If I had to explain why I occasionally watch a podcast or documentary from the true-crime genre, I think I’d mumble something about the human psyche, history, social criticism, maybe a little more about politics, the judiciary and the local color, but then I would have to admit that it is also just screaming exciting. The fact that I would initially be a bit secretive about this – even though true crime is one of the most popular podcast topics and series about serial killers by now deserve its own category on Netflix – is because I continue to feel a bit uncomfortable with the principle ‘the one z one death is another’s entertainment.
Not that murder is fun. Not by me at least, and the vast majority of viewers and listeners don’t think so. There are also plenty of podcast and series creators who deal with the subject with integrity, so that’s not the problem either. But online the true crime enthusiast has gone so far that I keep some distance just to be sure. ‘His haircut is the real crime’, I read under a TikTok about a man who killed his girlfriend and daughter. Crime storytelling is combined with other lighthearted internet pursuits, such as memes, makeup tutorials, and astrology. On YouTube, a Dutch woman whispers a report of the murders of Natalee Holloway and Anne Faber.
But true crime has also become something to speculate about together. Last year the term sleuthing culture because playing detective online is no longer an activity for a shady forum, but something that millions of people do on social media. After the murder of Gabby Petito in August – the wildest theories about the 22-year-old American influencer went around and every pixel of her Instagram was subjected to an in-depth study – media wrote like Vox, The New York Times, The Guardian and Vice not only about the murder case, but they also analyzed the rise of the mass amateur sleuthing. What is the influence of all that attention on a search, on the family? Whose hashtag gets 2 billion views on TikTok and who is silently missing?
And what if the same detective techniques are used for purposes that have little to do with missing persons and murderers? On TikTok, it happened to two twenty-somethings who hadn’t heard of a year ago, and who now live on as the hashtags #westelmcaleb (91.7 million views) and #couchguy (1.7 billion views), one because he didn’t behave properly. his dates had gone and the other because according to TikTok he had not reacted enthusiastic enough to a surprise from his girlfriend.
You can now also see it happening in the lawsuit between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, which has taken the form of a game of Cluedo completely out of control on social media. Why did she glance at her shoes for a split second? suspicious. Why isn’t he wearing his hair in a center part today?
Couch Guy, who during his 15 seconds of fame although sitting on a couch, his real name is Robert, described for slate how he had suffered from the situation. His body language had been analyzed frame by frame, strangers had diagnosed him as a psychopath, and his behavior had been compared to that of notorious murderers. In a video he had tried to convince the tiktok detectives that not everything is true crime, but he didn’t get rid of them that easily. You would almost, well, call it criminal.