Lin Jun, the victim of Luca Rocco Magnotta, wrote one last Facebook entry before his disappearance. It was a photo of a park, with the words: “It’s too, too, too beautiful.” Montreal in the Spring is indeed beautiful.
The Globe and Mail, Canada’s National Newspaper, which is national because of its circulation and not much else, did an in depth look into Lin Jun’s life. By in depth, I mean they looked at his internet history. At the moment, they don’t have much else.
“Mr. Lin was clearly very lonely, and somewhat narcissistic.” This is an old media view! He was a fully internet-saturated person, and people like that let it all hang out. As evidence, they point to his use of the online user name of Justin Rain, an actor from the Twilight series. Again, there are millions of people who use fake names on the internet.
And one more thing, and I hope I’m not the only one who figured this out. At one point, Lin Jun posted a photo of an empty subway car, with the caption: ‘The Midnight Cannibalism Train.’ This was not a morbid foretelling; this was not even the morbid musing of a depressed and lonely man. It was a reference to a Clive Barker short story (now a movie as well) called ‘The Midnight Meat Train’. It’s a story about a butcher paid by New York City for a most unusual job: to hunt the subway and prepare human victims for the Lovecraftian humanoid monsters who were New York’s original founders. The action starts in an empty subway car. Not only that, but the author, Clive Barker, is gay, as was Lin Jun. In all likelihood, Lin Jun was a gay man who liked to read spooky stories by the world’s most famous gay horror writer.
He came from Wuhan, and later Beijing, and studied French. He wanted to move to Quebec, and by Quebec, I bet he really wanted to move to Montreal.
China can be a homophobic society. My guess is Lin Jun had been reading about and pining after Montreal for years. It’s a large, highly urban city with cheap apartments. It’s proudly French, and the French don’t give a hoot how you lead your personal life. I know many people who have fled the well-meaning but restrictive societies of the Maritime and the Prairies to live in Montreal and not have to account for how they live their lives. Montrealers love to argue, to stir up shit against their provincial government, and they love to make love and they love to party. Most importantly, the French are accepting. As long as you make an effort to learn their language. During prohibition, New Yorkers used to visit Montreal to have fun. When taking an entrepreneurial course in Montreal, Lin Jun was asked of his life’s goals. One of them was ‘to find love.’
Lin Jun may have seen this in his future: Montreal, a good job, a man to share his bed; and a life lived utterly in French – in his work, his home and love life, while shopping for his groceries.
He seemed like a nice person who, at 33, had chosen not to let life get him down. He sounded optimistic and kind. It sounds like he made one bad choice: he chose to meet the blue-eyed devil whom he probably saw on a dating site. We’ve all make mistakes. We shouldn’t have to die because of them but sometimes we do.
Luka is a sad coward…he will have the rest of his rotting life to think of what he has done and then an eternity of suffering for it; his worm will never die.
Well, they’ve got him now. I think the ultimate punishment, for him anyway, would be for him to be in a cell with no mirrors.
You’re not alone: I recognised the Midnight Meat Train allusion immediately, and tweeted the author of the Globe and Mail article about it.
Good on you for doing that! But the ‘morbid prediction’ angle is probably too good to avoid.
My question is why would you purchase the name DevilInTheFlesh and support this Demon to talk about for your own attention draw..seems a little strange that you would go to the lengths of making a web-site of it…You are drawing people from all over the world and it is a demonic vibration on here..God bless your soul
I have eighty posts so far on this blog, and only a fraction of them are about Magnotta, and I bought the domain long before he committed his crimes.
As for the choice of content, he’s a Canadian, as am I, and he lived in a neighbourhood just up the hill from where I once lived in Montreal, so there’s a connection there and not only that, he interests me. Thanks for stopping by.
Pingback: “Journalism” and the Search for Sensationalism « Justice…A Blog for Patrick Jun Lin
Great post, thank you–nice to see a perspective like this. I was taken aback by this article as well, and have posted my reflections about it on a blog I recently created to remember and defend Jun Lin.
http://j4jl.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/poor-journalism-in-the-search-for-sensationalism/
Thanks. I already read your post due to the ‘pingback’ function.
In more recent news, I’ve heard a number of gay chinese bloggers who knew him do interviews, so I think his public profile is probably now more balanced.
That’s good to hear. Are those interviews available online? I’d like to see/hear them.
Hi there,
I’m presenting a paper on this case at a conference on Saturday, and I believe another speaker preceding me is intending on arguing that the definition of a ‘snuff film’ should be redefined to include that the victim was an actor in the video, either intentionally or led to believe they were acting in something else.
Lin Jun’s blog may well be evidence that he was at least led to believe he was participating in something. I doubt he volunteered to be killed, but if he was tricked into this situation, and there is evidence for this (which would be his blog, maybe, I’d have to review it myself) then it would help.
However, I can’t cite this blog as it’s hearsay. But if you can provide a citation, as in a link to the original blog, then I can include it, cite it, and add ‘as cited in…’ listing this blog in my references.
Thanks for any cooperation, and hope to hear from you in time to revise my paper!
A good rule: blogs are not good sources, unless your paper is *about* blogs. Most of the time we’re talking out our asses to get more traffic. I stopped posting on this blog for that very reason – I was failing to see value in what I was doing. I’m still blogging, but now under my own identity, about far more innocuous and inoffensive subjects. I think most good bloggers have left behind at least a few anonymous, ill-conceived, and abandoned blogs.
The details surrounding Magnotta and Lin Jun’s meeting are hazy. I just assumed that they met on the internet because both men had online presences (Magnotta had many, many profiles). However, after doing a search, I came up with this, which is also just from a ‘source’: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2012/06/01/19827991.html
So jealousy and anger may have been part of the reason.
I’ve always thought of a snuff film in the ‘old-fashioned’ definition: Death, on celluloid film, pre-ordered by bored and perverted rich men, the victim often a teenage runaway, one of the many disappeared on the nation’s highways. This definition pre-dates the internet: there was nothing digital about it. I don’t think evidence of that phenomenon was ever found; snuff films were an urban legend kept alive by active teenage male imaginations. The theme of a rich man using his immense wealth and power to order and buy a personalized film of someone’s death was central to snuff’s definition. I think it was all fictional.
Although not great movies, the ‘Hostel’ films did a reasonably good job updating *that* definition of snuff for the digital age.
The digital age has changed many definitions, so I think trying to define snuff films is pointless: anyone can and does record murder on camera for all sort of reasons, and the footage multiplies and travels at light-speed. The Mexican drugs cartels (intimidation), Magnotta (he did it for fame), Muslim extremists (for political and religious reasons), Russian Skinheads (for nationalistic reasons) or the Ukrainian Ice-pick killers (perhaps the worst of the videos, and they supposedly really did intend to sell that a footage) – the intents and reasons are different, but the results are always the same: the videos float around online for anyone to see. Anyone with a phone can make a porn film, a snuff film, art, or an award-winning short. Fame has become a goal and currency in and of itself.
The previous presenter at your conference may be making a pointless argument, is all I’m trying to say, unless he or she is trying to redefine ‘snuff films’ as something distinct from everything else out there.
Good luck presenting your paper! I’m sure it will go well.
Edit : Just looked up ‘snuff film’ on my computer’s dictionary. “a pornographic movie of an actual murder.” I’m not even sure that that means, but I suppose Magnotta’s footage matches that.
Edit again: Now I’m not sure just what a snuff movie is. Sounds like prime academic material to me.
Hi!
Thank you for the brilliant and prompt response. I read it on my phone’s email app from the hotel in time, but I don’t like replying from there because it’s difficult to see the formatting and typing takes ages. So I waited until I was back home and could reply on my computer.
The conference went really well, and nobody suggested the new rule I had heard about, so it was a false alarm anyway.
I’m aware that blogs, imageboards and forums are not academically suitable (they count in law as the same as conversation in a pub) as they are similar to hearsay. However, I had hoped to use the victim’s own blog itself, which counts as a primary source and is therefore acceptable in the lack of any academic citation.
You would be correct that there has been no evidence of a snuff film having ever really existed. If you are interested, snopes.com have a good article on them, except it hasn’t been updated since 2006, so doesn’t comment on 3 guys 1 hammer or 1 lunatic 1 icepick.
I completely agree with your brilliantly written paragraph regarding the reasons behind why someone records murder having little importance. In fact, part of my paper was on the juxtaposition of pornography on sites like bestgore and theYNC. The inference is definitely there for people to associate and flick between death and pornography.
The conference was also dealing with how snuff is presented in fiction. Strange Days came up a couple of times, as did Videodrome. Cannibal Holocaust was a big hitter, and Emmanuel in America as well. We also talked about censorship and government’s misunderstanding of the ‘video nasty’ tape trading circuit in the 80s leading to raids and arrests. The UK’s recent banning of ‘extreme pornography’ and the vagueness of that definition was very interesting. The argument was about whether the layperson can be ‘reasonably aware’ of whether they are breaking the law or not when it comes to certain middle-ground types of pornography.
Who knew there could be so much to say about such a niche topic?
Thanks again for your wonderful response.