I was always naturally attracted to the macabre. The dark side of human nature fascinates me. However, as I have said elsewhere at Horror to Culture, I seek not to live in or promote darkness, but to bring to light that which lurks in the shadows.
True Crime reveals real-life horrors. Where is the line between our darkest imaginings and our most vicious acts? Does art imitate life or life art? It seems to me there is a symbiotic relationship between the two, and as well it should be. We learn through self-reflection, and on the level of cultural consciousness, without art, there is no self to reflect.
Recently I watched two Netflix docuseries which highlight very similar events in a very different way. I would go so far as to say their respective presentations reflect a double standard in modern society.
Before I go into my analysis, I want to say that the most important thing to note is that what was done to the victims was wrong—just plain wrong. I have a certain notion of karma that probably doesn’t align with what any of us who have been wronged would like to believe, but which I think helps us to understand better why bad things happen to good people.
The universe is impartial in its fairness. It balances but it cannot, so far as I can tell, do justice to human relations. Justice is always up to us; how morally and ethically we act as individuals, not as subjects of some wider collective. The seeming paradox is that the more consonant with moral character is each respective individual, the better the outcome for the collective.
Both stories have many twists, so for infotainment purposes, I won’t spoil it for anyone who has yet to watch these docuseries or follow the cases otherwise, as it does not serve the purpose of this essay. However, for the sake of understanding the perspective I seek to elucidate, I strongly suggest that anyone watch both back-to-back.
An American Nightmare and Lover, Stalker, Killer both expose the junction where the judicial system, from law enforcement to the courtroom, drops the investigative ball, while the media sensationalizes cases for purposes which work directly against justice and a resolution for the real victims.
Yet in both cases there were officers of the counties in which the events happened and agents of the court system who did admirable jobs sticking to what was right, even when their colleagues were total bumbling morons or outright self-interested creeps. Those individuals who acted appropriately deserve commendation for sticking to the ethical and moral high ground, and the two docuseries do a good job of giving credit where it was due.
The striking difference between the two accounts was how the male and female victims’ plights are reflected.
Where a female was the victim, and a male the perpetrator, the issue is somehow a wider sociopolitical issue having to do with gender. Ultimately, we’re supposed to believe all society is at fault somehow for not protecting women’s rights, and this filters down to this individual case.
In this case, there’s a case to make, if we want to only view it through the feminist lens. Some law enforcement, all the way up to the FBI, did treat the victim as if she were lying, rather than impartially investigating the case, and the sensationalist media took the half-assed comparison to the movie Gone Girl, and ran with it, much to the detriment of the aforementioned impartiality.
Where the male was a victim, and a female the perpetrator, it was just another crime. Could have happened to anyone. He feels personally responsible for collateral damage that he never could have anticipated, and no one is championing his plight as a wider cause but merely as an oddball occurrence.
Yet, as many could attest, being stalked by an ex to the point of ruin is not an oddball occurrence for men. Not at all. When addressing the statistic that men commit death by suicide four times as much as women, the social narrative is that men are not in touch with their feelings, and no one listens because we never speak up; but, as a society, we conspicuously leave out the details about the nefarious and duplicitous ways that women can act toward men. So…
Which one is it? Is society complicit in its treatment of women but not of men? Or are these just unfortunate anomalies which no amount of social awareness could mitigate?
I will contend that the double standard arises due to a problem with human culture as an extension of human nature: we do not understand the difference between manipulative group ideology with a vested interest in promoting preconceived biases for its own sake and the ill actions of unscrupulous individuals.
I will go further, and be more specific about how this manifests in modern U.S. culture: fanatical left-wing feminism and evangelical right-wing religiosity respectively promote a lot of misandry and misogyny—bigotry, in other words, or prejudice—in their war to win over supporters, and the vast lot of reasonable people are caught up in the middle, recalling the line Anacharsis spoke to Solon when the Romans were canonizing many of the laws on which modern society is based:
“Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.”
It is always the fault of the perpetrators for committing the crimes, but the ineptitude of those in the system who allow their preconceptions to get in the way of the impartiality with which they are tasked to collect evidence and make sound adjudications is often a result of these ideological biases, which are everywhere present in modern U.S. culture, and are tearing us apart.
I am not here to argue either side. I am a conscientious objector to the CULTure war; but I hope that in so being I have made a space where peace may be possible, if not between the right/left dichotomy, in the minds of the majority of good, reasonable people, who are just, like me, sick and tired of all that bullshit, and more concerned with taking care of those we love and are sworn to protect.
So, dear reader, peace be with you. I can only give you something to think about, and do not wish to upset you with the sort of political propaganda I personally prefer to avoid. If you’ve got Netflix, and are a fan of True Crime, An American Nightmare and Lover, Stalker, Killer were very well-made documentaries. If you watch them in succession, I do believe you will, as the old saying goes, catch my drift.
Fare thee well!
