Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to season two of the Next Great Podcast. I've
Heard Radio and Tongle have once again teamed up to
bring you another round of amazing and unique voices. Were
excited to share these ten incredible podcasts with you and
need your help crowning the winner. Check out the pilots
and be shared a vote for your favorite at Next
(00:23):
Great podcast dot com. Today's entry is Tragedy Porn by
Sarah White and Riley Johnson. After the success of Only
Murders in the Building, the show about murder podcast fans
whose fascination with the category turns their lives upside down,
it feels like an actual podcast that critically examines our
(00:43):
true crime obsession is a way overdue. We believe this
will draw a big audience of listeners who feel a
little ambivalent about their own fascination with dark tales, or
who thoroughly enjoy the category but wants some help unpacking why.
With philosophy, history, and psycholog g backgrounds, Riley and Sarah
will examine issues like why certain victims stories get privileged
(01:05):
over others, and why violence and scandal excite the human
brain so much. I'm Sarah White and I'm Riley Johnson
from Atlanta, Georgia, and you're listening to the pilot of
(01:25):
Tragedy Porn as part of the Next Great Podcast competition
from my Heart Radio and Tongle. So Riley, I'm a
question for you. Yeah, do you have a favorite serial killer?
I think it's Jeffrey Dahmer. Okay, nice, you like fine dining,
your foodie, I am foodie. I think I really like
(01:46):
about him. You know, before before they caught him, his
sort of ultimate goal was to make a throne of
skulls very chic. So I like that. I like I
like interior design. Now. The other part of that, too,
is that I saw the picture that he drew with
the skulls and in the throne, he's got stick figures,
(02:06):
it's got it's got zero depth. So I can appreciate
someone who has an eye for design while still being
really bad at drawing, because I'm also really bad at drawing.
I'm really bad at drawing too. Um And well, I
do want to mention that I actually do have a
skull art wall in my bedroom. It's nice. It's not
real skulls, it's drawed skulls, she says, not drawn by
(02:28):
Jeffrey Dahmer by people who actually know how to draw.
And for me, my favorite serial killer is it's got
to be h. H. Holmes, you know of Devil in
White City fame, because he really just you know, he
understood the zeitgeist. He knew. He was like, Chicago is
(02:49):
the center of architectural ingenuity, and I have an idea
for an architecturally unique building. And he built that building
through hard work and insurance fraud. Yeah, he was like,
I want you know, that Art Deco style, but with
murder dungeons, you know. And I also my favorite part
(03:11):
about his story is that he was caught not because
of the detectives looking for any of the women that
he killed, but he was caught because of the insurance
fraud and because cops won't look for you that hard,
but insurance companies they're on it. They will hunt you down.
State Farm, get on crime. State Farm like a good neighbor.
(03:33):
State Farm is watching you. Let me ask you this
what we're talking about? Your crime? Correct? And it's pretty
much in the air everywhere. Yes, what is the craziest
true crime thing you've ever seen? Okay, well, if we
get to make more of this, we're going to go
into a lot of detail about that, but um, for now,
(03:56):
I'm going to say the baking show that I believe
True Crime inspired, which is Crime syn Kitchen. If you
haven't seen it, it is teams of bakers that must
look at a crime scene kitchen. So the producers have
set it up so they've left clues to whatever dessert
(04:16):
they've made, and they have the teams have to figure
out what the dessert is and then bake it. And
I just like to imagine the meetings of the producers
when they were deciding what to make, like what how
to make a baking show with a hook, because they're like,
people really love the Great British Baking Show, we need
(04:37):
a baking show. And then somebody in the back was
just like, they like they like crime and Crimesne Kitchen
was born. And I hope that it stays on the
air forever because I love it. It is fun because
I am that demographic. I love baking and I love
crime baking so much, great, great great British, so much,
(05:01):
great British bake Off. I'm not super into the big
off stuff. She doesn't like British people, sorry to our
British listeners. So The reason we wanted to make this podcast, obviously,
is to talk about true crime culture. True crime has
reached the point where it has become pervasive pop culture,
(05:23):
but it still treats itself like a subculture, and I
think that's fun to delve into. Yeah, so I watched
I listened to the podcast Morbid, and one of the
opening hook is hey, weirdos, which I always find kind
of funny because at this point, you know these weirdos.
(05:43):
I mean, they're still like the top five downloads on
Apple podcast and there they have their own they have
their own podcast network. Now that's that's a lot of
people to for them all to be just weirdos seems
pretty pretty normal at this point. Yeah. And I've funded
with coworkers because of our shared love of murder podcasts.
(06:03):
And I work for a very corporate, corporate place and
we're just talking about murder podcasts. I mean, I can
see corporations liking murder though that kind of the contract.
That's fair, but they don't like it when you talk
about it. The idea that it's a subculture is so
strange to me. So when I think of like murder
(06:26):
podcast documentary series, I think moms because mom's love crime.
Moms love crime. My mom loves crime. It's funny because
I I know, I love horror movies. I'll watch a
lot of them. I'll even suggestuff to my own mom,
and she'll say, like, oh, that's too violent, that's like gory.
(06:48):
I don't like that kind of stuff. It's creepy. But
then she like half of her UM media consumption is
just murder stuff. Yeah, and my mom spends all of
her time watching SPU reruns. And I think every friend
that I've told about this podcast has said, oh my god,
my mom loves that stuff, right, And we are here
(07:10):
to say if moms like it, it's not a subculture
because moms don't have time to get into subcultures. So
this podcast, if you Will, If you Will, UM is
primarily interested in true crime as more of a cultural critique. UM.
(07:30):
I'm kind of new to the genre. Sarah has got
me into it against her will. Things that I've learned
from these criminals, I mean, you know, manipulation, coercion. I mean,
that's the backdrop of any good relationship. I agree personally,
um So, And you know, my background is mostly in philosophy,
(07:50):
so I do a lot of cultural critique. So she thought,
and I guess I apparently agreed that I could supply
some kind of critical to this genre of true crime
and how it's been taken up by the sort of
contemporary culture. This is not a takedown. This is a
look into things that this genre is kind of creating
(08:11):
in our culture. So the first thing I guess we
should cover is what is true crime? So ostensibly, true
crime is a nonfiction genre that focuses on a narrative
telling about a crime, so detailing both the case the
people involved. Most often it deals with violent crime, murders, subductions, abuse,
(08:32):
cults my personal favorite, all of that. Everyone's personal favorites,
especially people who are especially people who were in the cults.
There are usually two styles. There's one that's uh the
in depth will look at a single case. These are
your programs like Sereal the documentary, Thin Blue Line and
Making a Murderer. And then there's programs that focus on
(08:53):
a different case each episode, like Crime Junkie or Snapped
or forensic files. The presenters go over the details of
the crime, give a background on the victim or victims.
They give commentary on the investigations, the trials, the convictions,
but they can only know so much, um, And you
(09:14):
can see in any of these true crime productions that
there is a use of artistic license to recreate as
much as possible about the settings and conversations, choices in film,
about how to edit interviews together to create an arc um.
All of these little details they could not possibly know
for sure, but the ones that make a good story,
(09:40):
what makes for a good story. Yeah, So we were
sort of, you know, thinking about this. I started getting
into the idea of like what exactly sort of constitutes
a narrative, um, And for me, I point out three things.
At least, the setting, right in this case is the
crime scene, the courthouse, the jail, you know, the usual
places that um sort of occur within a true crime narrative.
(10:04):
And of course they also have our characters in this case.
You know, in the sort of conventional sense, we talk
about protagonists and antagonists, and the case of true crime,
what's sort of unique about that is that, more often
than not, the sort of role of the protagonists the
antagonist is not super clear, and they're kind of like
sort of conjoined in some way, right, because in a
(10:25):
lot of cases, through the narrative the true crime, the
narrator is putting themselves and by extension, the listeners in
the shoes of the murderer. So in this kind of
construction they become a protagonist. Um. And yet at the
same time, we as viewers are also waiting for them
to get their just desserts. Right, We're looking for that
(10:46):
element of punishment to come along. It's like the opposite
of a hero's journey, right. Yeah. And when I think
of a genre specifically, I mean this sort of classic
genres are a comedy or a tragedy, and I think
within the true crime entertainment, we're really talking about tragedy. Um.
In this case, the victim suffers a horrible fate while
(11:07):
we sort of watch on. But what's interesting about that
is that this is still an entertainment, and tragedy often
does entertain, but it's more about the sort of cathartic
release of some kind of pain. So in this case,
interesting is what exactly is the catharsis that's being played
in this sort of true crime as tragedy And at
(11:28):
what point does this sort of pleasure that we get
from listening to these events, right, listening to a murder
from listening to their sort of court trials. At what
point does this pleasure actually become almost pornography? Right? Or
when does tragedy become pornography. While we will be mostly
(11:49):
focusing on true crime and its present state and time,
it is important to recognize that this is actually a
very old media genre. It has a long history. I mean,
this stuff goes way back. Here's a question. Salem witch
trials are the true crime yes or no? Yes, yeah,
I agree, because it was illegal to be a witch
and they were put on trial by the magistrates, you know,
(12:12):
in the makings of true crime as we know it
now start later and there's there's two events in particular
I think that highlight how crime became pop culture. The
first is um probably predictable. We're heading to nineteenth century
London and possibly the most well known serial killer, Jack
(12:32):
the Ripper. Jack. We're going to go more into Jack
the Ripper in a later episode, but for now, just
the highlights. Somebody murdered five women in White Chapel, London.
The murders were brutal, they were throat slashing is very
violent ones um, and the last one was especially brutal
when he went far further than a than a the
(12:55):
roat slash and all murders appeared without a motive. But
that's not why the case is so remembered. These killings
happened at a time when the popular press was really
entering its maturity after industrialization. You know, newspapers were competing
against each other in a new way, and at the
same time, societal effects of industrialization we're causing some serious
(13:19):
middle class handwringing over what is to be done with
all these morally degenerate pores in the slums. And they
were like, I mean yes, and and Victorian Albert were like,
we will build a museum and fill it with the dinosaurs.
Good job, guys. So you take this environment and you
(13:45):
add in some slit throats of presumed sex workers, and
you have yourself one of the first proper media frenzies.
Each newspaper wanted to outdo the others, so they had
to come up with some kind of hook to make
their stories the most appealing to readers. And obviously that
hook did not need to be true, something we we
are completely unfamiliar with today in our journalism. Seriously, this
(14:10):
is an actual headline from a paper at the time.
Jack the Rippo crimes. He adds one more to the
list of White Chapel victims. In all caps, a woman
is mutilated and dismembered by the fiend, who must kill
six more in order to fulfill his oath. More intense
excitement In London, a policeman's awful find the story of
(14:35):
his former deeds of blood, a mystery that defies the
skillful detectives. That is one headline. That's one headline. It
took so many words. It is so many words. They
hadn't invented editors yet, so clearly the murders were sensationalized
and used as a morality play. It really created the
framework for crime reporting, like giving killers a catchy nickname
(14:59):
and running victims into cautionary tales and fallen women. One
thing I really like about that is um from a
critical perspective, is this sort of kills six more like
I love this way. It sort of puts everyone in
the panic that you might be next. You might be
next if you're a whore. And there in the case
(15:22):
was never solved, probably because it occurred in in the
slums of London and police were just like, if I
don't see it happen. I will never know, um, which
is again something we are so unfamiliar with todays UM.
And so it's just become this endless mystery. It's just
(15:44):
like that people are still coming out with new theories
about what happened. It's just it will never end. What's
your favorite theory? My favorite theory for sure is the
um the theory that Queen Victoria's grandson went into a
syphilitic mayna and then killed the prostitutes that gave him syphilis. UM.
(16:05):
So that one is a personal faith of mine. UM.
And today multiple companies offer Jack the Ripper walking tours
around Whitechapel and I have actually been on one of those. UM.
It was about ten years ago. It was really fun.
But the thing that I remember most clearly out of
all the stories that he told is that the tour
(16:27):
guide worked so hard to make sure we all understood
that the women Jack murdered would have been ugly, like
no teeth covered in soot, probably covered in horseshit. Like.
I know, he was trying to paint a picture of
what life was like for the industrial poor of London,
(16:47):
but I still think there were better ways he could
have done. That pretty girls don't get murdered. They don't.
It's the rule. That's the morality point that there I
learned that rule, and um and scream, Well, we all
love gentleman Jack. The you work that is most often
credited as creating the true crime genre is the book
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It came out in
(17:08):
nineteen sixty six, and it's a great example of some
of the issues that we're going to focus on when
we're looking at this kind of culture. For those who
are unfamiliar, the book chronicles the murders of the clutters
farming family from Holcombe, Kansas. The husband, wife, and two
of their teenage children were found dead in their homes,
(17:28):
all bound and gagged and shot in the head. The
crime made national news, which is how it came to
the attention of Truman Capote. Capote was an author living
in New York City, and he was most famous at
that point for his novel Breakfast at Tiffany's. Audrey hepburn
such a class, such a classic that I've never seen
and have no interest in watching. I'm gonna make your
(17:49):
watch it. I'm going to watch it. He he read
about the murders and was compelled to know more. He
went to the family farm in Kansas to invest a
gate and do interviews. He wasn't welcome at first, and
the remaining family never welcomed him, but he became friends
with the lead investigator on the case and had access
(18:10):
to lots of insider information. He would write to this
investigator and ask for something, and the investigator would send
it to him. He also interviewed the murderers extensively, two
men named Dick Hitcock and Perry Smith. He wrote to
them in prison for years, and he even served as
a witness for their executions, which then became the ending
(18:31):
for the book. Harry Smith, he was He was a
sexy one, right and he was the one that Truman
Capodi had some hot blood for. And they're both. They were,
and that's what's most important. He wrote the book five
years after the murders, because that's how long it took
for their death sentences to be carried out. And the
(18:53):
book was a huge success. Capodi was already well known,
but this book catapulted him to just the stratus fear
of fame, and he made tons of money, tons tons
of money. She would let me do a Capodi impressions.
I was like, I'm not gonna do just one, so
she was like, I'm gonna do it this one. Campody
(19:15):
never contacted the Clutter family once the book came out,
even though its success was due to their family's pain.
He took their family's tragedy and told it without their
consent to the world, all while making lots of money
doing so. And the biggest issue the Clutter family had
with the book was how Campody portrayed their family members.
They thought that he rendered them as caricatures, as sort
(19:37):
of archetypes for his narrative, so pictures of their former
selves cardboard cutouts, if you will. Well, he gave the
murderers complex character development and arcs and you know, moral confliction.
Because Campody never knew the Clutters, but he did know
the murderers. He spoke with them, he wrote them letters
(19:58):
for five years. And this is the case in a
lot of true crime. The victims, of course, cannot speak
for themselves. Their story is no longer their own um
And this gets to a larger issue which we want
to talk about in this podcast, and what we really
are looking at when we're looking at true crime, popular
culture and that has to do with the idea of testimony,
(20:21):
and testimony is defined in multiple ways. Will be giving
two definitions. I'm giving the easy one and Riley has
to give the complicated one because she understands philosophy jargon,
which is which I don't allegedly allegedly um. And in
legal terms, testimony is simply a form of evidence that
(20:42):
is obtained from a witness who makes a solemn statement
or declaration of fact. The philosophical definition of testimonies, I mean,
basically it has a lot of the same elements, although
it's a little bit broader. Um, I'm gonna give you
the most abstract definition possible. Hit me with it. That's
(21:05):
what I come to philosophy for Testimony is a proposition
conveyed by one entity, a person or a group to
another entity, whether through speech or writing or through facial expression,
that is based on the entities knowledge space. This entity
has no knowledge base I have, I have known nothing.
(21:25):
You know stuff? You know true crime. That's why we're
doing this, why we're cast in pods. So in the
case of testimony, we're talking about someone who is giving
a claim about something, but the assumption is that they
know something about it, they actually have knowledge of an event,
or they have some sort of expertise on a subject. So,
(21:47):
for example, UM, I can give testimony as a philosopher
because I have that background. Although that being said, testimony
requires also um, there's judgment of whether or not this
testimony is actually reliable, um, and whether or not we
can have basically uh sort of. One of the fun
issues of testimony is whether or not the claim that
(22:11):
I'm making is also biased. Right, So I can certainly
make a claim. Uh, if Sarah were to hit me
right now, I could make the claim reliably that has happened.
It's not it didn't happen. It's not reliable. Don't worry. Um,
you should see my face right now. I would not
do that. Um. And you know, because let's say I
(22:35):
can speak this way objectively, but the fact that it
actually happened to me would actually mean that my testimony
of it would be considered there biased and essentially not
actually a reliable indicator of its truth. So in this case,
testimony looks for both knowledge that one actually has it
and is reliable, and that one can basically claim that
(22:56):
their claim is um fundament lee uh, unbiased, impartial, you
might say, and does that impartiality make add to its validity? Isn't? Yes,
So there's definitely a connection between validity and impartiality in
so far as I have no reason to if I'm
the speaker, I have no reason to lie or make
(23:20):
a false claim, right right, because it doesn't matter to me.
What is the what is that? Um the fancy philosophy
word about, like philosophy of knowledge, epistemology, epistemology. She's she
does stuff, she studies stuff I can't pronounce. I mean,
it's a pretty easy word to pronounce. Yeah, it's just
hermoneutical phenomenology. She loves that word. She loves hermonutical. It's
(23:43):
her favorite word to make fun of me for I
don't know what it is, but it's feels so good
in the mouth to say it sounds like phenomena. It's
so round phenomena. Dude, dude, this has gone off the
rails crazy. This is what happens when you have a
dumb person with philosopher. So we talk about testimony in
(24:05):
the case of law, we're talking about also whether or
not that person is reliable, whether they not they have
the actual expertise, the or even just simply the experience
to back it up, and that they are fundamentally impartial
and unbiased. And that's why it's relevant in true crime
as well, because it comes into kind of questions of
(24:27):
ethics um and and most true crime media presents itself
as telling the stories of victims because they want to
raise awareness about the crime and that this awareness can
help lead to some form of justice, maybe more peace
for the family of victims, you know, closure, the idea
that these stories deserve to be heard intrinsically. But then
(24:50):
he might raise the question if you're doing this for
entertainment purposes, to get more clicks, to get more views,
to get more listeners, to get more sponsor, to get
more sponsors, than actually your sort of recounting of it
might not be the most reliable or objective because we're also,
like we said, we're trying to have a good narrative,
(25:13):
and more often than not, reality is not a good narrative.
It's kind of boring. It's super boring. And but that's
just how our our brains like to put things into
a narrative because it's easier for us to That's that's
how we process information. Essentially, we see things from cause
(25:34):
to effect, and our brains seek out patterns that aren't there,
and so narratives, we respond to narratives rather than just
a list of disparate events that all happened, you know, concurrently.
And as I think when true crime media presents itself
as you know, saying that we're basically doing you know,
(25:56):
we're doing kind of a form of social justice by
letting people victims, letting their stories be heard right and
letting us therefore tell them. We're in a lot of ways,
I think, raising the sort of fundamental ethical question of
whether or not it's actually appropriate to speak in the
voice of another person, whether or not it's actually appropriate
(26:18):
to give testimony for another um, and in which case
does this testimony really just become another form of voyeurism.
And for me, the thing that I keep coming back
to is it's really a distinction depending on two things.
The first is the person who's giving the testimony, who's
telling the story, and what the purpose of the testimony is.
(26:41):
Because in most cases of the stories on these programs,
victims cannot speak for themselves. But if they had a choice,
you know what, they want their story told this way.
But does anybody have a soul right to their own story.
Should you be the only one who can tell your story.
I don't think that's true either. I don't think um so.
(27:03):
I kept thinking about this when we were watching the
case against add Non, said the um. It was a
documentary on HBO about the same case that serial covered,
and the victim in that case is hey Manley. She
was a young girl. She was a teenage girl, and
her ex boyfriend, ad Non Sayed has been in jail,
uh convicted of the crime, in jail for about twenty years.
(27:24):
And in this documentary they take her diary and they
have they have the actual diary, not just a transcript,
because they've put the pages, they've scanned them, they've put
them in the render of the footage, and they have
animated them, and they've had a voice actor read over
her recollections of her dates with ad Non and spoiler alert,
(27:48):
a sixteen year old is really gushing about her boyfriend
and her diary. But that's presented in court. It's presented
as a as a way to really bolster ad Non's
character to the public. But as a former teenage girl,
current hag, I must say there is something that just
(28:08):
so deeply bothers me about her sixteen year old diary
being shown to the world, because that's, oh my gosh,
it just sounds terrible. That sounds terrible. I've burned my diary.
I burned my diaries too. It's interesting from it from
the ethical perspective because it's like, you know, what is
(28:29):
testimony without consent um? And when is so? When does win?
Is win? Is testimony properly ethical? When is an ethical um?
And you know, if the person cannot give that testimony
themselves because they are the victim, more likely than not,
the only real voice that's given that that people are
(28:49):
are are given the testimony of is actually the perpetrator.
So a lot of cases these kind of true crime media,
it's actually the perpetrator whose voice and who's narrative about
the event is given the sort of greatest amount of
air time. Just like in Cold Blood, they get scene
after scene after seen, so they have agency, whereas the
(29:11):
person who's the victim is often exploited. Basically, this is
probably the central question that will be exploring this season
on Tragedy Porn. In our season, we're going to take
a critical look at the true crime wave and it's
possible implications in our culture. We're going to talk about
concepts of law and justice and what it means to
(29:33):
get justice for a victim. We're going to look at
internet sleuths who take investigating into their own hands. And
we are of course, of course going to get into
the death drive drive, because there was no way we
were getting out of this without talking about Sigmund Freud.
I would love to bring Sigmund Freud forward in time
(29:56):
and just sit him at a computer and pull up
Poor and Hub for him and then lock him in
the room. What do we have to lock him in
the room? Yes, I think he then becomes shrouding her Sigmund.
And if you enjoyed this, please vote for us and
(30:18):
if you want to reach out, you can tweet at us.
We are at Tragedy Porn Pod and you can email
us um our email addresses Tragedy Porn Podcast at gmail
dot com. Thank you for listening. Thanks Hi. This is
Sienna from Tossed Popcorn, last year's winner of the Next
(30:40):
Great Podcast. Thank you so much for listening to this episode,
and be sure to go vote for your favorite at
Next Great Podcast dot com.