The Responsibility in Depicting Real Life Horror
What are the responsibilities of depicting real life horror in film and other media, who is it for, and why does it matter?
While there are many directions to go in analyzing the issues surrounding serial killer documentaries and true crime, a particular problem is how humanity is or isn’t given to its subjects. This applies as much to the victims as the perpetrators.
A disclaimer of sorts: I am not suggesting sympathy or forgiveness for serial killers. Rather, much like Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, the subject of the HBO original documentary Crazy, Not Insane (2020), (and a real life archetype of reluctant FBI criminal profiler Wendy, the character played by Anna Torv in the David Fincher created and unceremoniously halted Netflix original Mindhunter (2017-2019)), this article centre’s around the take that it is hard to do justice for current victims or to curtail the number of future victims if real consideration is not given to why the perpetrators of these heinous crimes are committing them. Declaring these men or women as simply evil is a fruitless attempt, as is dismissing of them as fundamentally different from us. As Otnow Lewis says in Crazy, Not Insane, “Evil is a religious concept, it’s not a scientific concept, and what society wants to do with a person like that is up to society, but it at least helps to know what motivates a serial killer.”
Searches for these motivations are lacking in the criminal justice system, and that seeps over to their portrayals in media, particularly in true crime.
In the Tiller Russell directed, Night Stalker: The Hunt for A Serial Killer (2021), it is a given, especially for those familiar with Ramirez’s crimes, that doing justice to his female victims by focusing on their stories and shedding light on who they were in both life and death is a responsibility of the makers of the documentary series. It handles this well in some cases, lending camera time to Anastasia Hronas, who at age six in 1985, was kidnapped from her bedroom by Ramirez and raped repeatedly over the course of a night before ultimately being abandoned near a gas station. Hronas, and her full humanity, is given prominence in the series, likely because she would ultimately go on to play a significant role in identifying Ramirez in a lineup. Night Stalker... does a worse job in its complete exclusion of victims like Mei Leung, the nine-year-old who was raped and tortured before being murdered and tied to a crucifix (as Ramirez often was as a child). Mei Leung is never mentioned in the series, even at the beginning of the third episode which begins with the names of various victims scrolling across our collective screens in homage. We never hear the name Mei Leung or the story of her murder. She is, at best, one of the speculated upon nameless victims, despite her murder, torture, and rape having been a recorded event.
In Crazy, Not Insane, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis shares notes, audio, and video from years of studying serial killers and homicidal children to better flesh out the issues surrounding the criminal justice system and, by proxy, media like Night Stalker… which continues this misguided tradition of not asking the right questions. It handles Ramirez’s story with a lack of introspection or exposition of his interior life. In doing this, the stories of the women whose torture and murders would have an early effect on Ramirez’s path are also excluded. The victims who are included are often used like stage dressing; faceless, bloody, and at least partially nude bodies, and what seem to be obligatory shots of bare legs whenever a new crime scene is presented. They move from victim to evidence to aesthetic choices for the makers of the four-part series.
It could be said that the makers of Night Stalker… only take the time to examine the life of Ramirez for the first one minute and eight seconds of the final episode because otherwise the story is being told from the point of view of the police who, until the end of the third episode, did not know who he was. However, a great deal is done to present the cops, particularly Detective Gil Carillo and Sheriff Frank Salerno of the LAPD as fully fleshed-out rockstars with families, lives, goals, and aspirations. It should be noted that neither of these men identified Ramirez, nor were they a part of the police force who wanted to reveal his identity; a choice that was ultimately made by the San Francisco Police Department (holders of a warrant for Ramirez after the murders of Peter and Barbara Pan) after their Inspector Frank Falzone’s questioning of an associate of Ramirez led to his finding out the name of the killer. Releasing the name and image quickly led to Ramirez’s capture by civilians.
That aforementioned minute and eight seconds feature a slideshow of photos of Ramirez as a “normal” person and quotes such as “He was always the kid who never quite fit in with anybody”, “...a thief since he was a kid, five finger Richie” who “had a lot of bad influences.” “...practically all the things that could poison a child were part of his life.”
As for self-narrated portrayals of the series’ hero cops, Carillo recalls “...leaving the hall of justice one day asking if it was wrong for me to want somebody else to die, I needed more evidence... and the only way he’d make a mistake was if there were more victims”. On its face, this is a disgusting statement. In the context of Night Stalker..., it is exactly the sort of copaganda the series seems to strive for.
Victims are spoken of as proof of how heinous Ramirez is, as clues that enable the cops to excel on their career paths. Ramirez himself is spoken of as an evil AC/DC fan with dark eyes, decked out in all black and emitting a goat-like body odour. Carillo meanwhile is a good Catholic, a high achieving young cop from East LA, with criminal profiling education (the irony), who was luckily partnered with Salerno, the “Italian Stallion” who worked the Hillside Strangler case. Amidst all of this, the series fails to ask the right questions or examine the social, psychological, and biological forces that led to these murders. They humanize no one more than the police, and everyone, including the victims and the audience, is ultimately failed by this approach.
Ashley C. Jones is an arts & culture writer based in Houston, TX.
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