Why TV teaches us serial killers are tortured geniuses

Spoiler alert: They’re not. And it goes deeper than You.

Alexandra Sahara

and

kate

Mar 01, 2021

4.5 minute read

☕ Coffee for pitches ☕

GUIDING QUESTION

Why do we fetishize the intellect of serial killers? And why is it only the white ones?

Penn Badgley gives a sexy smolder to the camera in a recent advertisement for “You” on Twitter. The text accompanying the short video reads, “Has he finally met his match?” implying wit and intellect in the character.

THE TEASER

The mentally unstable killer and thirst trap Joe Goldberg is coming back for season 3 of You, and just like the last two seasons, we fully expect to find ourselves gawking over the man we hate to love.

Another year, another tortured white guy who, let’s face it, tortured people.

And for some reason, we fetishize his intellect as much as we fetishize his body. Something we just don’t do to non-white killers.

There are two angles to this story.

First, let’s talk about sex and genius.

Joe isn’t the first killer we’ve made out to be approachable, empathetic, clever—whatever you want to call it.

Look at Zac Efron as Ted Bundy in “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.” He wasn’t even fictional, and he’s described by a judge as a “diabolical genius” in an episode titled “Handsome Devil.”

Darren Chris referred to as charming in Cosmopolitan as he played Andrew Cunanan—this of course being the man who shot and killed Gianni Versace and 4 others.

Genius.

Charming.

Even Charles Manson is covered as a manipulative style icon.

These are terms that go beyond sexualizing a criminal physically.

This is about IQ and EQ playing at superhuman levels.

The problem is that this kind of coverage starts to bleed into positive admiration and implies empathy is earned even when behavior is ‘shockingly evil and vile’.

The evidence is astounding—look no further than the nuanced personalities developed for fictional (and white) characters like Dexter or Tony Soprano. Then there’s the layered analysis of real killers like Jeffrey Dahmer in My Friend Dahmer, which Vanity Fair described as extending Dahmer…

…some human compassion, letting us see how the tragedy of his loneliness, spurred by the horror of his dark compulsions, [making] pre-murderous Dahmer something of a victim himself.

Now let’s be clear.

Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t need to be viewed as a victim.

And perhaps not every scenario needs empathy. Here’s why.

When we provide the perpetrator, and not the victim, positive attention, then we are distancing ourselves from the reality of what actually happened—that Dahmer killed 17 boys and abused their corpses—and we as viewers are taught to find something intriguing, understandable, and nuanced about their actions.

Make no mistake, this isn’t just a Netflix issue. This style of coverage is baked into how the news grapples with crime. In a thesis presented at Eastern Kentucky University, you can quantitatively see how some negative coverage of killers is equal to or even less than the positive coverage. Think like, BTK being described as a “leader in his church” and how he “appreciated neatness.”

In this analysis, you can see how BTK a.k.a. Bind Torture Kill a.k.a. Dennis Rader, the guy who tortured and killed 10 people and sent taunting letters to the police, was described with positive character traits 47 times and with negative character traits only 25 times in the same 10 articles.

But there’s a second angle to this story—why is the positive coverage only of white guys?

Many argue that non-white crime is simply covered less. And in the cases that it is, the crimes are more often than not conveyed as animalistic, thuggish, and generally not worth the time and nuance we afford to white killers who, and this is key, mostly kill white victims.

But hey, maybe if there were more Netflix specials about black serial killers, we could live in a post-racial crime-obsessed society? That’s good, right?

Mmm… No.

The argument isn’t that there should be equal representation in the coverage of killers. Instead, as consumers, we should understand that this media is implicitly telling us one thing is more valuable than another.

To be a more educated and proactive consumer, this means we must understand two things.

1) The genre of true crime will continue to grow, regardless of its inherent bias, and Hollywood and news media will likely not change their style of coverage.

*True crime makes up one of the most popular genres of media, particularly in podcasting, where it’s seen explosive growth with shows like Serial, S-Town, and My Favorite Murder.*

2) This content will continue to place crime on an unequal intellectual pedestal when it comes to race. It will make white killers out to be clever, thoughtful, and more complex than simply people who need serious mental health help—all the while overlooking similarly extreme crimes by people of color.

Ultimately, some of this content is training us to implicitly look for humanity where there might be none.

Consume responsibly.

WHY THIS STORY IS WORTH IT

The easy news peg here is that Season 3 of You has just started advertising.

The more serious news peg is the recent death of serial killer Anthony Sowell, who some argue was covered less due to the fact that he was African American and his victims were African American.

PEOPLE WORTH INTERVIEWING

Big fish interview: Joe Penhall, creator of Mindhunter, a show about the profiling and inner workings of America’s most famous killers. In particular, they change from a white killer in season 1 to a black killer in season 2, so Penhall should be able to speak on the differences between perceptions of crime and race.

Alicia Simmons, Associate Professor of Sociology and Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University. She specifically analyzes intersections of media, race, and politics in the United States.
April Nicole Pace, who wrote the dissertation Serial killers in popular media: A content analysis of sensationalism and support for capital punishment.

WHAT WE DON’T HAVE ANSWERS TO

A great story would be able to find evidence that expands on the race angle not addressed in this dissertation. Specifically, how can we compare black versus white coverage when there is so little of one? Can we perform a similar analysis of black versus white crime as Pace did in this piece?