What’s the value of pointing a camera at the ugliness of life and calling it an important social service? Some of the year’s best documentaries have true crime on the brain, and are committed to exploring that very question. Even something seemingly more straightforward like Geeta Gandbhir’s
The Perfect Neighbor, a powerfully heartrending, doom-laden doc about an older white woman who murders her black neighbor in front of her victim’s kids, is, through its near-exclusive use of police body cam footage to build dual portraits of both a vibrant neighborhood and what Jamelle Bouie astutely called the “psychosis” of racism, as much about its telling as its facts. But the prevailing true crime mode hasn’t been so reflective. Our culture has been addicted to a kind of flippant binge watch mentality about this genre that confuses watching true crime documentaries with activism, as if watching the lurid details of an investigation or the public shaming of an alleged perpetrator is the same thing as preventing or even understanding crime. (To be fair, conflating viewing habits with political effort has been a cross-party problem for the better part of two decades.) Worse still are the kinds of investigative vigilantism the true crime craze has inspired, from ad hoc social media detective networks to YouTube sting operations that get it wrong just as often as right. And the ways in which everything from network news exposés to amateur sleuthing can actually impede the course of justice — tampering with the chain of evidence or crossing into entrapment — is counterproductive to their ostensible aims. When law enforcement is subservient to the demands of entertainment, it’s no surprise which one triumphs at the expense of the other.
Dissecting this very dilemma is part of the project of David Osit’s
Predators. With a clinical, methodical, critical eye, he looks at the NBC series
To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 and 2007 and made host Chris Hansen’s gotcha appearances a steady pop culture presence. Its episodes followed a rigorous formula, with a youthful-appearing decoy actor luring a man into a house to meet what he thinks is a minor, at which point Hansen and camera crew confront him. When the man leaves, police are typically waiting to arrest him. This new documentary problematizes the production through its own raw footage, turning what was punchy newsmagazine sensationalism and schadenfreude into something more complicated and troubling. No wonder it didn’t make final edit to watch people beg and plead for help with mental illness, or decoys reeling from their exposure to these events or growing uncertain in the moment, or, in one infamous case, the suicide of a suspect. Through interviews with sociological experts, law enforcement officials, people involved in the show, and people who copycat the structure for web series now, the movie makes a persuasive case that the cheap hits of indiscriminate exposure and catharsis has done absolutely nothing to prevent these crimes from happening. Couched in the language of raising awareness and catching criminals, the show has merely made a spectacle of it. (Hansen expresses wonder at how, late in the show's run, many perpetrators liked the show, too.) There’s something awful about the crimes, yes, but also something queasy about the sensationalism and futility in the show's interest. Is this really justice? What are we really learning by all this empty repetition of ugliness and depravity? For however well-intentioned and even informational the intent from which the idea sprang, Osit makes a persuasive case that its ends did not justify the means.
An even further dissection of the form can be found in Charlie Shackleton’s
Zodiac Killer Project. The conceit is that he’s failed to get the rights to a true crime book about the eponymous serial killer and so, instead, is going to take us through all the decisions with which he would’ve been confronted if he’d gotten to make it. He talks about the “gravitational pull” of the commercial incentive for relitigating old sensationalistic crimes that has taken hold of all modern documentarians. (The list of generational talents who’ve been slumming in the streaming true crime mines for a quick buck is truly astonishing.) And as such the comprehensiveness of Shackleton’s efforts to totally take apart the tropes and ruts they’ve fallen into in making these docs is satisfyingly wry and accumulatively devastating. His narration plays out over straight-faced parodies that are perfect recreations of the kind of drone establishing shots and eerie minimalist music and ominous insert close-ups of which these projects are always full. From opening credits to red herrings to dubious conclusions, he takes us through the whole arc. And then each step he’ll layer on real examples from real docs that perfectly match his. Over this he might say, “It doesn’t really tell you anything, but at the same time it gives you the general vibe. In case you have one eye on your phone.” It’s grimly funny to watch this laser-focused and comprehensively sharp skewering of these repetitive moves, as well as the tricks and manipulations of the true crime doc. It shows how reality is so fungible in the hands of a filmmaker that even genuine fact and authentic interviews can be bent toward the banal and the manipulated. What we take for documentary truth can be so mediated by the genre dictates and the fans’ expectations, that we end up with endless interactions of grizzled sheriffs stepping onto a gravel parking lot, and slow pans across dark windows, and the empty feeling of so much darkness drudged up to make us feel a little glimmer of vicarious sickness and the vague sense of having learned something from staring into mankind’s essential illness. And to click play on the next one.
