful blonde girlfriend and he couldn’t get one. But he didn’t really want the girlfriend, any more than Hinckley wanted Jodie Foster. “A man having a beautiful girl by his side shows the world that he is worth something.” It wasn’t sex; he wanted people to notice him. He killed six people and then himself. It worked.

In July 2024, a twenty-year-old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Just before Crooks pulled the trigger, Trump had turned his head half an inch to the right, and the bullet ended up grazing his right ear. After the shooting, all the political hysterics assumed there must have been some kind of partisan motive, as if we were still in the age of John Wilkes Booth or Leon Czolgosz, and not the age of John Hinckley. The shooter was dead and he’d left no manifesto, but why else would you try to kill the most contentious candidate in the most contentious election in American history? As if Donald Trump were anything other than a celebrity, and politics were anything other than media. Crooks was born in 2003; he’d spent essentially his entire life watching the Donald Trump show. A gun is a machine for turning a spectator of stars into a star.

John Hinckley released a statement on Twitter after the shooting. “Violence is not the way to go,” he said. “Give peace a chance.”

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Hinckley says he’s cured now. He no longer fantasizes about Jodie Foster. He’s formally apologized to her; also to the families of his other victims. He no longer has violent thoughts. He just wants to sing and play the guitar. And if you think his madness was all about shooting Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, then he really has been cured. That specific pattern is unlikely to surface again. He has, however, started his own political group, the National Redemption Party, which supports “peace, love, and hope” and opposes both “the Mob that controls the music industry” and “Zionism everywhere.” It’s possible the problem goes deeper than that.

There’s no clinical name for Hinckley’s mimetic madness. Which is odd, because there’s an obvious literary precedent: you can find the same sickness in Don Quixote. Hinckley watched movies until he thought he was in one; Cervantes’s landowner is similarly mesmerized by printed text. Trapped in his lonely house somewhere in La Mancha, with only Palmerín of England and Amadís of Gaul for company, until his sanity ebbs away. Like all psychopathology, it’s an extreme version of a very ordinary aspect of the mind. We all have a social self; we all need recognition from other people. It’s not abnormal to want to be famous. It’s just that sometimes that need obliterates everything else. Don Quixote changes his name and declares himself a knight. He makes up a lady to fall psychotically in love with. He starts riding around on his old nag, declaring that every shabby roadside inn is really a castle, and the sheep being driven down the road are really an army. It’s not that he has confused the books for reality. It’s death drive. He wants to be a famous knight errant, like the ones in his books, because that means becoming an object, and not having to suffer through the subjective misery of a sad, lonely, loveless man nearing the end of his life.

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. There are people who’ve had plastic surgery to look better in selfies. Check the metrics. Are people looking at you? How many? A little fat boy from New Jersey can make a face at his phone, and suddenly he’s famous on four continents. If you keep tweeting, day in and day out, one day all your friends and family will be forced to publicly denounce you. There are ordinary, faintly stupid people who livestream essentially every second of their waking lives, and millions of others who watch them. Sometimes people livestream themselves committing spectacular acts of violence. These people tend to have a few things in common: they’re young, male and spend a lot of time online. 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.

Image credit: Michael Evans, Chaos outside the Washington Hilton Hotel after the assassination attempt on President Reagan, 1981. Collection of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.