Rachel Monroe’s 2019 book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, is in my opinion one of the best contemporary reads on women and true crime you can find on shelves. It’s grounded by the fact that Monroe herself, an accomplished journalist for The Atlantic and many others, has long had her own interest in the topic. She’s watched all the Law & Order SVUs and America’s Most Wanteds, and all the iterations of the visual medium that take us up to Making a Murderer and our contemporary and seemingly deathless frenzy for the genre today. Taking into account the changes social media has wrought on the genre, and the ways in which women are drawn to stories of their own victimisation, Monroe splits her book into four sections based on familiar archetypes: Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer. She admits to the ‘dark, raging glamour’ of the killer, and Hollywood’s depiction of them as evil masterminds in everything from Silence of the Lambs to Se7en. And she examines how victimhood, even in a case as stark as the infamous killing of Sharon Tate, can be weaponised to do serious damage and uphold carceral logic.
Naturally, I was interested to hear more about Monroe’s perspective on some of the film and TV tropes of true crime. Below, you can find a lightly edited Q+A with Rachel on how true crime documentaries have ‘evolved’ in some ways and not at all in others, the ongoing Ted Bundy obsession, and what constitutes ‘feminist’ true crime media, if there can be such a thing.
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CN: With your book, after focusing so intently on true crime as your subject, do you find yourself turning to true crime television or film for relaxation anymore? Or is it different now?
RM: It doesn't have the same effect on me anymore. I think that's probably a combination from spending so much time forcing myself to think critically, rather than, you know, just abandoning myself to the pleasures of it. And, and also, I think I sort of have a tendency when I work on a project to become totally obsessed with it. On the other side of it, I'm just done. But if I’m cleaning, I almost always am listening to true crime podcast.
CN: Something I wrote in one of the earlier editions of the newsletter was this sense that true crime - in film & TV - has evolved in an interesting way in that you can still find the trashier, more lowbrow stuff, but there’s also a host of options that are considered much more acceptable - much more highbrow, visually and thematically. They want you to know they’re ethical, even if the framework hasn’t really changed. Is true crime becoming more sophisticated, in some ways?
RM: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I think any genre, particularly now, with social media, and with so much criticism available online, they all have this tendency to become a little bit more self aware, a little bit more reflexive.I think you definitely see that with true crime. Right after my book came out, I had a number of phone meetings with various production companies or people who wanted to make true crime. They knew this was like a really hot genre to sell. But every single one of them started to feel almost like a script. At a certain point they would say: you know: we want to do something smart, we want to do something critical. It does become the new mainstream. It was funny to me, I would sort of ask them: Okay, well, what is that, doing something different?
CN: Yeah, what does ‘different’ entail?
RM: Well the answer was always: we want more diverse victims, basically. On one hand, that’s a noble thing, because the genre really paints this picture of crime as something that happens overwhelmingly to women. That is, like, statistically, really not true at all. But I don't think that you can… make the genre suddenly woke by swapping out the murdered white girls murdered Black girl, while keeping every trope intact, and the structure exactly the same. Everything else remains unchanged. And I'm sorry, that's like, not really anything. It's surface level improvement, fixing your representation issues, while not actually tackling the sort of deeper issues in place.
CN: That touches on a conversation that's being had across a lot of film and TV right now, with representation. It's important, but it's the beginning, not the end of a conversation, and, you know, corporate or kind of, as you say, kind of mainstream ‘representation’ is trying to cover up for a multitude of sins in other ways.
RM: I think that there's a desire for, honestly, all of our consumption, but particularly media consumption, to sort of be justified on ethical grounds. People are like, I'm buying my special oatmilk which is going to somehow fix climate change, or like, okay, I'm going to watch my murder shows, but these are murder shows that are concerned with justice. The other thing that the producers of these shoes tend to talk about is ‘we are centering the victim’. That's another huge trope, and that sometimes these programs will use it as the right choice, but then sometimes I think it's used in a more cynical way to kind of absolve yourself of complicity or questioning a little bit more. But you can absolve yourself of the voyeurism if you're saying: oh, the voyeurism is for the victim.
CN: That then begs the question about the well-made stuff. So, OJ: Made in America for example won a Peabody Award. I think it did a pretty incredible job with its subject, and over such an expansive running time that it felt very considered. What elements do you think are required - or at least what set of questions need to be asked ethically - before a true crime project is initiated?
RM: With the OJ case, that example is such a good one, because first of all, that was a case that was already very much in the public consciousness. So you're not making a spectacle of people's lives for the good content of it. And that was a story that told us so much more than about the murders. It was a way of looking at the racial politics of the 80s and 90s. [...] The worst true crime is obsessive about murder and makes it the central fact; the most interesting thing about a certain person's life. It makes it seem as though their whole life was building up to that, and that's the thing that's most worth knowing about them. That documentary did such a good job of creating a broad canvas: there’s so much more of the world than this little narrow slice. I think, some of it is: okay,is there something like larger to say here? Does the story illuminate something about the justice system or like a particular community? And I think having buy-in from the key players, to me, seems really important. I also wish there were more people asking themselves the question: why did the story need to be told now by me?
CN: I’m interested to know what you make of the Ted Bundy phenom, which you mention in Savage Appetites vis-a-vis the Joe Berlinger / Netflix Ted Bundy Tapes doc. Now there’s another two feature films coming out about him, one named American Boogeyman and another called No Man of God. The latter is directed by a woman, Amber Sealy, and she and Joe Berlinger actually got into an email argument over Sealy saying she wanted to provide a corrective to Berlinger’s exploitative films. I’m deeply skeptical - I think the whole thing is gross.
RM: I think that’s a perfect illustration of the weird projection that you see in true crime creators where -- I mean, let’s face it. As human beings, we have these salacious interests. We're interested in taboo, violence. But then, that feels unacceptable to say: oh, I want to make a movie about Ted Bundy because like, he's a famous serial killer and people are interested in that. No, instead you claim that you’re somehow doing something noble and good. You project on everybody else: nobody else is doing that, only me. I'm the only good one. Actually, I think you're all doing something sleazy. And I would have a lot more respect if you just kind of called it.
CN: One of the things you write in your book about femininity, and the white feminist appreciation for true crime, seems to stem from a desire to subvert feminine norms. ‘Amid all those grain bowls and all that yoga, who wouldn’t want to indulge in some darkness, terror, and rage?’ And that is a sympathetic notion, up to a point, but when it reshapes who is allowed to be a victim and what we think about crime, of course it’s also...dangerous. Is there still any potential for something like feminist true crime, or is it always disreputable, always at someone else’s expense?
RM: I think it is, but I think there has to be an intersectional understanding of crime, because I think the danger of ‘feminist’ true crime programming is exactly the danger of white feminism: that it looks no further than itself, and sees no alliances with oppressed groups. Sometimes, it advocates for policies that actually actively harm other vulnerable or marginalised groups. With true crime that is just overly obsessed with violence against white women, worst case scenario, you have a huge swath of white women who think that at any minute, they're going to get murdered. And that justifies their paranoia, their ‘Oh, I saw somebody who I thought didn't fit into my neighborhood, I call the cops.’, the ‘let’s toughen up our laws’.
I mean, sometimes with true crime, you do just want to wallow a little bit in the darker side of human nature, for entertainment purposes. And I think that's fine. But I think if we want to think of true crime as feminist, it's going to have to be doing something else. And that's teaching us to look beyond our own potential vulnerabilities and see the ways that the world makes a lot of other people very vulnerable. Instead of doubling down on our own safety, we need to be widening the safety net for everybody else.
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You can pick up Rachel Monroe’s book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, most anywhere you purchase books. Or find Rachel on Twitter at @rachmonroe.
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Savage Appetites
Thank you for another great post! It really helped me to think through my very different reactions to two documentary series about Peter Sutcliffe (Britain's equivalent of Ted Bundy in terms of how often people go back to that filmmaking well?), a BBC one that I found sobering but excellent and a Netflix effort I found pretty gross (and I think gave up on midway through).
On the surface, they were pretty similar (even having many of the same interviewees), but the BBC one felt like it had something to say about society at the time, the many appalling failures of the police investigation and how the former contributed to the latter. And I think only the Netflix one fell into the trap you identify of ignoring the wider context of the victims.