Why True Crime is a Misnomer and How We Can Reframe the Conversation

we need to shift how we discuss true crime

previously published with Refracted Magazine

‘The language of true crime is coded  -- it tells us our degree of mourning is contingent on the victim’s story’ (Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party)

True Crime. One of the most popular genres on Netflix, (listed under the simpler title ‘Crime’). A category that has spawned documentaries seeking  (or pretending) to psychoanalyse killers, while inadvertently humanising them; profiling respective victims  for our entertainment. These documentaries frequently feature the murder of young women and girls at the hands of men who are trangers, sometimes men they knew, and rarely men they loved - though we know this obscures the reality of violence against women. 

‘Trending’ titles include Nightstalker; about a prolific murderer, rapist, and paedophile; and  The Ted Bundy Tapes.  Two in and already a pattern starts emerging; how marketable the dead female body is. 

Commodification of the female body

True Crime is one of the most profitable industries in public entertainment. The proliferation of these documentaries has transformed  the female body into a commodity; a product to be consumed visually and digitally.  Not only does it represent  how victims become reduced to mere images, it illuminates the exploitation that is coded  into American advertising. Josh Cohen discusses the ‘pornographic’ logic of advertising, which in True Crime translates to the fetishisation of the ‘relationship’ between perpetrator and victim. 

This violation  of the female body in this dynamic  also informs (and signifies)  our ideas on masculinity.  Continuing his discussion on advertising, Cohen highlights how ‘this interpenetration of women...produces a sinister redirection and transformation of authentic masculine desire’. Ted Bundy’s victims simply become a way to ‘understand’ the man behind the murder; the supposed ‘motive’. This obscures what Olivia Gatwood picks up on in her poem When I Say We Are All Teen Girls; namely that ‘even those men are teen girls, the way they want so badly to be big and important and worshipped by someone’. 

Twitter recently facilitated this production of a ‘sinister redirection’ of ‘authentic masculine desire’, in it’s discussion of the murder of several Asian women. Instead of honoring the victims,  there was an attempt to make excuses for their killer. As Minh-Ha T. Pham emphasises; ‘he didn’t have a “sexual addiction” - he had racist sexualised fantasies about dominating Asian women.’ This represents a marked failure to discuss the problem of white male violence.

Though Gatwood makes an important point on masculinity, this cultural need to understand dangerous men often comes at the cost of forgetting or undervaluing the women at the centre of their crimes. Understanding masculine desire (at least in a pop culture context) often takes higher priority than honoring the women who were brutally raped and murdered, who simply become by-products of the process; blots in the True Crime TV landscape.

The Dissection of Elisa Lam

‘I watch the security footage they discovered of her last moments, I watch her move and breathe like the rest of us. I watch her look over her shoulder three times before walking out of view’ (Olivia Gatwood, My Grandmother Asks Why i don’t Trust Men)

This point is emphasized in one of Netflix’s latest; Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel . Even the title positions Elisa Lam as a by-product, not even mentioning her name and choosing instead to centre the hotel at the heart of the narrative. Implied is the assumption  that a mysterious building would garner more interest than the woman who lost her life.

This assumption is not wholly unfounded when taking into consideration journalist Josh Dean’s comment that ‘the Cecil is as much a character as Elisa is’. Not only is this comment completely insensitive; Dean and the rest of the documentary place the value of human (and female) life on the same level as a building; an inanimate object. In other words, the personification of the Hotel allows for Elisa to be objectified in the process. She is an object of intrigue, whilst the  Hotel and people’s obsession with it  are the real subject of our attention.

As mentioned in the introduction, Elisa Lam only becomes the focus of the narrative when she is being profiled, ‘our degree of mourning’, being ‘contingent on [Elisa’s] story’. The documentary features a kind-of dissection on two levels. The first a literal dissection by the coroners to identify her cause of death. The second a figurative dissection of the footage of her last moments and her social media as a snapshot of her life which are made available for public dissection. Instead of celebrating who she was, this superficial exposure of her life and last moments functions as a mine for   sympathy.

Good Girls

‘The good girl is nothing more than a myth. We long for her for the same reason we long for utopia: Neither exists’ (Amy Jo Burns, Good Girls)

Elisa Lam received a documentary because she was, what we like to call a ‘good girl’. Though she was a 21 year old woman, she is described as ‘a naive girl [...]all peaches and roses’. Her lack of previous alcohol and drug consumption marks her out as a ‘good girl’, and worthy of our attention.

The infantilization of Elisa Lam highlights our cultural obsession predominantly with young women and girls. By focusing on their apparent ‘good girl’ status, it evokes the ‘correct’ emotional response, giving the women/girl in question more sympathy points with the audience acting as her jury. 

The documentary only echoes what we have seen before, in the case of Jon Benet Ramsay; ‘a sanitising death with ritual overtones that is also plenty showy/great filler for Tabloid TV’. Or her British counterpart, Maddie McCann, who had her own Netflix documentary in 2019/2020, titled The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

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Ted Bundy and the glamorisation of Serial Killers

‘Ted Bundy was a fucking loser’ (Ellie Ward, Ted Bundy Was a Fucking Loser) 

Even when victims are supposed to be ‘good girls’, sometimes their stories are neglected, when those of their murderers’ take higher priority. Particularly, when the murderer appears to be the perfect counterpart to the good girl; the ‘bad boy’. The number one example is a name still bounced around in popular culture; Ted Bundy.

I doubt many of us could remember even one of his victims’ names, yet we remember the man. A man who gets a feature length film in which he is played by Zac Efron, who in 2017 was named the ‘Sexiest Man Alive’, a title given to Bundy himself in some circles of Tumblr.

By pronouncing Bundy a ‘bad boy’, and using a sex symbol like Efron to play him, we arguably romanticise him as a cultural ‘icon’ - for women to swoon over and men to idolise. Either way, the subject of male violence against women is undervalued and forgotten. Bundy gets the infamy he always craved, and we fall into the trap of somehow satiating the killer and dishonouring the women and girls that lost their lives directly at his hands.

While it is important to highlight how men use their charm to lure in victims, we cannot allow this to function as a justification for true crime porn. Bundy  didn’t just flirt and chat these women up, he murdered them and ‘took pleasure from...the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after." (Ann Rule).

Bearing Witness

‘The serious writer, after all, bears witness’ (Joyce Carol Oates, Why Is Your Writing So Violent?)

We bear witness time and time again to True Crime stories. But ultimately, they are always stories steeped in shock and horror. Narratives chosen to be aired because they can be dramatised for our entertainment.

But where are the stories about women killed one normal Monday in their homes by their boyfriend who they’ve gone steady with for 5 years? Where are the stories about girls who aren’t strangled by a stranger in their dorm rooms, but by men they loved and knew like the lifeline on their left hand? 

For genuine True’ Crime, depictions - we  need to utilise  the Feminine Gaze. This is our key to unravelling the idolisation of male killers,  and to humanise the women who are murdered and raped every single day - both by strangers, by those they have loved; and ultimately by men who choose not to value a woman’s life. To challenge the status quo, we need narratives written from a Feminine Gaze, not the male one we are so used to.

Sources:

Burns, Amy Jo. ‘Good Girls’, from Roxanne Gay Not That Bad (finish) (Anthology)

Cohen, Josh. insert book

Gatwood, Olivia. life of the party: IF A GIRL SCREAMS & OTHER POEMS (2019) (Poetry Collection)

Netflix. Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2020) (Doc)

Ward, Ellie. Ted Bundy Is a Fucking Loser