Entertainment is Murder
I’ve been giving some thought to why we are so entertained by murder. Truth is, anyone actually affected by a murder, of a family member or friend or even an acquaintance, is usually left feeling angry, helpless, and afraid. Not a good state to be in, and possibly the opposite of being entertained.
Actual homicide is a tragedy, an often random occurrence that leaves the survivors scarred. When the murderer is brought to justice, there is rarely a feeling of satisfaction, and certainly not a satisfaction that fills the void left by the victim. My personal and professional brushes with homicide have left me feeling that way.
In my reporting career, in a fairly small town that would see one or two homicides a year, only a couple stand out. Mostly, this is due to murder usually being a sordid affair between family members. Such incidents are simply not interesting, no matter how purple your prose, how graphic your photos. I still maintain that one of the murders I covered remains unsolved. A man was accused of killing a friend by pounding his head repeatedly into the sand of a beach. Personally, my research says that a man does not have the strength to crush another’s skull in this manner. The cops I brought it up to claimed that the perpetrator was an enormous guy, six-eight, two-eighty, all muscle, who could and did kill his drinking buddy in this fashion. As neither the suspect nor victim were people of any means or notoriety otherwise, this one will never get any attention.
So why are we so into murder? Mysteries, police procedurals, forensics and all that popular stuff focus on solving murders and the prosecution of justice or the procurement of vengeance. It seems that this fascination with the process spills over into real life, where we expect the police to solve crimes as their raison d’être.
To me, this is weird. Why do we put so much energy and money into solving crimes, rather than preventing them? Crime prevention, on the one hand, is boring. But it would seem much more valuable a thing feeling safer than having curiosity satisfied. This seems to say that while we don’t want to be murdered in our beds, we do want our neighbor killed in his or her bed, and then we want to follow the investigation on the news.
It’s probably a politically harder sale to staff more prevention positions, which don’t necessarily have to be sworn officers, than to obtain new, cool pursuit vehicles and forensic gear and other flashy, sort of after-the-fact stuff. On TV and in the movies, you see whole teams of federal employees flying around in airplanes looking for serial killers. Apparently, this really happens, though the expense really seems to outweigh the danger. But do taxpayers ever complain about the FBI’s behavioral units? I don’t really follow politics, and I don’t want to get into issues of injustice or overcrowded prisons or the disproportionate number of this group versus that group when it comes to arrests. I’m not qualified to speak.
However, as a writer, I am guilty of dangling homicides around for the sake of entertainment. Frankly, I am just as entertained, if not more so, as the next guy by cop shows, dramatic or reality based, wherein murders are featured. I am also guilty of trotting out the serial killer trope, although I feel that with the exception of one or two, serial killers are by and large incredibly boring. Evil, yes, but still rather unintelligent and uninteresting, with the exception that they’ve thrown off the chains of civilized folk and live out homicidal fantasies (and it’s just weird that people have such fantasies to begin with, but there you have it).
That said, we’re one of the few species on the planet that commits the killing of its own members. On the one hand, we are led to believe that a darkness resides in each of us, and that every person is capable of homicide. It seems a tenuous connection to the overwhelming attraction to murder. On the other hand, if we are all potential murderers, why is it so fascinating?
This is not some kind of mass schadenfreude—readers and viewers of mysteries aren’t enjoying the suffering of the victims. Somehow, this is generally left out, with the survivors limited to a character or two. It does make me wonder about our Western culture, though. We’ve been desensitized to violence, obviously, but have we been stripped of our empathy? Do we ever stop in the middle of a mystery novel and consider the survivors, consider what all the people in the victim’s live are suffering through? Why is it so easy for us to shuck what would be a terrible tragedy for the sake of a few hours of excitement?
I don’t have the answers. Occasionally, I do think of these things as I work, and rein myself in a little. Sometimes, my conscience subliminally remembers that these fictional victims must also have fictional kids, aunts, uncles, nephews, work friends, and neighbors. Sure, I kill them off anyway, but maybe with a little less nonchalance. Otherwise, murder itself would become boring.
Photo credti: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26063220@N00/3480359060">Murder's weapon on the table</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">(license)</a>
