To Exploit or Understand?

Miss Lise,
Now it is my turn to confess that I have been pondering a casual comment you made on a prior post, the one about our country’s obsession with crime shows. When I first wrote that post, I actually thought the plethora of books and TV shows about crime as being like Day of the Dead or Halloween – a stylized way to deal with death, turning it into something not quite real. In other words, death is an all too real and terrifying possibility, so we seek to turn it into entertainment. But then you made a comment that really stuck with me, saying that all these shows and books basically “exploit our morbid curiosity with murder.” I don’t know why, but it really got me to thinking…. about how we slow down and rubberneck at accidents… about the amount of camera time given to close-ups of wounds… about the sheer volume of books about murder. This, in turn, pitched me into a long internal examination of what I wanted to write about and why I write in the first place – a salient point to ponder at the beginning of the year and at this point in my career.

I then read two crime books over the holidays and found I had very different reactions to them. One was a serial killer novel with extremely (extremely!) graphic descriptions of the torture the killer inflicted. It was unnecessary to the story, so far as I could see, in that it explained nothing about the killer’s anguish, confusion or alienation that drove the killer to that point (something ONLY Thomas Harris has ever been able to do well). The other book was “Bone by Bone” by Carol O’Connell, which did indeed have murder at the core of the plot but was more about very complicated relationships among fascinating people in an odd, isolated town. I loved the book. It focused on people trying to do the right thing and the enduring connections between each other, and less on the violence and gore. I realized that, for me, it comes down to what drives a crime book or crime show – the courage of good people to bring justice or the self-indulgent violence wrought by the killer? I’m thinking the difference between exploiting our fear of death and seeking to understand it lies somewhere in that balance.