The Unnerving Fascination with Prime-Time True Crime

The unnerving fascination with prime-time true crime

by Nadine Friedman | illustrations by Angie Wang

ear excites. It always But there’s another form of excitement brought on by fear that is less direct and not related to survival instinct. There’s that voyeuristic tingle has. That is, after all, its we feel upon witnessing harm perpetrated on another. When the 10 F o’clock news reports about a body found in a ditch somewhere, we lean job: The adrenaline, the ﬂ ush toward the TV, our senses sharpened, to hear more. We read about a murder in the paper, and we disregard every other story on the front of excitement we feel when page, instead soaking in the grisly details in between bites of breakfast. This particular branch of fear-induced excitement may not serve any we’re afraid, is meant to save real purpose, but it’s certainly made its mark on popular culture. Inves- tigation Discovery is an entire network devoted to documentary-style us from harm. Fight or ﬂ ight true-crime programming, covering elaborate cons, murders, and other tawdry tales via pulpy journalism like On the Case with Paula Zahn, as a primal reaction probably broadcast newsmagazines like Dateline, and original crime dramatiza- tions like Final Witness and Wives with Knives. Other networks like never required that much OWN, truTV, Biography Channel, NBC, and A&E have their own true- crime television offerings, but ID is the only network entirely dedicated evolutionary honing. to them. Most of ID’s programs deal with crimes against and harm done to women—watching for just a few hours can feel like watching a marathon of women being assaulted, manipulated, and found dead next to rivers. ID’s viewership is in the millions—an astounding number for cable. And many of these viewers are women. By 2012, ID showed a 45 percent increase since 2011 in the 18- to 49-year-old female viewer demographic, making it no. 4 in daytime delivery and outperform- ing larger networks. ID’s president, Henry Schleiff, crowed in a 2012 press release that it’s becoming a “major player in the competition for female viewers,” with programming that reflects “real-life drama that our female audiences crave...as ID quickly becomes the no. 1 guilty pleasure for women.” But are ID viewers discouraged from synthesizing reality in favor of believing spooky, misleading anecdotes? Do these programs

Your purchase of this digital edition makes it possible for us to thrive. SPRING. 13 | ISSUE NO. 58 bitch | 29 educate and sharpen our antennae for danger, or do we just Crimes and How They Matter” in New York’s Herald Tribune feel more scared and disconnected afterward? When “truth” in 1935. She identified the two kinds of crime that people is buried in bias, sensationalism, and comforting mythol- cared about: “The crime hero and the crime mystery—all ogy and then delivered with cinematic finesse, it’s tempting the other crimes everybody forgets as soon as they find out to embrace reality as fiction. “The more we think we’re not who did them.” affected by media—stereotypes, advertising—the more po- These days, the industry adage “fast, cheap, and good— tential those forms of media have,” says Jennifer L. Pozner, pick any two” could easily apply to the millennial upswing media literacy expert and author of Reality Bites Back. “Of in reality shows and the downturn of conscientious TV course it affects our empathy if we think we’re too smart to journalism. Mainstream media’s m.o. has been to scoop be affected.” quickly and cover hyperbolically. And in the past decade Ambivalence comes at a high cost. When you pair the or so, the investigative-journalism industry has caught up. formula for such impressive ratings (misogyny, abuse, and CBS’s 60 Minutes now offsets expensive, solid stories with psychological and physical exploitation) with real-life statis- ﬂuff segments. NBC’s Dateline, once airing five nights a tics about sexual violence and crime, you might get queasy. week, began eliminating time slots in 2001, a move that According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and correlated with the boom of reality television (with a going Control, one in five women in the United States has been rate of $200,000 for a half-hour, reality’s a steal compared raped—that’s almost 22 million. And 42.4 million women with the $2 million production cost of an hour-long cable have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking, drama). Reality TV has been a thorn in the industry’s side with assault and murder disproportionately affecting trans for years; one of the demands of the 2008 Writers Guild women and women with disabilities. Only a fraction of cases of America strike was better WGA standards for reality are reported and brought to trial. programming (six out of the top 10 shows at the time)—a But ID viewers aren’t exposed to these realities—instead, demand strikers ended up backing off of. they get vetted anecdotes about assault, sexualized corpses, “Pick any two” claimed investigative journalism, once and manipulative vamps, as well as twisted object lessons a venerated genre in both print and TV. In 1980, 60 Minutes about violence and crime. And while the popularity of these was the top-rated show with 28.2 percent of Nielsen house- shows has continued to increase, a look into their use of holds. In 2011, it drew 7.4 percent. It’s worth noting that In- troubling tropes proves that, when it comes to women, our vestigation Discovery began in 2008, around the time when cultural relationship with fear, excitement, and true crime the nation’s print and TV journalism cut thousands of jobs. hasn’t evolved at all. If anything, it’s moving backwards. Conglomerate deference to sponsors, cutbacks, and reduc- tion in investigative reporters (several original TV crusaders literally dying off), have shrunk journalism’s resources, as well as its spirit of adventurous reporting. Along with the rise of the Internet, thorough research and investigation According to Harold Schechter’s 2005 book Savage Pastimes: A couldn’t compete with emerging media’s immediacy. Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, grisly dime museums Newsmagazine topics shifted from malfeasance to today’s and escapist penny dreadfuls were 18th-century forebear for infotainment: human interest and, of course, true crime. In murder as cultural pastime. Schechter traces murder ballads— 1988, CBS News debuted 48 Hours on prime time (originally typically starring rapists, child-killing madwomen, and resent- premiering two years prior as the cinema-vérité documentary ful husbands—back to Victorian England. These “Elizabethan 48 Hours on Crack Street) with the goal of keeping entertain- equivalents of supermarket tabloids” were equally popular in ment and news separate. That year CBS News President the United States, illustrating unchecked male fantasies and Howard Stringer confidently told the L.A. Times, “We had warning women about the mortal dangers of impropriety. no business being in prime time and were a handicap to the The American author Edmund Pearson expanded the entertainment business.… I’m not going to get into an agreement crime genre’s preoccupation with middle-class bad behav- with entertainment to go into co-production or anything ridi- ior in his 1924 book, Studies in Murder. Although his work culous like that.” Fast-forward to 2012: 48 Hours Mystery airs depended on the authenticity of trial records and newspaper episode “Soccer Moms Confidential,” about the downfall of accounts, the characters were complex, the stories detailed a narcissistic, unbalanced con artist. and addictive—the most famous essay chronicled the case of the wealthy Lizzie Borden, acquitted of axe murder. Highly instrumental in presenting crime as amusement, Pearson helped create Hollywood’s caterwauling, doomed Bride of Frankenstein years later. Elsewhere, Gertrude Stein was As Thomas De Quincey wrote in his 1827 essay, “On Murder intrigued by the artistry of Borden and the boundary-push- Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” there’s more to the ing tenets of feminine criminality, publishing “American composition of a murder than “two blockheads to kill and be

30 | bitch FEMINIST RESPONSE TO POP CULTURE Bitch Media is a non-proﬁt, independent media organization. killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane.” Instead, “design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.” Today’s true-crime mise-en-scène involves eerily fogged camera work, elaborate light- ing, and clichéd but visually arresting backdrops. Hosts stroll by studio green screens of fearsome, shadowy warehouses, or travel to the tip of a perilously remote Colorado cliff. But it’s not just the scenery that’s used to create a mood: The sentiment of these shows when it comes to gender, race, and class rely on ratings at the expense of reality. Women—mostly white—are usually portrayed as victims on these shows. A&E’s Cold Case Files, an Emmy-winning genre dinosaur, is heralded by law enforcement for its authenticity. Unfortunately, its “vicious stranger/pretty gal” template and conviction that forensics can solve everything sway viewers’ critical filters and perpetuate grave misunderstandings of sexual violence. Based on these shows, you’d never know that most

Based on these shows, you’d never know that most women are raped by acquaintances and that their attackers almost never serve jail time. Creating a 30-minute arc out of the uncomfortable reality of a premeditated, unprosecuted assault by an acquaintance is a tough sell.

women are raped by acquaintances and that their attackers almost never serve jail time. Creating a 30-minute narrative arc out of the uncomfortable reality of a premeditated, unprosecuted assault by an acquaintance is a tough sell. And then there’s the victim-blaming. In the promo for ID’s Fatal Encounters, a show that ticks down the final hours of a murder victim’s life via an onscreen clock, female voices lament, “If I hadn’t gotten in that car, if I hadn’t opened that door, if I hadn’t missed that call…I might be alive today.” Not only is it absurd to speak for the dead, this framework ex- cuses and validates rape myths. Monika Johnson Hostler, teen mentor and president of the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, is unnerved by the speed and degree to which TV has hypersexualized “women and girls in a way that [fuels] rape culture...in both an obvious and passive manner.” Female true-crime victims often ﬁt the bill of what journalist Eugene Robinson described as the “damsel in distress” trope in a 2005 Washington Post op-ed. “A damsel must be white…. She must be attractive…. Her economic status should be middle-class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime…. Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage.” When women of color are featured, they are in dehumanizing roles. Egyptian-born murderer Omaima Nelson, for instance, has been the subject of two ID reenactment shows, Deadly Women and the nutty Happily Never After, portrayed in both as a sexually ferocious foreigner in lingerie. Or take the representation of 17-year-old Felicia Morgan on Deadly Women. Subjected to rape, poverty, and violence as a child in Milwaukee, Morgan eventually murdered another teenager over a leather jacket. But the 10-minute segment, titled “No Good Reason,” doesn’t investigate socioeconomics and its cyclical relationship to violence in low-income areas. Rather, as the narrator jokes, it’s just “a crime of fashion.”

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Paul Harvey, which is no accident: although Canadian, his voice suggests the small-town Americana that are Keillor and Harvey’s specialty.”

Networks laud their true-crime programming as a revelatory genre; more educational than reality, more vital than scripted dramas—after all, they’re based on true stories. Pozner calls this kind of work “pseudojournalism”—material packaged “under the mantle of news using techniques of film with the goals of film, as opposed to the goals of journalism—reporting for factual accuracy, with nuance, to get to the truth. Instead, the goal is to mirror what we see on Law & Order.” In fact, according to 2011 statistics from the Office on Even Paula Zahn, host of ID documentary series On the Violence Against Women and the National Institute of Justice, Case, tellingly referred to participants as “characters” in a sexual assault rates are higher for black women than white 2011 New York Times piece. Real participants are sometimes women in most age groups. Another NIJ study, When Violence conscious of their own tragedy’s dramatic structure in Hits Home: How Economics and Neighborhood Play a Role, found interviews. In one of the most meta moments on 48 Hours, the rate of intimate partner violence against black women to a suspected murderer marvels, “I’m the ex-husband. I’ve be about twice that for white women, with economic distress watched 48 Hours. The ex is the first one you go to!” hugely proportionate to violence. Yet on a show with 24-7 There are untold real-life occurrences of physical and programming, we rarely see women of color unless they’re out psychological abuse, realities the hyperbolic, illogical, and for blood. Stories of missing or exploited men of color are rarely influential crime narrative has no stake in exploring. Casey acknowledged—though perhaps that’s not surprising on a Anthony is today’s “bad mother” pastiche, shaping percep- channel that valorizes the criminal justice system. tions and bias. Rather than explore the systemic violence that In addition to race, programs draw clear lines between leads to tragedies like school shootings, racial profiling, and geography and class. Another of ID’s crime dramatization and gang rape—shows like those on ID are more interested in documentary shows, Sins & Secrets, examines cases that unfold exploitation than explanation. in bucolic suburban and rural towns, with scripts steeped in With reality presented as gory cautionary tales, the onus parochial clichés. In one episode, “Boone,” a pretty Appala- is on producers as well asconsumers to explore unpleasant chian State University grad is murdered by a “hillbilly” on an truths in ways that don’t distort them. “There is a space for isolated trail as a new moon crests the rolling mountains. The all media to assist in our efforts to eliminate violence against message to middle-class living rooms is clear: Never go into women,” Johnson Hostler believes. “It just requires those of the Southern woods, you hear? us who are working to end violence to hold everyone, includ- Then take Behind Mansion Walls. The bowtied Brit Christo- ing those that produce this type of programming, account- pher Mason hosts this giddy drama-doc hybrid about “murder in able.” Otherwise, when real violence, bias, and hate present fabulous houses.” It recalls the over-the-top stylization of Lifestyles themselves, unedited and appalling, they’ll be so tied up in of the Rich and Famous, but here, rich people murder each other, fiction we might not know the difference. letting us relish recession-era schadenfreude. As dialect blogger Ben Trawick-Smith has noted, voiceover is used to convey divi- sions between white- and blue-collar worlds. Regarding the jux- Nadine Friedman is a Brooklyn-based taposition of BMW’s English host and the grave Dateline NBC writer and photographer. She is currently narrator Keith Morrison, “Mason’s crisp Cambridge diction completing a book of portraits and is clearly supposed to evoke wealth and privilege. Morrison’s stories of individuals living with dramatic falling inflections are similar to Garrison Keillor and multiple sclerosis.

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