- This video is sponsored by Twin Mirror.
(lively music)
What's up Wisecrack,
Helen here, and today we're talking about
everyone's favorite guilty pleasure, true crime.
Between all the docuseries, podcasts, books,
and Reddit threads,
it seems that audiences today can't get enough
of real life stories about gruesome violence.
This obsession has become so prevalent
as to even inspire satire.
And then there's this bop.
♪ Murder show murder show ♪
♪ I'm gonna watch a murder show ♪
So there's clearly something compelling about true crime
and the way it lets us consume content about grisly murder
from the comfort of our couches.
But what does that say about us as human beings
and as a society.
Are we all secret wannabe serial killers,
nosy voyeurs, or both?
Or does true crime serve some kind of real emotional
or psychological function?
Let's unravel the mystery in this Wisecrack edition:
Why we can Stop Watching True Crime.
But before we get into it,
I wanna talk about this video sponsor, Twin Mirror.
Twin Mirror is an exciting game
that's finally made its way on the Steam.
In it, you embody Sam,
a journalist who has returned to his West Virginia hometown
after his old friend, Nick,
dies under mysterious circumstances.
And the story only gets more complex from there.
Sam's entire existence is complicated by the presence
of the Double, a more sociable version of himself
that only he can see,
who helps Sam access feelings he normally can't,
such as empathy.
Sam, with help from The Double,
investigates his friend Nick's death
by reexamining his hometown and the people who live there,
including Nick's girlfriend and his teenage daughter.
The game also lets you access flashes from Sam's memory,
helping you piece together
exactly how everybody got where they are
and how they can possibly move forward.
It's a fascinating often eerie game
that gives you all the thrills of solving a juicy mystery.
Plus, it delves into topics that we here at Wisecrack
really love, like self perception, moral relativity,
societal pressures, and more.
To get your own copy of Twin Mirror
and start playing today,
click the link in the video description.
And now, back to the show.
To understand the contemporary obsession with true crime
we have to look back at the genres historical development.
Now, human beings have loved stories about murder
and punishing murderers since biblical times,
but the mass production of true crime media
can be traced back to one 15th century invention,
the printing press.
Apologies to those of you who thought
we were about to mention the invention of the spring coil.
At the time, public execution was still the preferred method
of punishment for capital crimes.
So entrepreneurial printers started selling broadsides,
or large posters, at the gallows,
which detailed those crimes.
This gave spectators context for the execution.
As they became extremely popular
these posters evolved into folded pamphlets
and started being circulated far and wide.
Publishers caught on and began printing and distributing
an unprecedented amount of true crime pamphlets
across Europe.
These early pamphlets were especially popular among clergy
who presented them as morality tales.
The stories often included CDD tales
about the perpetrators moral descent into violent crime,
starting with such sins as gambling,
going into debt and drinking.
I'm only two out of three, so I should be good for now.
This degeneracy then culminated in bloody murder.
The message was straightforward;
stay on the narrow path of salvation through Jesus Christ
or suffer the fate of one of these miscreants.
The popularity of true crime proved enduring.
In Victorian England
it took the form of serialized penny dreadfuls
about detectives and criminals;
in the American Old West
where large-scale printing was harder to come by,
criminal's dastardly deeds were passed down
via murder ballads.
And with each new advancement in mass media technology
came a new wave of true crime.
By the time the 24 hour news networks hit the scene,
audiences in the latter half of the 20th century
could be treated to nightly tales of cold-blooded killings.
Today's media landscape of endless podcasts
and streaming services is no different.
Much of the true crime produced today
featured events that took place sometime ago
and were covered extensively by the news media of the time.
This wealth of archival material
and an inexpensive production model
have made it easy to re-examine these past cases,
and audiences are here for it.
So why has our demand for retellings of bloody murders
sustained itself for so many centuries?
Why do the most heinous crimes committed by mankind
make good fodder for casual entertainment?
Well, neurology gives us one simple answer.
Witnessing cases of violence
triggers the release of adrenaline.
And when you're in a controlled environment,
like the comfort of your couch, it can be very stimulating.
It's basically triggering the same reaction we have
to watching horror movies and extreme sports.
Psychologists have also theorized
that the obsession with true crime,
especially among women, can act as a survival instinct.
Watching how other women fell victim to predators
may actually ease anxieties of this happening to the viewer.
Subconsciously, they feel they're garnering insight
into how they might survive a similar attack,
even if that's not necessarily the case.
But beyond the individual reasons to watch true crime,
there's also a social aspect to this obsession.
It's why podcasts like "Serial" and series like the "Jinx"
and "Making a Murderer" became cultural touchstones
that you couldn't avoid talking about.
And it's why the highly active fan base
of the podcast My Favorite Murder
lovingly refer to themselves as Murderinos.
A good true crime show can inspire
the same water cooler conversation
once reserved for fans of Lost,
that's even a fans only knowledge of the crime
comes from the media itself.
This tendency to want to put crimes
into a narrative structure speaks to how we as a society
deal with events that are so tragic
they threaten our view of the world.
True crime author and analyst Rebecca Frost explains that,
"In responding to situations
that have disrupted communal order,
the crime narrative functions as a restoration ritual
that aids members of the community responding to
and recovering from the presented threat."
But rather than simply reflecting the crime itself,
these narratives also tell us a lot
about the societies that created them.
Much like how the overly religious morality tales
of early true crime pamphlets
reflected the values of the late Middle Ages,
today's crime narratives reflect our own values and beliefs.
In sculpting the archetype of the cold-blooded killer
for example,
the common contemporary narrative tends to focus on
universally recognized modern psychology concepts
like childhood trauma.
In this way, a supposedly objective retelling
of factual events
can inadvertently reinforce our own biases.
Literary professor Mark Seltzer writes,
"True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction.
It marks or irritates the distinction between real
and fictional reality."
Basically true crime is all the sludge
between what really happened, which we can't access,
and what maybe happened, which we can speculate about
until Reddit stops up voting us.
And the way these narratives have shifted over time
can tell us a lot about how society has changed,
especially in regards to crime and punishment.
And to understand that
we need to come back to French philosopher
and a Wisecrack icon, Michel Foucault.
In his 1975 book "Discipline and Punish"
Foucault compared and contrasted to the archaic practice
of public execution with our modern system
of police and prisons.
He questioned our current practice
of institutionalizing criminals
and executing the most heinous ones behind closed doors.
And he asked whether it's any more humane
than the good old days of drawing and quartering criminals
for the whole town to see.
Importantly, he examined how both of these practices
are more about maintaining power than deterring crime.
He argued that ending the practice of public execution
was less about treating criminals more humanely
and more about hiding the cruelty
of the justice system itself.
He wrote about the way public executions
accustomed spectators to cruelty
in order to scare them away from committing crimes.
At the same time, public executions
turned executioners and judges into literal murderers,
which was also really scary.
But here's the problem,
it also made people kind of empathize
with the brutally tortured criminals,
big no-no.
Where the true crime pamphlets of the past
often reveled in the details of violent punishment,
today's true crime rarely goes beyond the conviction
of the crime itself.
Instead, it focuses on the investigation
and occasionally the trial and sentencing.
But there is a problem inherent in this practice.
See the main source of information about these processes
is inevitably the police and the prosecutors.
And this gets ethically messy because those parties
have a vested interest in shaping the narratives
around crime.
See the public is rarely exposed
to the brutally punitive measures
of the criminal justice system.
And it's also fed a steady diet
of the grizzly details of the crimes themselves.
This leads to a heavily skewed perspective.
It's no wonder that multiple studies have shown
that consuming large amounts of crime related media
is correlated with political support for more crime control
and punitive measures.
Focusing on the investigation
also legitimizes the methods used by the authorities.
Forensic sciences are used by police to investigate crimes,
by prosecutors to establish guilt in the courtroom,
and by forensics experts testifying in court.
And they're generally accepted by the judicial system
and society as a whole despite the fact
that these techniques are rarely subjected
to the same experimental rigor
as other purely scientific theories.
Ballistics, fingerprinting, and even aspects of DNA analysis
have all come into question by the scientific community
and yet they're still used to put people behind bars.
It's entirely possible
we'll scoff at at least some of these methods someday
the same way we now know better
than to rely on blood spatter or lie detectors.
The role of the media
in legitimizing these practices to the public
has been a topic of debate among criminologists for decades.
A 2004 USA Today article coined the term, the CSI Effect
to describe the tendency of juries
to demand evermore forensic evidence from trial prosecutors.
Foucault addresses this as well.
Again, contrasting these techniques
with the medieval methods of establishing guilt,
which usually consisted of
simply torturing the suspect until they confessed.
These confessions were widely accepted
at the time as clear evidence of guilt,
after all,
why would someone confess to a crime they didn't commit?
It's now pretty well known
that confessions made under duress are not reliable.
That said, across the board,
confessions made under a variety
of sometimes suspect circumstances
are still taken seriously under law, to much harm.
According to the Innocence Project,
29% of recent DNA exonerations
were cases where defendants confessed to murders
they hadn't committed.
And the same skepticism
perhaps should be applied to our current methods
of forensic investigation.
Foucault argued that the expansion
of the criminal investigation
is less about establishing truth
and more about reinforcing the power of the institutions
which control the investigation.
He explains that among its many functions,
forensic science grants the judicial system
an illusory sense of scientific authority
that is then treated as objective truth.
It's also self perpetuating
in granting itself its own legitimacy.
As we've said, the institution of the Church
back in the Middle Ages
used true crime to reinforce its own necessity to society.
Similarly, today's true crime may be working,
intentionally or otherwise,
to reinforce institutions like the police, the courts,
and the prison system as a whole.
Now, to its credit,
the most recent wave of true crime
seems to be taking an active role
in examining the justice system itself.
HBO's the "Jinx"
detailed just how much criminals can get away with
if they have money and social status.
And Netflix's "Making a Murderer"
showed us just how easy it is for law enforcement
to manipulate forensic evidence and coerce confessions.
And the popularity of these shows
has had real life consequences.
The "Jinx's" Robert Durst
was finally convicted of the murder of Susan Berman.
- [ Durst] Killed them all, of course.
- And when, for example, "Serial's" Adnan Syed
and "Making a Muederer's" Brendan Dassey
appealed their convictions, it makes the news.
This new wave of true crime
has also spurred the creation of communities
of internet sleuths who conduct independent research
and exchange their results.
This can sometimes lead to positive outcomes.
The late Michelle McNamara
spent years researching and compiling information
on the serial rapist and murderer
who would become known as the Golden State Killer.
She, along with prominent internet crime daddy, Paul Holes
can be credited
with eventually tracking down the murderer.
Of course, there's a dark side to this trend as well.
Netflix's recent "Cecil Hotel" docuseries
highlighted health internet sleuthing
can easily snowball into fantastical conspiracy theories.
This can have devastating effects on innocent people
who are mistaken for suspects.
- They're saying I'm a suspect for murder,
murder of Elisa Lam.
- Not to mention retraumatizing victims of crimes
and their families.
Aside from the ethics of true crime and internet sleuthing,
we don't think it's a coincidence
that these two phenomenon emerged simultaneously.
As we explained, mass media has both created
and met the demand for true crime all along.
That continues today.
Netflix's true crime related offerings alone
grew 63% between 2018 and 2021, for example.
But that's hardly the only effect of mass media.
It also tends to democratize knowledge,
which often leads to periods of great social upheaval.
Take our old friend, the printing press,
this new technology didn't just create a boom in true crime
it's also credited with spring the Protestant Reformation,
which challenged the authority of the Catholic Church.
See expanded literacy rates
along with the widespread distribution
of religious literature
led to a mass de-centralization of religious knowledge.
Without the need for a papal authority
to interpret the scripture differing religious denominations
began to pop up all over Europe.
This often led to heated
and sometimes violent clashes between these different sects.
It also instigated major crackdowns
on descent from religious authorities.
It's no coincidence that during this time of social upheaval
people found escape in the allure of true crime,
along with easing their anxieties
about the violence happening around them
it likely helped to reinforce their beliefs
in justice and order.
And our current time is no different.
The internet has created a mass awareness
about all kinds of injustices and abuses of authority
and inspired a number of mass social movements.
During these uncertain times,
true crime can be soothing for society.
Watching individual injustices get properly investigated
and even resolved is satisfying.
And even true crime that highlights
very real miscarriages of justice
can make amateur sleuths
feel that they're part of correcting those injustices,
which is also satisfying.
At a time when the world feels completely unpredictable
there's a certain comfort in the illusion of control
that true crime presents us with.
But at the same time we gotta wonder
is the entertainment we're consuming weirdly reinforcing
the very systems of injustice we're mad at?
And are our guilty pleasures creating a demand for content
that can only be met by exploiting tragedies
and re-traumatizing victims?
What do you guys think?
Is binging boatloads of content about real life violence
A-O-K for our brains and our society,
or are we just exploiting tragedies
for our own entertainment and peace of mind?
Tell us what you think in the comments.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Peace.
(upbeat music)