November 10, 2022

Stranger At The Gate: "These people were just plain old pleasant"

Plus Casey Anthony, Ryan Murphy, and more adventures in the book trade

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
In theory, murder and terrorist conspiracy. In practice, well…

The story
Stranger At The Gate: A Veteran’s Return From The Brink Of Terrorism won a special jury prize at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and I can see why; Joshua Seftel’s straightforward 30-minute documentary short manages to create suspense and tension despite signaling the story’s end in the film’s subtitle. Seftel is also astute in the interview snippets he uses to give you a three-dimensional sense of his subjects, like Bibi Bahrami talking about the soothing sincerity of “American country music,” or Islamic Center congregant Jomo Williams noting that his great-grandfather was lynched.

There is some use of doc cliché — aerial shots of Muncie that make sure to include a nearby Goodwill; a family enjoying sparklers in slo-mo to suggest the 4th of July — but it’s deftly enough done that you might not notice until minutes later (or unless, you know, you review these for a living), and it’s in the service of creating the most efficient and unsentimental version of a story that could very easily tip into Very Special Episode territory.

That simple hospitality could bridge a moat whose alligators include cynical post-9/11 sabre-rattling and combat PTSD, and short-circuit the lethal designs of a retired Marine Dr. Bahrami remembers as a “red…neck,” is of course at this moment in American electoral politics a very appealing idea to see manifested. I’ve had a variation on it on my mind a lot of late, living where I do, trying to co-exist with certain reactionary neighbors on the level of everyday apolitical kindnesses, each of us hoping to establish the benefit of some doubt with the others — like, you don’t want to be naive about folks who put this dude’s campaign sign in the window, but at the same time, that family knows your car and they saw your charger fall out of said car and they returned the charger to you (in a box someone origami’d out of a HelloFresh mailer card; that house contains multitudes), plus if you walk your block pre-furious all the time you’ll give yourself a migraine.

Every now and then, the little things do add up, and Stranger At The Gate is a well-crafted and unsaccharine account of one of those now-and-thens. You can watch it at NewYorker.com, and I recommend it. — SDB

And now, another issue of Mysteries Of Ethical True-Crime Consumption Quarterly, featuring…OJ Simpson? I’ll give you the background here as economically as I can given that I don’t entirely know what’s going on here…so, Exhibit B. exists as its own online entity, but I also map some of my inventory onto eBay for better visibility. I won’t bore you with the specifics; suffice it to say that the two systems’ method of talking to each other is some jury-rigged (…so to speak) nineties jank, and sometimes updates from eBay about sales or messages look like spam.

Which is what I assumed this was when it hit my inbox yesterday:

Your listing didn't follow our Offensive material policy. Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t allowed.

The email buried the lede pretty thoroughly, not specifying which listing until the very end, and between that and the random Germanic capitalization up top, my first reaction was “that’s probably horseshit but okay, tell me more.”

They did, and…they didn’t:

What activity didn't follow the policy

 Out of respect for the families of murder victims and victims of violent crimes, we'll remove listings of items closely associated with individuals notorious for committing violent crimes or murderous acts regardless of whether or not the criminal is living or deceased.

Remember, the particular objectionable listing is still unknown to me at this juncture of the email, and Exhibit B. is…true crime. All and only true crime. “Items closely associated with” “violent crimes or murderous acts” is, conservatively, 70 percent of my inventory. But I don’t carry “murderabilia” as it’s generally understood, I don’t have any plans to carry it, I don’t try to leverage market confusion about it, and in fact generally I don’t…get it, as a consumer or a retailer, because the ick far outweighs any nominal interest or educational value IMO. Not that selling true-crime books doesn’t still monetize the trauma of victims and families, but there are degrees, we’ve talked about this, etc.

So in the abstract, I have zero problem with eBay squashing problematic listings as defined, which the email — reminder: still didn’t know which listing got flagged at this point — then delineated:

What is the policy

- Listings that promote, perpetuate, or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination, including on the grounds of race, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, aren’t allowed. This includes, but isn't limited to, the following:
-- Slurs or epithets of any kind
-- Items, including figurines, cartoons, housewares, historical advertisements, and golliwogs with racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise demeaning portrayals, for example through caricatures or other exaggerated features
-- Black Americana items that are discriminatory
-- Slavery items, including reproductions, such as tags, shackles, documents, bills of sale, etc.
-- Confederate battle flag and related items with its image
-- Historical Holocaust-related items, including reproductions
-- Any item that is anti-Semitic or any item from after 1933 that bears a swastika
-- Media identified as Nazi propaganda
-- Listings that imply or promote support of, membership in, or funding of a terrorist organization

Reading this, I’m murmuring, “Right, sure; yep, makes sense; ew, people sell that shit?; sure, got it,” because this all makes ethical and fiscal sense. Dealers in historical ephemera might have a problem with it, but as my grandma used to say, don’t invite trouble in, it already has a key.

But I don’t think I carry anything that’s even in the same time zone as what’s listed. I used to have one borderline case, which I noted in the listing I would donate the proceeds of because it was both a compelling rarity and immoral to profit from, but that one’s long gone. Aphrodite Jones’s take on the Brandon Teena case is transphobic and dated, but I thought I stopped listing that one. Was it that one? Was it one of the dozens of admittedly tasteless, but not this hateful, cover designs, all of which I’ve tagged thusly?

Okay: close your eyes. Think about which case or book might have gotten flagged. Got a guess?

You’re almost certainly incorrect:

Listings that don't follow policy

[listing no. redacted] - If I Did It: Confessions Of The Killer

We appreciate your understanding..

Thanks,
eBay

I’m sorry: what?

The existence of If I Did It is in fact kind of offensive. There is a significant amount of OJ: Made In America’s runtime devoted to its creation, Fred Goldman’s confrontation of it, the Goldman family’s assumption of control of it via both Son Of Sam statutes and garnishing proceeds thanks to the civil judgment in that case, and so on. But it’s not, to my mind, any more offensive than anything else I stock about that case, like the tertiary Nicole’s-friend “crimoirs” with sugary titles or the “the jurors speak!” broadsides. It’s all pretty gross — and possibly more to the point, it’s all sitting right where I shelved it when it first came in stock. OJ materials do. not. sell. Ever. Have not sold one OJ item in two years. Be as offended as you want at the idea of my profiting from the pain caused by this case; it’s…not going to occur. Multi-generational case fatigue (and, frankly, the fact that OJ:MIA is the alpha and omega of case coverage) has ensured that.

It’s a baffler, and tbh there’s some extra punctuation in this portion of the email that makes me suspicious of its origins, so I go to my actual seller dashboard, and this communication is there also, so it’s budge, but it’s legit. There’s also a follow-up informing me that, basically, the listing was ended and deleted from eBay but I’m not “grounded” or anything unless I try to relist it, which, see above, why would I bother.

But then there’s another update an hour later:

We reviewed your case and are happy to share that your appeal has been approved.

Any actions taken on your account have been removed. If we reinstated any listings, you'll find the details at the end of this email and you can relist the items.

I…hadn’t appealed it. I was recording Extra Hot Great — and when the email came in, I was talking about Low Country, which this story is starting to rival in terms of number of twists — and anyway, trying to contact an actual human employee at eBay about anything is a Hellerian fool’s errand that I wouldn’t have bothered with in the first place.

No idea what happened here. Does the Goldman Foundation have an algorithm it uses to report listings? Did eBay’s offensive-materials algorithm trap the book by mistake? Either way, why now? Why that book and not any of the half-dozen Dahmer-adjacent PBs I’ve listed recently (and those sell, unsurprisingly)? — SDB

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Speaking of Dahmer (…I’m a bit tired of typing that phrase, I must say), I also noted Ryan Murphy’s deal expansion on “the Monster franchise” on Extra Hot Great yesterday. Leaving aside the low-hanging-fruit jokes about the renewal of The Watcher, 1) a stand-alone story 2) that did not have a solution and 3) was overlong and not that good, the acidic comparisons of Murphy’s American Crime and Monster properties to the MCU started immediately. Buzzfeed collected a bunch of the bitchier tweets the other day.

Here again, I get why people are put off by the industrial-complex aspects of the deal, as well as by Monster itself, and Murphy’s response to the criticism has been more defensive and obtuse than you’d hope from a creator who brought us the thoughtful, innovative, wrenching second season of American Crime Story. But he did bring us that season, and I’d like to think he’s taking the backlash under better advisement than he’s indicated before moving forward with another genre story. I guess we’ll see. — SDB

Before I hand you off to Eve, a few trailers and longreads for your afternoon! — SDB

• Peacock’s Casey Anthony doc drops November 29 [Parade] // Not sure a version of the case “told largely from Anthony's perspective” is inviting for me. Alexandra Dean (Secrets Of Playboy) directs.

  

• The next installment of Crime Scene is also out that day [Primetimer] // Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields “investigates a string of unsolved murders in an area between Houston and Galveston”; Jessica Dimmock (Captive Audience) directs.

• “How a viral teen app became the center of a sex trafficking hoax” [WaPo] // Taylor Lorenz on the Gas app as “the latest example of a troubling pattern: A buzzy, consumer-facing app becomes an overnight hit, only to be beset by rumors that it’s a front for sex trafficking.”

• “The Couple Behind One of History’s Most Brazen Art Heists” [Hyperallergic] // A review of next year’s hybrid doc The Thief Collector.

Friday on Best Evidence: Will Xenu command Eve to recommend some weekend reads?

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