You and the Problem of Serial Killers

 

 

 

Source: Netflix

 

 

 

My girlfriend and I recently caught up on the Netflix original series You. We tried to watch the first season last year as part of our pandemic binging but gave up because the writing is terrible, the pacing is sluggish to near glacial, with characters so paper thin we couldn't even enjoy it as trash viewing. 

The next two seasons make almost no improvements on these problems but we went in to both seasons knowing the major twists which sort of helped. In the second season, knowing that Love is a serial killer, too, added depth to a season that completely lacked it otherwise. Knowing that season three ended with Joe killing Love didn't make the things better but it did at least add a sense of purpose, however misguided, to a stereotypical suburban sitcom.

 

If I had to pinpoint the core problem of You, it'd be that it thinks serial killers are interesting. True crime has warped people's perception of serial killers to the point that we've lost sight of what we find interesting about them, which is figuring out how their lives shaped them into the killers they became. But as for the people themselves, they're nothing, almost universally pathetic losers whose only impact on the world is the destruction they left in their wake. 

At heart, serial killers are little more than flesh suits acting out their obsessions and compulsions. Media depictions of serial killers tend to portray them as addicts, as otherwise functional people consumed by their desires. This is a necessary step because if you portrayed serial killers as they are, they'd be completely unmarketable.

Consider a scenario, if you will. You are out in public when suddenly, your stomach rumbles in the exact wrong way. You scramble, looking for a place to go, wandering, doing a mental checklist of which places have restrooms at all, ones that are open to the public, or ones where you have to buy something to justify your presence. All the while, the pressure continues to build, working its way down your intestines, each step threatening disaster. Finally, you remember where you can go, you work your way there, your every thought on holding it together for just that much longer until you reach the stall, plop on the toilet, then at long last, experience the sweet relief of release. 

This is what serial killers are, all the time. Just the tension and panic over having to take a shit in public until they find the perfect place to release that tension all at once. For all the horror they bring out, that's all every one of them is, nothing more. 

Where this causes problems for You is that it annihilates its capacity for drama. For drama to work, characters have to be put in situations that force them to make decisions that cause conflicts in the core of their identity. Emotional peril, not physical threats, is what drama runs on so, if your main character is an emotional void who doesn't have an interior life, your dramatic options become somewhat limited.

The end result of this is that Joe is forever trapped in a loop. He's always going to be looking for his perfect woman, his perfect "love," except, he never will. Joe's search will never be complete because no woman will ever live up to his fantasy because there's always going to be the pesky complications that all these women are real people. They're always going to have quirks, interests, and goals outside of Joe's need to be the center of their universe so he's always going to reject them.

That doesn't mean that there's no way to make this work. The show could have enough self-awareness to flesh out the characters so we understand what a loser Joe is, that he is essentially a child crying after they threw their favorite toy in the garbage who lashes out at every one who tells him the situation is his fault. Except, they won't. The show really wants us to be on Joe's side and it plays so heavily into his point of view with his constant voice over that everything has to be written to match his perspective. 

Problem is, his view of the world is so incredibly shallow. Every woman is either helpless in need of his protection or the latest backdrop for his mommy projections. Men are universally threats or obstacles. That's it. That is the sum total of his relationships to the outside world. 

If the show had better writing, we could see people as they are rather than filtered through Joe's fishbowl lens, but then the conceit of the show would collapse in a heartbeat. This is what torpedoes the third season, funnily enough. 

 

Love and Joe are living in suburbia, raising their baby in a life Joe says he always wanted. He's with a woman who loves him, who not only knows he's a murderer but completely accepts it. In fact, the fact that Joe's a murderer is why Love loves him- she sees him as a man who will do literally everything to protect what's important to him. Which, in a sense, is true. What Love, and by extension, the writers, miss however is that the only thing important to Joe is Joe. Their relationship falls apart because Joe, by definition, cannot recognize the validity of Love's feelings, let alone his obligation to satisfy them. That Love places expectations on Joe, that she expects to carry his own weight in their relationship and be her partner destroys Joe's fantasy, prompting his rejection and kick starting his search for a new obsession.

 

To be clear, I don't think these events in and of themselves are where the show goes wrong. Joe's failure to be a person is an accurate portrayal of what a serial killer is. We see Joe in the most perfect, ideal relationship he could ever possibly be in which just exposes  how much Joe is missing, how little there is to him, how small and inconsequential he is. Where the show screws up is that it takes Joe's side, framing everything as if Joe is the victim of circumstance, a man doing his best only to be undone by a partner with ludicrous expectations.

 

You wants to have it both ways. They want Joe to be a threat, to be dangerous, but they don't want him to be guilty of anything. The writers go all in on Joe's quest for a soul mate because it papers over his crimes, it makes it easier for us to accept the murders because they're supposedly committed in pursuit of a higher purpose instead of a sad little man compensating for his inadequacies through the destruction of others.

This reluctance to make Joe responsible means that the show lacks any meaningful tension. We know the show has no interest in making Joe face any consequences for his actions so any time Joe's worried about getting caught, we know he's not, that he's going to get off scot-free so, why bother? (To just emphasize this point, Joe kills an enforcer for the Russian mob when he comes to collect a $50,000 debt. It's never mentioned again.) 

In the end, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's only natural that a show so committed to uncritically depicting a serial killer would end up as shallow as its subject. 

Things I Wished I Loved: Killing Them Softly

I really wanted to like Andrew Dominik's 2012 film Killing Them Softly. The movie was the second collaboration between Dominik and Brad Pitt after the commercial flop of the criminally under seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford- I'm guessing the plan was that a punchier run time paired with a more manageable title would lead to a better box office return. The film is a tight 97 minutes but still manages to pack in the same thematic work of the stripping away the mythology to get to the ugly, mundane realities of a beloved American myth that Assassination was packed to the brim with. Everyone here is stellar, too. Pitt gives one of the best performances of his career with Richard Kind, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Scott McNairy, and Ben Mendelsohn rounding out the cast. 

It's just such a shame that it all goes to waste. 

What kills this movie dead, what made it infuriating to watch in theaters and only gets worse on a rewatch, is the movie's insistence on putting the subtext through a bullhorn. 

The film takes place amidst the financial ruin and presidential election of 2008. Which, honestly, is perfect. The plot of the movie is centered around finding out who is responsible for disturbing the order of the world to set things right again so having the world collapse in the background provides some nice commentary about how performative and improvised these measures of control really are. There's also a nice corollary to the fundamental criminal nature of our financial system and how uncomfortably well it lines up with the kick up tributary system of La Cosa Nostra.

Instead of letting this marinate in the background, though, the movie brings its subtext to the forefront at every possible opportunity. The robbery of the gambling den that sets the plot off has C-SPAN on in the background, Hank Paulson's congressional testimony blares over a montage of two goons waiting to pick up a suspect, the camera lingers on a speech made by candidate Obama even after characters move out of frame, even the final climatic conversation is framed by Obama's victory speech. 

There's a fifteen minute period in the movie where none of this happens, where Dominik lets things lie and the story play out which makes the movie sores during this time. James Gandolfini has one the best scenes of his career wallowing in pathetic self pity, Pitt and McNairy trade one of the best subtly threatening conversations ever put to film and the assassinations that bring the whole sordid affair to a close are so expertly done that there's a thrill to how cold and professional they are. 

Even the movie's closing line, which should be an instant classic, feels more like the film berating you with its point instead of honing the theme to fine, sharp edge.

And yet. I find myself replaying "America isn't a country, it's just a business" and "I'm American. And in America you're on your own," over and over in my head these days. The social fabric of this country is so nonexistent that you can't even get people to wear a piece of cloth over their mouths in public because why should anyone be slightly inconvenienced for another person's benefit without getting something in return? Get a free vaccine? Nope. Texas and Florida are going so far as to ban local governments from instituting any anti-COVID measures because of "freedom" or whatever.

Hell, that isn't even the only thing that resonates in the movie. A huge thread of the movie is that the Mob, the most romanticized criminal organization, symbol of freedom from the drudgery of everyday life, has straitjacketed itself by adopting the structures and strictures of corporate America. For all the talk about self-determination, they're bound by the grind, trapped by the unrelenting need for money to fund our basic necessities. How free are then, if the only way they can live on our own is if they victimize someone else lest they get left out in the cold to hungry?

You have no idea how badly I want to say that Andrew Dominik made not only the best Western of the 21st century but also the best crime movie since Heat and that we should all be kicking ourselves for sleeping on them both. But then I just remember that slow zoom in on Obama as Gandolfini walks out of frame so the movie can grind itself to a halt for a few seconds so all the peasants understand what's happening and I just want to bang my head against the wall in frustration, baffled that a quiet masterpiece of a movie insists on tripping over itself on something so maddeningly trivial. 

If you're bored one night scrolling and these things don't bother you as much as they bother me, check it out. I may have a lot of problems with the movie but I at it'd be nice if people actually saw the damn thing.

These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For

Over the last two weeks, controversies about cancel culture have spread across Facebook and Twitter like a brain rotting fungus infecting every edgelord or cranky uncle it came across. The latest hysterics came after the Dr. Seuss Foundation announced it was pulling six books from publication because of racist drawings and then again when news broke that a scene with Pepe le Pew was cut from the new Space Jam movie. 

There's a lot to unpack about why this is so ridiculous and why we're all the stupider for it, but, to clear things up, neither of these things are examples of anything getting cancelled. No one called for the Dr. Seuss books to get pulled from publication, it was something the company decided on their own because they don't want to be associated with images like these anymore.

It's important to note the real problem underlying the Dr. Seuss books isn't that the books were pulled, it's that they were pulled without a fight. 

Even if you take the view that the books were for purely economic reasons- i. e., they did it to protect the brand - what that says is that the Dr. Seuss Foundation looked at their products, looked at the potential damage the controversy could do to their non-racist books, and decided that their better option would be to just recall the titles with those drawings. Even in this telling, which is nothing more than a stripped down cost-benefit analysis, the reactions of Asian and Black communities were deemed important enough that the mere potential of the financial harm they could leverage was enough to change their practices. 

I'm not saying that's how it went down, just using it as an example that no matter how you look at this, this decision was made because the Foundation thought how their minority customers felt about their product, mattered. They thought it was important enough to do something about it without anyone pressuring them to do so. 

What all those headlines about political correctness gone too far are saying is that people who weren't important in the past, are important now. It's amazing how much this simple recognition bothers people, like they can't stand living in a world were other people are important, too. That's all any of this is, all any of it ever is, just blind anger over the fact that minorities get to have a say in the world they live in.

As for the Pepe le Pew thing, his scene got deleted when Space Jam changed directors. This is what's called making a movie. If this upsets you, I congratulate you on living a life with no actual problems. 

What annoys me most about all the outrage pieces over cancel culture is that they universally don't engage with why such a thing would exist in the first place. If they do, it's usually just complaining about how kids get so offended at everything these days. Which, yeah, if you look for people being stupidly upset over inoffensive things you're going to find them, obviously. Conveniently, the push to make this solely about overly sensitive millennials and Gen Z'ers let's people with actual power off the hook for making things this bad in the first place. 

Consider the world since the start of the millennium. We had Bush II lie his way into starting a war, operate a global torture regime, launch an illegal spying program, with no consequences. Then, the global economy burns to the ground in the fallout of fraudulent trading and business practices from literally the entire financial sector. Then, the same banks get caught actively laundering money for the Sinaloa drug cartel, rigging interest rates, and stealing money from their customers. No one went to jail or was even arrested for any of this, naturally. That's not to say we were limited to white collar villainy. For more blue collar scumbags, we have the cops who killed Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice - for just a small sampling - who all walked away clean after killing unarmed civilians. 

Then, Donald Trump happened. If there's any lesson from the Trump administration, is that people in power get away with whatever they want because other people in power choose not to stop them. Mitch McConnell could've pulled Trump's leash anytime he wanted by slowing down Trump's pet projects in the Senate until Trump behaved like a good little dog on camera, but that never happened. The Democrats could've decimated Trump's agenda by passing budgets that didn't allocate money for the wall, or the Space Force, or for any of the other ridiculous projects Trump undertook. But they didn't, because why would they? Sure, Trump himself is an asshole, but he's still President and this is still America. That Biden is continuing some of Trump's policies- like keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and supporting failed puppet Juan Guadio in Venezuela - show for the umpteenth time that Washington's problem with Trump was his personality, not his actions.

You can't expect people to look at the world, see all the open, unpunished corruption, and do nothing about it. Normal people can't arrest anyone, can't throw them out of office on a whim, but they can mobilize online to publicly shun or humiliate people off social networks. That's what cancel culture is, a response to offi cial failures to hold obvious criminals accountable so that someone, somehow suffers for the shitty things they've done. 

Naturally, there are pitfalls to this. Mass public outrage doesn't leave room for nuance or a sense of scale; for example, when Kathy Griffin posted that picture holding Trump's decapitated head, all that called for was a "wow, that's a bit over-the-top and desperate," not the massive dog piling she ended up buried under.  

It also acts as convenient cover for actual censorship, like when YouTube took down videos by independent news channel Staus Coup. The videos in question were coverage of the Capitol Riot, they weren't endorsing or advocating, just standard reporting. Corporations always move to co-opt the language of social movements to neuter their momentum, cancel culture gives them fertile ground to move against independent creators in the name of "protecting" the discourse from controversial elements. 

Critics of cancel culture are right that it's not good to rely solely on mobilizing mass movements of angry people against new outrages of the week. That what's happening isn't so much accountability as it is the public devouring of randomly selected individuals and doesn't address the systemic issues that allowed the harm in the first place. 

All of that is true, but to spend all the energy tsk tsking cancel culture as a sign of national decline seems more like a modern version of hating on hippies more than anything else. Cancel culture is the product of larger failures, not the cause of them. 

The easiest way to end cancel culture is to tear down the failed institutions that spawned it. Sure, there will always be people railing against something or other but if we can get the world to a place where assholes get punished for their asshole shit as an everyday thing, then at least we'll get to choose how much we want to stick around to listen.