I thought I’d put up some random, remixed selections from the lecture on ‘Loveable Murderers’ I gave at ACMI earlier this year. Relive the magic! The bloody, bloody magic! Here goes…
A random New Yorker finds a corpse. That’s the strict formula for the opening of an episode of NBC’s Law & Order. Do the math. 20 seasons, 22ish episodes a season. That’s at least 440 bodies. It’s a mountain of victims that any serial killer would be proud to claim.
And that’s without any of the Law & Order spin-offs, too. Now add in the death toll of the zillion other murder-focused TV shows currently on air. It seems reasonable, somehow, because murder isn’t like other crimes. In fact, on TV, it’s almost considered victimless – even when the victim is lying right there on the floor.
Murder is everywhere in popular culture, and it’s often presented as a clean and simple – if not bloodless – crime. When I was a kid, I’d get nervous every time there was the tiniest hint of sex on TV while my parents were in the room, but a corpse? No problem!
Take Murder She Wrote. It has ‘murder’ right there in the title, and yet it’s somehow the most family-friendly show imaginable, featuring Jessica Fletcher quietly solving crimes with common sense and folksy wisdom. But think about how many bodies she must’ve seen. Every town she visits, every holiday she takes…
The fact that Jessica Fletcher is a famous mystery novelist, of course, links her back to Agatha Christie – and Christie is emblematic of how murder often isn’t crime of passion. It’s a drawing room mystery. Her victims weren’t really people. Just puzzles to be solved. Similarly, these murder shows never contain much grief, do they? Their funerals are just informal line-ups to see who’s acting guilty.
As an aside, I can think of two pieces of fiction that turn this on its head. One mainstream, one otherwise, but both decidedly subversive. First, Mike Myer’s Austin Powers. There’s a running gag showing Austin killing a random henchman – before we cut to that henchman’s family or friends, devastated as they hear the news that their loved one has been unceremoniously killed.
Grant Morrison’s insanely experimental conspiracy comic, The Invisibles, dedicated an entire issue to the life story of a man who’d previously served as nothing but cannon fodder. We see his childhood, his motivations, his relationships – and then the issue ends back where he first appeared, killed in an instant by our uncaring heroes.
Anyway, in 1950, Raymond Chandler responding to the rise of bloodless murder mysteries with an essay called The Simple Art Of Murder. He was sick of the way that murder had become – in essence – sudoku with corpses. Praised the writing of his literary predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, he wrote:
“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”
The murderers mightn’t have good reasons to kill, but their stories sure do. Killing is a great structural gimmick. Kill someone and suddenly everything’s in motion: stakes are raised, friends are serving up big chunks of exposition, there’s a murderer to catch for dramatic tension, and so on. Twin Peaks is hardly the only soap opera to kick off with a killing.
This same storytelling principle was applied to dinner parties in real life, too. Remember the How To Host A Murder game of the mid-1980s? Everyone would be given characters and clues to be acted and read out throughout the meal. It’s an interesting thought experiment to plug other crimes into the title instead of the word ‘murder’ and see how they instantly become unacceptable.
I mean, I can pretty much guarantee that no one would have come to my lecture if it was on ‘Loveable Rapists’, would they?