What's the prescription for case fatigue?
the true crime that's worth your time
We all have cases we’re weary of, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s that a round-number case anniversary has recently come and gone (the Tate-LaBianca murders), or the signal-to-noise ratio of crackpot theories to verifiable evidence gives you a headache (DB Cooper; sorry, buddy), or there’s a jokey cynicism to the coverage (Gacy).
I have a handful of these cases, unsurprisingly, and as I was combing through a literal ziggurat of Black Dahlia books the other day and feeling mostly impatient about how coverage of Elizabeth Short’s horrible demise mostly seems premised on the rubbernecking factor, I wondered if it’s possible for anyone to write or shoot a take on that case that I’d be not just not pre-exhausted by — but actively interested in.
And then I thought, if Casey Cep went out and lived with the case for a couple years, I would read the hell out of that. And if Ava DuVernay shot a scripted three- or four-parter about it, and zoomed in on the way LAPD might have used its investigation to continue violating the civil rights of Angelenos of color for no reason, I would watch the hell out of that.
What’s the case you can’t with — and which creator could save it?
(Doesn’t have to be a creator we associate with true crime; I’ve got a list of like 15 movies fantasy-directed by Terrence Malick, going back years.) — SDB