Murder and Mayhem and Misanthropy, Oh My

It seemed wrong to group the dead.  It was not seven; it was one and one and one and one and one and one and one.  Each an entire life, each with a name.

Chanel Miller, Know My Name

Let's talk ✨violence✨, kiddos.

Growing up, I developed a reputation as someone who was "easily freaked out" by violence, peril, etc. within the realm of fiction.  Part of this — when I was younger, especially — was due to real sensitivity.  Anything "dark" was difficult for child me to handle without paying for it when trying to fall asleep at night.  As I've grown older, however, things have shifted.  Exhibit A:  my inability to make it more than twenty minutes into Snow White and the Huntsman as a tween, contrasted with my adoration for the whole movie as a twenty-something.  Now, I'll take a film with R-rated violence over a cutesy murder mystery episode of Monk any day of the week — and, what's more, I'll (probably) be far less disturbed by the R-rated show than by the Monk episode.

This confuses people, sometimes.  And I get it.  After all, it's hard to explain why I can watch Die Hard, Tarantino, Hostiles, etc. but not Psych or NCIS.  It's hard to explain why mild violence or violence that happens off-screen is often harder for me to handle psychologically than onscreen scalpings, blood spurts, etc.  Basically, though, it comes down to the narrative attitude behind the incorporation of the violence.

If you're going to write violence, I'd rather you actually depict that violence than downplay it or shunt it to the side.  This is partially due to the way that my empathy operates when absorbing this kind of stuff.  You can't just casually relate that a murder has happened without expecting me to instantly teleport to the victim's side. In my mind, that's exactly where I'll be — side by side with them, watching their brain unravel with terror as they're mutilated and killed, and taking a piece of that terror for myself.  So, all things considered, it's often better for you to just show me what happened, because my imagination will likely make it even worse than it was.

(Plus, since I've been pretty interested in the medical field since childhood, I find that my brain typically assumes a kind of clinical approach to gore and the like, so the "nitty gritty" becomes more like a medical puzzle for me than a scare tactic.)

The other reason is that, if a writer is willing to actually Go There™ when it comes to the violence in their story, then I can (usually) be pretty confident that the writer is actually taking that violence seriously.  Death and dread and destruction are not merely run-of-the-mill elements that can be injected into their plot as cavalierly as flavored syrups are added to a cafe order.

I've gradually realized that the reason I dislike murder mysteries and crime shows and the like has less to do with an aversion to violence as such and more to do with an aversion to the way these stories portray violence.  Blood 'n' guts do not necessarily bother me as much as the implication that they are not serious, and that's an implication that I far too often find in these kinds of stories.  In my experience, they usually premise their plot on a human being spending their last moments in abject horror and pain, and then ask me to just . . . not care?  Like, they tell me that this horrific crime has occurred and then introduce this detective character who's supposed to charm me right off my feet as they blow me away with their forensic skills, and expect me to believe that THAT'S what matters:  the talent or charisma of the person solving the crime, not, y'know, the crime itself.  And the victim?

You know, instantly and unequivocally, that the murder victims are of absolutely no consequence to either the writers or the other characters.  The civilian who bites the dust at the beginning of the episode (or the novel, or what have you) is nothing but an expendable piece of plot fodder, there to die in fear and trembling so that the real stars of the show can entertain us with their lovable wisecracks and noble encomiums as they work the grisly case.  You're not supposed to think about the victim again after they've been offed, except as a piece of the puzzle the protagonist is solving.  They simply Do Not Matter, and it's your job to accept that and roll with it.

And that . . . that gets under my skin in a way I can't really explain.  It ticks me off, actually.  I simply cannot rationalize, by any idealistic framework whatsoever  — whether religious or anthropological — such a cavalier dismissal of human life.  Even for the purposes of fiction.  It just feels so gross to me?  It's a subtle form of misanthropy, sure, but I think it's misanthropy nonetheless.  (I can only think of one murder mystery off the top of my head that does this better, and that's The Lost Girl of Astor Street by Stephanie Morrill.  The victim in that story is extremely important both to the plot and to the characters, and so, though I could take or leave the book, I appreciate the way the author wrote it.)

This type of narrative paradigm lists toward a peculiar kind of elitism, in my mind.  By this reasoning, the significance of a character's life is directly correlated to that character's proximity to the protagonist.  If the hero or heroine doesn't have a personal connection to this person, their death can not only be negligible, it can be downright entertaining.

Of course, there's nuance, here.  I'm not saying that every single death in every single scene in every single action movie needs to be given the full narrative weight that human life deserves — that's neither practical nor possible.  Different fictional genres have different tonal qualities that demand different thematic foci, and that's very fair.  Moreover, there are certainly storytellers who slide to the opposite extremity of this spectrum and saturate their tales with a positively unnecessary (and ineffectual) degree of explicit violence, such as the aforementioned Tarantino. *coughs*  This kind of gruesomeness doesn't work either, because it betrays a writer so bereft of narrative substance that they have to rely on sensationalism and shock value to elicit any kind of significant emotional response from their audience.

My point, however, is that it's one thing to use suffering as a plot device, but it's quite another to trivialize suffering by building it into the structural fabric of your story in such a way that it loses any significance.  If you're going to write about people, you could at least pretend to believe that those people's lives have value, and ensure that the story you write reflects that belief.

[I could also talk about the issue of Christians demonizing any and all sexual content in fiction (because heaven forbid sex be discussed outside of a closed room, or imagined before a wedding night) while cheerfully accepting the destruction of fellow image-bearers as a prerequisite to certain forms of entertainment, bUT THAT'S ANOTHER STORY . . . ]

Anywhoozles.  Those are just some of my thoughts!  I, of course, don't want to imply that you shouldn't read, watch, or enjoy murder mysteries.  Since I'm not a fan of the genre as a whole, I'm sure there are a lot of excellent entries that handle this aspect of their premises better than the few I've encountered.  I'm also pretty ambivalent about mystery in general, so that's part of why this specific mystery flavor doesn't work too well for me.  But this topic is something I've been mulling over lately, so I wanted to write about it. 😜

What do you think?