When centering the suspect works (and when it doesn't)
the true crime that's worth your time
We’ve been talking a lot lately about how problematic it is to center the criminal in a true crime property. Victims rights advocates quite properly protest this as a practice, saying that this puts a killer, scammer, or other type of predator on a pedestal or glamorizes evildoing.
Clearly, fiction has done this for thousands and thousands of years (I mean, who isn’t down to clown with Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter?) but with the rise of true crime, that type of narrative has bled into the real world, leaving folks who lost family and friends to these cases wondering why the actor playing their son’s killer is collecting awards while their son’s name remains all but unknown.
Still. There’s arguable value, both from a narrative and a human perspective, to understand the roots in some of these cases, and properties that intelligently examine how these folks came to do what they did can help bring better understanding to what we, as a society, can do to possibly prevent it. When Sarah and I were talking about this yesterday, I brought up Monster (the 2003 feature about Aileen Wuornos) as a possible dramatic example of this; Sarah mentioned the 2019 docuseries Lorena.
Of course, women who faced years of abuse aren’t the only cases where the suspects might belong in the middle. Some con, fraud or heist tales feel OK with the criminals at the center, but not all. Steal from Wells Fargo or defraud Burger King? I can live with that, but robbing a grandma on the street or a mom-and-pop restaurant, and I’m less inclined to find fun in the yarn.
So, your turn: what are some properties where making the suspect the centerpiece is the right thing to do, from either an ethical or an entertainment perspective? And what properties made an effort at this, and totally fail? — EB