What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime: Notes on Serial Season 2
Serial, Season 1 has been great fun. But has it done anything more than bring podcasting up to the level of a good Law & Order episode: pretty young woman murdered; ex-boyfriend as obvious suspect; alibi; alternate suspect; pop-philosophical discourse on the nature of crime and truth? Or, maybe, Serial doesn't even rise to the level of Law & Orderbecause, let's face it, that last episode was a let down. The D.A. giving a brief treatise on epistemology as we fade to credits is one thing when we know how the case ends; it is somewhat less satisfying absent the narrative conclusion and when we are left only with the sudden deus ex machina of a heretofore unmentioned serial killer on the loose. So, as fun as it was, there are questions about the lasting merit of Serial, Season 1. Serial, though, did do something rare: it narrativized its own genre. And that critique of the true crime genre itself is what Serial needs to retain in Season 2.
There are lots of ways of thinking about crime, but consider for the moment 2 of those modes, one legal and one novelistic. To take the latter first, we often feel the need to understand crime on the psychological terrain of the realist novel. This impulse emerged well before the history of modern true crime, at least as early as Crime and Punishment. There we see Dostoevsky interested almost not at all in the victims of crime or the cultural or economic forces leading to crime, or even crime as it is usually manifested in minor acts of theft, assault, and vandalism. What he is interested in is the psychology of the murderer. Hundreds of pages are given over to the subtle shifts in perception and rationalization that might lead an otherwise normal young man to commit murder. Thus an event which might be understood in any number of ways is pushed onto the particular terrain of psychology, the terrain most home to the realist novelist.
What Dostoevsky did in fiction was taken up with a vengeance by the first generation of book-length true crime authors. The last 3 quarters of In Cold Blood are not so much about understanding the crime (we already know who killed the Clutter family and, at least in broad strokes, how they did it) as they are about understanding the inner workings of Perry Smith: How does a sensitive young man develop into a killer? The same is true of Mailer'sThe Executioner's Song, true crime's other major award winner. Though Mailer is more interested in cultural issues than is Capote, the emphasis remains squarely on understanding the psychology of Garry Gilmore. At psychology's logical endpoint, we find true crime's obsession with serial killers. Here, generally in the lowest brow of true crime, the apparently least normal of human minds are explored ad nauseum for some insight into how they work.
There are differences between the realist novel's version of psychology and that of true crime. Where the realist novelist generally focuses on the average and the bourgeois, the true crime writer looks for the lurid and the exceptional. But the basic psychologizing principle remains in place. As Jane Austen explores Mr. Darcy's mind, so Ann Rule explores the mind of Ted Bundy. In each case human consciousness is a focus in a way it is not in, say, historical writing or fairy tales. And thus true crime places crime on the psychological terrain of the novel.
At the same time we try to understand crime as psychology, however, there exists also a pull toward the discourse of law. If we are sometimes interested in thoughts and consciousness, we are also often interested in facts, evidence, and procedures. Here is the terrain of CSI and the first and last acts of a Law & Order episode. How do the police figure it out? How do the lawyers prove it? Will the judge allow the coerced testimony? Where the novel craves the subtleties of the human brain, the law craves the clear rules and hard evidence of the courtroom.
True crime holds these two discourses in tension. It tacks back and forth between the novel and the law, sometimes obsessing over the mind, sometimes cataloging the evidence. In the best works of True Crime (like In Cold Blood) this oscillation gives the text its pace and its structure: Are you bored with Perry's diary? Then let us return to the careful police work of Al Dewey.
The genius of Serial was that it narrativized this generic tension. Though, as the narrator, she took her turns at legal investigation, producer Sarah Koenig for the most part played the role of the novelist. Right from episode 1 she psychologized the crime, wondering how someone who sounded and behaved like Adnan could be guilty of such an act. She talked about jealousy and wondered if Adnan possessed a flawed character: were his youthful thefts from the mosque evidence of a criminal tendency deep within him? Adnan, on the other hand, objected strenuously to this kind of discourse, speaking for the law as the only way to understand the crime. He resented any discussion of his character and asked only that his case be adjudicated on the facts. Memorably, he became frustrated at the assertion that he seemed like a nice guy; he would rather his psychology be left entirely out of the discussion. In this way Adnan, the convicted felon, became the voice of the law, speaking for the very discourse that had found him guilty. And Serial became true crime about true crime; in it's two principal characters it pitted against each other the antinomies of the genre to which it belongs.
The key to Serial, Season 2 will be its ability to maintain this level of meta-discourse on top of the narrative requirements of standard true crime. And this is why Slate's listof 5 possible cases for Season 2 is a bit off the mark. Each of their cases bears the salacious, titillating, mysterious marks of true crime at its finest. However, none quite leaps out as an opportunity to address the larger stakes at play when crime is narrativized as entertainment.
This is such a case out there, though. The current child sexual assault case at Jakarta International School has everything Serial needs. There is a salacious crime; an investigation rife with errors to interrogate; rich, beautiful people brought low; and all of the sexy details you could want about opulent expat life. But there are also discourses at war here: Indonesian notions of law versus American ones; poor people's justice versus rich people's; Muslim ideas versus Christian; and, maybe best of all, Indonesian notions of American psychology versus American notions of Indonesian psychology. If Serial is to continue rising above the radio plays and true crime from which it grew, it will need to continue narrativizing its own role in these narratives, talking about how to talk about crime and punishment.
