What we’re talking about with true crime is horrible pain and suffering and grief and anguish. This is one of the boundaries that always gets blurred with crime as entertainment-the boundary between objective reality and spinning a narrative. In cases like Gabby Petito’s, which are unfolding in real time, where is the line between consuming the news developments as news and consuming them as true crime? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Jean Murley, an English professor and scholar of true crime who teaches at Queensborough Community College, has written that creating and consuming these narratives “is a way of making sense of the senseless, but it has also become a worldview, an outlook, and a perspective on contemporary American life.” I recently spoke with Murley about the Petito case and its coverage, how news stories are narrativized even as they unfold, and whether a lurid obsession with true crime has any upside. The story of the Petito case-from the way it has gripped the country to the racial dynamics of how it’s been covered-is, of course, part of a larger cultural habit of turning disappearances and deaths into entertainment. (A report from earlier this year by the University of Wyoming showed that, in the past decade, seven hundred and ten indigenous people were reported missing in the state.) The Petito case, which is still unfolding (her fiancé, with whom she’d been travelling, is believed to be in hiding) seemed like another instance of what the late journalist Gwen Ifill famously described as “missing white woman syndrome”: a hunger for stories about victims who look like Petito, to the exclusion of all others. The photos of Petito that filled our screens showed an attractive, blond, young white woman who radiated the curated happiness of a social-media native, and critics noted that coverage of her disappearance-and the subsequent identification, in Wyoming, of her remains-dwarfed the attention that both the media and law enforcement pay to other missing and murdered people, especially those who are Black and indigenous. At the same time, the national fascination with Petito’s case sparked a debate about the nature of the fascination itself. Last month, the disappearance of the twenty-two-year-old Gabby Petito became a sensation, attracting play-by-play coverage in the news and avid amateur sleuthing on social media.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |