Truman Capote set a high bar for his imitators when writing his seminal true crime novel “In Cold Blood.” His research hunkered down in the town of Holcomb for 5 years, performing extensive interviews and collecting thousands of notes. In the decades after, the genre would twist and morph into strange new mediums. A fellow pioneer in the genre, Errol Morris’s documentary film “The Thin Blue Line” would mix surreal reenactments with interviewees talking on camera as if they were staring into your soul. Morris’s modern style of true crime documentaries is still imitated by countless Netflix productions to this day. Their style’s were novel, at the time, but their technique was rooted in very basic journalistic integrity.
But true crime has withered into some weird mockery of itself. Now instead of spending years trying to contort dozens of interviews, police reports and thousands of notes riddled with contradictions into a coherent narrative, true crime is now about what type of fast food best pairs with murder.
When “Thin Blue Line” debuted in an era where non-fiction film was remarkably unpopular, it grossed only over $1.2 million domestically. Now, nonfiction films such as “Elton John: Never Too Late” are scoring deals for $35 million for streaming rights alone. True crime is hot. Everyone and their mother wants a taste of that true crime money.
There has been a screenshot circulating the internet for a few years of a YouTube video by Stephanie Soo titled “42 Year Old Dad Marries his Biological Daughter & Then Kills Her | Raising Cane’s Tenders Mukbang.” It does not matter how advanced technology becomes, no AI image generator will ever be truly capable of replicating the sheer aura of this image. The massive overflowing tub of Cane’s sauce sitting next to a stack of chicken fingers, Soo’s blase facial expression and title seeming more concerned with the incest and less with the murder of an actual humans.
The video itself is a work of art — and not in a good way. Soo gleefully recounts the case of Steven Pladl, who, in 2018, murdered his daughter Katie Pladl — whom he had an incestous relationship with — their infant child and Katie’s adopted father before dying by suicide. There is nothing very funny about the triple murder-suicide, but Soo fills her recounting of the case with incest jokes before segwaying into a 2 minute long advertisement for Glasses.com. It is an amazing, if terrible, sight to behold as the severity of Katie Pladl’s murder is minimized and exploited for a sponsorship.
I am not a mind reader; I do not know why Soo thought combining mukbang and true crime into an unholy chimera was okay. From a purely financial standpoint, it is a smart idea. They are two massive genres, slamming the two together brings both audiences together. But the fact that true crime has devolved into a genre that such an instinct can be acted upon and executed is bad.
I bring up Soo because she has seemed to make strides towards addressing criticism over the years. Most of her mukbang/true crime videos have been removed and she keeps her mukbang and true crime on seperate channels. Soo’s website features fairly extensive sourcing for her videos and an admission that her content is not investigative in nature. Soo has shown that true crime can become a better, more ethical genre if creators are willing to address criticism. It’s far from perfect, Soo’s mass production of true crime videos is by itself in poor taste, but she is a successful entrepreneur. Soo has seen that there is a demand and she has the supply to match it.
“Humans are so drawn to violence that humans are paying to watch things like the Squid Game, but aren’t we already paying Netflix to watch Squid Game, so aren’t we already there,” Soo said in the amazingly titled, “He stuck a HAMMER into her BRAIN to ‘FIX’ her and this is what happened | Mexican Food Mukbang.”
More mainstream true crime suffers from its own issues. While reaching out those directly involved in the case is a tried and true method for storytelling, the glut of true crime docs flooding sites like Netflix and Hulu seem to stop short of any actual desire to investigate their cases. Falling back on popular cases and parroting police narrative word for word.
Take last year’s Netflix documentary “What Jennifer Did” about the murder of Bich Pan. The producers of the documentary instead interviewed six cops, two friends and a piano teacher. None of the accused, nor the surviving victim or any of the attorney’s on both sides of the case. Nope, cops. The end result is a documentary devoid of any true revelations; a glorified Wikipedia summary. For a high budget, professionally shot and edited Netflix doc, “What Jennifer Did” is remarkably incurious about the case it is covering.
It is not wrong to interview cops about cases they were involved in. It would be silly not to. But relying solely on them as the sole arbiters of truth has become a crutch for too many true crime docs, which is ironic for a genre defined by a documentary about police misconduct. Morris’s efforts with “The Thin Blue Line” ended up leading to the exoneration of Randall Adams, who had been falsely convicted on shoddy evidence for the murder of a police officer. If Morris had just stopped at the official police narrative, Adams would have died in jail as an innocent man.
But the cop show-esque format of true crime leads to easy catharsis. Horrible evil monstrous criminals are caught and jailed by heroic cops. Acting as if real, gruesome crimes can be molded into fictional morality.
A shining example of true crime that avoids the general sensational, popcorny and simplistic nature of the genre has fallen into in recent years is the book “Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls” by Kathleen Hale. The book recounts the inherently sensational Slenderman stabbing without ever resorting to sensationalism. Hale instead focuses on the complex small town politics of Waukesha, Wisconsin. It humanizes the victim Payton Leutner and explores the mental health of Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, showcasing the treatment of those with mental health problems by the justice system.
Hale’s investigation was curious, thorough and sensitive. It might sound like that should be the bare minimum necessary for writing in this genre, but with the current state of true crime is actually asking a lot.
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