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guidetoenjoy-blog · 5 years

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What Gets Lost When A Real Murder Becomes An Entertainment Craze

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What Gets Lost When A Real Murder Becomes An Entertainment Craze

If you had a few days off and an Internet connection toward the end of 2015, I wouldn’t be surprised if you spent your time watching “Making a Murderer.”

Netflix’s 10-part documentary series follows the story of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man who was released from prison after 18 years serving time for a rape he didn’t commit before being accused of the murder of Auto Trader photographer Teresa Halbach just a few years later.

The show has attracted the same kind of frenzied discussion and national attention as the audio-only “Serial” did just about a year earlier with the murky case of Adnan Syed.

It’s fascinating to watch people go through the stages of consuming true crime, as I did myself: first, tentative interest, then a voracious need to watch without stopping, then the confused aftershock of realizing this kind of story, for all its engaging, salacious details (Rape and murder! Corrupt cops! Coerced confessions!), rarely ever ends tied in a neat bow.

What was my role, we wonder after watching the Netflix series, in logging 10 hours observing this specific man’s precarious situation? We pore over the details, analyze the outcome, deal with the ensuing rage … but to what avail?

I couldn’t even wait until the end of the series to start looking for a prologue to the narrative presented by filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi. I hopped online and scrolled through passionate Reddit feeds debating whether or not Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey did it. I found a Facebook group offering support for the convicted. From there, I reached the Change.org petition calling for President Obama to release Avery and Dassey. I had a brief thought to add my name to the list — here was something I could do to reverse the miscarriage of justice!

Here’s where the true crime fascination turns uncomfortable: when it moves from an educational, illuminating case study of how the justice system can fail average citizens to a wave of outcry — both for and against our protagonist — from viewers-turned-detectives. The hours logged with this case in mind gives us a sense of agency over it, in some weird way, creating the desire to speculate and gush over it the same way we do any other TV show. When given the chance to read whodunit “fan theories,” I feel both the tug of “oooh, let’s investigate,” and the sobering reminder that fellow humans, and not easily drawn fictional heroes and villains, are at the heart of this.

There’s a reason we don’t turn to comment sections or Twitter polls to determine whether a man is guilty of a crime. Plus, it feels a little disingenuous: what percentage of listeners who cried foul at Syed’s grating lawyer and unexamined alibis is still following his story today? How many names on that Change.org petition merely needed a place to put the indignation earned from watching the series?

Netflix

The same shrugging, well-I-don’t-really-know feeling came again when reports started popping up in backlash to “Making a Murderer.” Recent critiques have taken issue with the fact that the series appeared to want viewers to walk away thinking Avery and Dassey were unjustly imprisoned.

Everyone’s least favorite prosecutor, Ken Kratz, was quick to claim to reporters that Demos and Ricciardi intentionally left out evidence that made Avery look culpable (claims that Avery’s defense lawyers have discredited). A relatively unknown entertainment site, Pajiba, posted a lengthy list of possible omissions viewers weren’t privy to in the docuseries that paints Avery in a darker light.

With unending Internet arguments on both sides, the only clear answer is: it’s complicated. I’m not going to weigh evidence for and against here. I can only conclude with certainty that there is so much we don’t know about Halbach’s disappearance and death, and we likely never will, as much as we crave a resolution to this deeply sad tale.

This isn’t to say the discussion and possible corruption raised and unearthed by journalistic investigations isn’t valid, nor welcomed; only that we should add in a few grains of salt to our media consumption cocktail. Even the most balanced storytelling gets shades of bias from its authors, who need to turn the sometimes-bland truth of what happened into a compelling narrative. That narrative creation plays a part in why jury duty is widely known as a soul-deadening burden of citizenship while “Serial” broke podcast downloading records.

The huge rise in “steven avery” as a search term, compared to “teresa halbach.”

“Making a Murderer” wouldn’t be the hit it is today if it simply showed hundreds of hours of dry court testimony. It’s easy to get swept up in the mystery of true crime until we remember the events on screen, well, truly did happen.

There’s a sobering moment in the middle of the series where a reporter explains how TV audiences love a grisly crime, a moment when you, the viewer, realize you’re just as intrusive as the microphone-wielding pantsuits that pester Avery’s mother when it’s clear she doesn’t want to talk to them. It’s a difficult place to stand as a viewer: craving more information, more drama, and remembering that when the cameras are turned off, what’s left are two actual, broken families and a flawed justice system, and questions we don’t have any easy answers to.

You can be highbrow. You can be lowbrow. But can you ever just be brow? Welcome to Middlebrow, a weekly examination of pop culture. Sign up to receive it in your inbox weekly.

Follow Jillian Capewell on Twitter: @jcapejcape

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

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how2to18 · 6 years

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THE SLIPPERY NATURE of Araminta Hall’s American debut, Our Kind of Cruelty, is established from the very first page with an epigraph chipped from Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea: “One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.”

The implication that what follows will also be a love story is both true and misleading, which sets the novel’s tone and identifies its central paradox: “[H]ow do you show someone that what they believe to be true is really not the truth?” This is, essentially, a love story; a story about love. It’s no starry-eyed romance, but a love story in the tradition of Wuthering Heights or Caroline Kepnes’s You, in which love manifests as darker, more obsessive, with lovers prepared to burn down the world that would keep them apart, even if they self-destruct in the process. Or, as the narrator of this book declares: “[S]ometimes two people need each other so much it is worth sacrificing others to make sure they end up together.”

These two people are Mike and V(erity), a young West London couple who spent eight years in a psychologically complex, all-consuming relationship before Mike’s work took him abroad to New York, where the strain of distance and one drunken mistake caused V to end their relationship, soon afterward becoming engaged to another man. This decisively removes any chance Mike has of winning her back. Or does it?

This is dark and thought-provoking psychological suspense, eschewing the typical “he said, she said” structure to instead present an intense single-perspective dive deep into the core of a relationship whose truths have always been veiled. Here, there is only the “he said”: the book opens with Mike sitting in prison after he’s killed a man, reluctantly writing a detailed history of his relationship with V at the request of his barrister. What emerges from this account is a portrait of a relationship with an intricate power dynamic characterized by role playing, sexual exhibitionism, and a deeply rooted choreography of cues, codes, and signals developed between two lovers for communicating undetected by outsiders.

These signals were carefully orchestrated behavioral props for use in the Crave — a bit of performance engineered by V as a lark, mingling danger and violence in a sexually charged ritual in which the couple frequently indulged over the course of their relationship. The Crave always took place in a crowded public space, a nightclub or bar where V would allow a man to buy her a drink and encouraged flirtation while Mike watched from a distance, waiting for V’s signal. As soon as she tugged her silver eagle necklace, he would push through the crowd and angrily confront the man hitting on her, using his extraordinarily muscular body to threaten him until he left, emasculated, and Mike and V would celebrate their triumphant rush by having sex in the nightclub bathroom, V turned on by Mike’s violent potential: “I love seeing how scared they are of you.”

These are the moving parts of their relationship; V setting the stage, calling the shots, Mike watching intently, waiting for his cue to act, intimacy triggered by theatrical heroism and the threat of violence. And as for the men from whom Mike had to “rescue” V, well, both love and war have their share of collateral damage. “We had played enough times to know that the end moments often seem cruel; that for us to get what we want others have to get hurt. If we could have done it another way then no doubt we would have, but there was no other way; cruelty was a necessary part of our game.”

Four months after their split, during which time V rebuffed all of Mike’s attempts to communicate, he emails to tell her he is moving back to London, and she responds warmly, apologizing for her behavior during their breakup, hoping they can renew their friendship when he comes home, and telling him of her engagement to a man called Angus. Although initially stunned, Mike quickly understands that her blithe announcement is both a punishment and a challenge — an opportunity for him to make amends:

Her breezy tone was so far removed from the V whom I knew, that I wondered for a moment if she had been kidnapped and someone else was writing her e-mails, although the much more plausible explanations were that V was not herself, or that she was using her tone to send me a covert message. There were two options at play: Either she had lost her mind with the distress I had caused her at Christmas and jumped into the arms of the nearest fool, or she needed me to pay for what I’d done. This seemed by far the most likely; this was V after all and she would need me to witness my own remorse. It was as if the lines of her e-mail dissolved and behind them were her true words. This was a game, our favorite game. It was obvious that we were beginning a new, more intricate Crave.

V broke up with Mike in response to “the American incident,” an offense Mike committed while overseas, and as he parses out the subtext of what would appear to others to be a casual email, he sees she is offering him reconciliation. Only he knows her well enough to see the coded offer she is making — the chance to redeem himself in their most elaborate Crave yet; an apology in the form of a grand romantic gesture, to rescue V from Angus — just another unworthy man, the latest dupe in a series of dupes.

Is this too difficult a request to make of Mike, a man she has cold-shouldered for months after breaking his heart? (“‘If it’s easy it’s probably not worth having,’ V said to me once, and that made me smile.”) And is she, in fact, asking, or is Mike just seeing what he wants to see, believing that this whole separation has been a test of his resolve, that “V and I were never meant to be apart.” Is he responding to the rules of a game V’s stopped playing? (“‘Everything is a game,’ V used to tell me; ‘only stupid people forget that.’”)

The ambiguity is thick. On the one hand, this is a couple with a long history of using mind games as foreplay. On the other hand, the reader is limited to Mike’s point of view, which is demonstrably unreliable, through his own admissions. But just because we don’t see the messages he sees in V’s words and behaviors doesn’t mean they aren’t there, not in a couple as opaque to outsiders as they were, and as comfortable with manipulation. Hall bats the question back and forth in front of the reader the whole way through: Do we have one unreliable narrator or two? Is this the work of two sociopaths in love or the misinterpretations of one delusional man? Is this Crave or Cray?

Mike is certain of his truth: “I knew what she was doing, it was all fine.”

It’s an intensifying thriller, building momentum as it progresses, bringing Mike’s narrative closer to his crime, keeping the reader guessing as to V’s intentions and the level of her culpability. She may not have a direct voice here, but her power over Mike is clear in his account of their romantic history and his devotion to her, even now.

V is a woman with the kind of entitled confidence found in the young and beautiful who are well aware of their beauty and the power it grants, accustomed to having people bend to their whims. In her personal life, she is impulsive, sexually adventurous, and fond of provocation, using Mike to shock her conservative parents. Professionally, she’s a successful and well-respected figure in the field of artificial intelligence, conditioning machines to be more human, and the persuasive influence she wields at work bleeds into her her relationship with Mike. “It is true to say that the Crave always belonged to V,” and in fact, she controlled every aspect of their relationship. Their compatibility wasn’t a case of two people perfectly matched; it was the result of V shaping Mike into what she desired at the time, even referring to him as “Frankenstein’s monster.” And Mike, who grew up in a foster family after his alcoholic mother was deemed unfit, basked in her attention and gladly adapted to please her (“I like the sense of dedication that has gone into creating me”). Grateful to V for everything, he changed his routines (“V likes me to lift weights and start all my days with a run”), his body (“V sculpted me into what she jokingly called the perfect man and she wasn’t happy until every part of me was as defined as a road map”), as well as his habits, tastes, and manners. One could construct quite a profligate drinking game from the number of times the phrase “V taught me how to…” appears.

For his part, Mike is unusually malleable, a care home kid with anger issues and a history of poor impulse control and acting out in rage, whose own written account exposes periods of blackouts, struggles with social cues and interactions, and disproportionately aggressive responses to small frustrations. V choosing to love him was an unexpected honor; she gave him purpose, a home, and a sense of belonging he’d never had before. He stresses frequently that he and V stand apart from the rabble: “V and I are not like others.” Their love elevates them beyond ordinary expectations, and Mike relishes his role as V’s protector; the “them-against-us” aspect to their games. “‘We make a funny pair,’ she said to me once, ‘you with no parents, me with no siblings. There’s so little of us to go around. We have to keep a tight hold of each other to stop the other from floating away.’” And Mike is determined to hold on tight.

Even after their split, he remains in her thrall. Like a dog trained to fight, he responds to one master and he’s in the ring for her whether she’s still commanding him or not. Conditioned by the Crave to observe her down to her most unconscious gestures, even the phrasings he uses are suggestive of a canine presence: “I would wait, my eyes never leaving her, my body ready to pounce at all times.” He’s eager to please, dead loyal, and trained to obey V’s subtext and cues even when they don’t line up with the facade she’s presenting to the rest of the world, which sustains the uncertainty throughout, Mike “knowing” what V would want, even when he suspects she may have gotten lost in her own game.

Getting Gillian Flynn to blurb this is a perfect choice. In many ways, Hall’s is a similar take on Gone Girl’s toxic relationship theme; a lack of honest communication and an uneven power dynamic are contributing factors to the relationship’s struggles, with a special emphasis upon a man’s frustration with the inscrutability of a woman. There’s even a deliberate echo to Gone Girl in a scene where Mike reveals he loves to watch V sleep and fantasizes about uncoiling her brain, both to understand her and to direct her thoughts toward him. The attractive vulnerability of a sleeping woman, the impulse toward violence as a tool for understanding; it’s the refuge of an emasculated man in thrall to a woman who outmatches him.

Despite the nod, this is no Gone Girl rip-off, and it actually becomes a thoughtful response to Gone Girl and all of the subsequent authors of psychological suspense homesteading on Gillian Flynn’s land. There has been a glut of post-G.G. novels in which manipulative women mastermind intricate webs of deception, so much so that it has almost become a cliché of the genre. Hall upends the reader’s expectations by removing direct access to the female character, and whenever V appears to be innocent, doubt is automatically triggered in the reader by these ingrained genre presumptions about gender and power.

This all gets thrown for a loop in the third-act courtroom scene, where Gone Girl gives way to a modern-day The Scarlet Letter, and the truth, previously twisted through Mike’s flawed perspective, is now professionally twisted through a legal wringer and the scope of the story becomes larger than a domestic dispute, much more insidious and timely.

Of course this is a love story, but it is a love story built upon emotional extremes:

They say that hate is the closest emotion to love. And passion certainly exists in two forms. The passion of sex and the passion of arguments. For V and I one would merge into the other all the time. One second shouting, the next fucking. We needed each other in a way that sometimes made me feel like it wouldn’t be enough until we’d consumed each other. I read a story once about a Russian man who ate his lovers and I sort of understand why he did it. Imagine your lover actually traveling through your blood, feeding your muscles, informing your brain. Some would see that as the basest level of cruelty, others as an act of love. Ultimately, that is what it means to Crave.

Love, cruelty, passion, and lies, manipulated to serve the theatrics of court and Crave alike, where the truth looks different depending on what you have to protect, what you have to lose, and whether you’re getting paid. To reenlist Murdoch’s epigraph, “Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face.”

Karen Brissette is a voracious reader and the most popular reviewer on Goodreads.

The post Love, Cruelty, Passion, and Lies appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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literateape · 6 years

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What Price For A Cultural Paradigm Shift?

by Don Hall

Unless you’re so completely entrenched with your head up your own ass, the idea that women have had the shit end of the societal stick for pretty much since recorded time and beyond is not news.

I’ll confess that while I certainly have benefitted in ways I may not be able to fathom from this patriarchal and, more often than not, brutally unfair system, I can’t say I understand why it has been that way. I can’t quite get my head around the concept that women even as close as a century ago were considered property, were not allowed any property rights, were not allowed to participate in our electoral process. Given my being raised primarily by a badass mom and having had most of my bosses be women, I can understand our past (and, in many cases, our present) but not fully comprehend it.

The world I want to live in holds every life with no regard for gender, gender identity, sexual preference, race, economic class, country of birth and the host of identifiers we cling to as equal in importance and in value to society. I’d argue that an awful lot of people in this country we call home agree with that.

The phrase that pays these days is “The Future is Female” and, for the most part, I think it’s high time we approach our future with that in mind. In Michael Moore’s last film Where To Invade Next, it is striking to see an almost entirely women-run government and banking system in Iceland and in Tunisia a revolutionary change in how the country views the rights of women. If we are, as it seems, poised to shift our paradigm from Patriarchal to Matriarchal, I’m all for it.

How we achieve this shift, I believe, will determine its long term effectiveness.

I think we need to dismiss the idea that due to centuries of oppression all women are equally righteous, honest, or the best we have to offer. The idea that systematic oppression breeds nobility is as empirically false as the notion that starving artists make the best art or drunks are the best writers. Reality (a state so pummeled in an age of No Truth But Your Own) shows that no matter the gender or race, we are all human at the core and humans are fraught with flaws and the ability to do horrifying things to one another.

Being falsely accused by your own daughter of raping her several times is probably a father’s worst nightmare. Because some of the evidence seemed so authentic, Thomas Kennedy was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After 9 years, Cassandra, his daughter owned up to falsely accusing her father and confessed that the physical evidences of rape were because she had sexual relations with a boy in second grade. The boy, already an adult by the time she revealed the truth, released a statement saying that what she said was indeed true.

***

Although there was no evidence linking Darryl to the alleged rape he was being convicted of, a supposedly racist jury went ahead and convicted him anyway. He served 19 years starting in 1984 but thanks to DNA testing, he was cleared of the rape and is now fighting back by helping others in his position.

***

Two years ago former California high school football star Brian Banks, who had spent five years in prison for raping his classmate Wanetta Gibson, was exonerated after Gibson contacted him to apologize and admitted making up the attack. In 2009, New Yorker William McCaffrey was released after serving four years of a 20-year prison sentence for a rape his friend Biurny Peguero had made up to explain her injuries from a fight with several women. In 2012 a Michigan man, James Grissom, was freed after nearly 10 years in prison when the woman who accused him, Sara Ylen, was caught making another false allegation (and faking cancer to bilk money from insurance companies and sympathetic donors).

These examples pale in comparison to the thousands of stories we’re hearing and have heard of women being brutalized and the abusers getting away with it.

In a conversation with my mother, she can name every employer who pressed his boner on her shoulder, who chased her around the office, who diminished and brutalized her. Likewise, I’ve had conversations with exonerated death row inmates, falsely accused and incarcerated for decades for crimes they did not commit.

To say, however, that these falsely accused men don’t matter, that to merely reverse the inequity is the way to go misses the goal substantially. These examples don’t matter more but they certainly can’t matter less.

If the Future is Female, I hope it isn’t Margaret Thatcher, the women behind the Tokyo Rose broadcasts, or Susan Smith (who drowned her children and claimed it was done by an anonymous black man.) I hope the Female Future isn’t Aileen Wuornos, Imelda Marcos, or Eva Braun.

If one of the markers of what we call toxic masculinity is aggression and rage, seeing the #MeToo movement go from a genuine expression of pain and trauma to a call for retribution and revenge absent of any reasonable hope of justice is ironic. Perhaps the reverse of toxic masculinity is nurturing femininity and, if that is the case, we’re going in the wrong direction.

I watch from the sidelines as the #BlackLivesMatter movement fights for the rights of innocent men and women murdered by overly aggressive policing tactics. They fight for the innocent. They fight for due process over thug-like prejudgment based on factors that have no bearing on criminality. As they achieve systemic shifts in the culture of policing and oversight on law enforcers, the goal is to protect those innocent of crime as well as those who are criminals (because even those breaking the law have a right to not being executed.)

#BlackLivesMatter provides hope and focus out of the fire of rage and the frustration of people so long oppressed and stolen from, so long murdered and discarded. The movement had a rocky start and had elements associating with it pushing things too far to be effective (calls for the abolition of policing in general were neither reasonable nor feasible and thus spawned nonsense like #BlueLivesMatter and the tone deaf #AllLivesMatter movements.) These were roadblocks toward truly providing change and #BlackLivesMatter has overcome them for the most part.

It is a transformation from protest to genuine activism and fundamental institutional change that evaded Occupy Wall Street and so many others.

The #MeToo movement has the same opportunity. Hope and focus rather than unrealistic scorched Earth tactics.

Yeah — I got frustrated with the unfair treatment of Al Franken. I vented some. I’m still pissed about the injustice to a man so committed to the causes of true progress, a shining example of what a Senator opposed to the Trump administration should be about, was tarred and feathered for a boorish joke and tales of ass-grabbing which he denies.

I notice that by even bringing up the idea that even if one believes these eight women (I don’t) that questioning whether these misjudgments are predatory is, for the most strident of Rage Profiteers, grounds for excommunication from the Church of the Left. The message from this Leftist version of the Tea Party is that unless you see his indiscretions as equal to the criminal behavior of a Weinstein or a Trump, you’re just as culpable as the 84% Of Republicans who love our President.

Which is horseshit. Passionate, uncompromising, unrelenting feces from the bunghole of an equine.

We are on the same side of this. We can tear at each other, destroy our alliances in the quest for purity of ideology, become the DNC of the 1980 presidential election — you know, the one where the Far Left candidate (Ted Kennedy) tore open a rift with the Center Left Incumbent (Jimmy Carter) that allowed a B-Movie Actor who wasn’t the GOP favorite by a long shot swing on through and secure the highest office in the land. Sort of like last year. Or we can recognize that while we don’t see exactly eye-to-eye on these issues all the time, stop trying to shame one another and unify the Left and oust the Robber Barons and Warmongers from the steps of Washington.

I fear a Consistency of Dunces. I fear the Politics of Shame and Retribution will continue to drive those of looking for collaboration and compromises in order to affect long-lasting systemic change out of the tribe.

I hope for better. We all want to live in a world that values everyone. I hope that’s enough.

#metoo #BlackLivesMatter #Al Franken #culture of Rage #false accusations #The Future is Female

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theliterateape · 6 years

Text

What Price For A Cultural Paradigm Shift?

by Don Hall

Unless you’re so completely entrenched with your head up your own ass, the idea that women have had the shit end of the societal stick for pretty much since recorded time and beyond is not news.

How we achieve this shift, I believe, will determine its long term effectiveness.

***

These examples pale in comparison to the thousands of stories we’re hearing and have heard of women being brutalized and the abusers getting away with it.

It is a transformation from protest to genuine activism and fundamental institutional change that evaded Occupy Wall Street and so many others.

The #MeToo movement has the same opportunity. Hope and focus rather than unrealistic scorched Earth tactics.

Which is horseshit. Passionate, uncompromising, unrelenting feces from the bunghole of an equine.

I hope for better. We all want to live in a world that values everyone. I hope that’s enough.

#metoo #BlackLivesMatter #Al Franken #culture of Rage #false accusations #The Future is Female

0 notes