‘The People v. O.J. Simpson’ and why we’re obsessed with true crime

Malcolm-Jamal Warner in ‘The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story’

The thirst for true crime is real.

We’ve devoured “Making A Murderer,” have followed “Serial”’s Adnan Syed back into the courtroom, and our Tuesday nights are now dictated by the re-telling of O.J. Simpson’s story at the hands of “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.”

This time last year, we were entrenched in Robert Durst’s murders and (accidental) confession, and the success of that HBO miniseries led to revisiting true crime documentaries like “The Staircase” and “The Central Park Five.” And we want more.

But our investment in true crime isn’t new, nor is it an anomaly. Since Jack the Ripper emerged from White Chapel in the late 19th century, we – as in humans – have been obsessed with other people dying. We want to know how, when, where, why. We want to know who did it and what happened to that person and how they became the monsters we now recognize them as. And then we wonder and worry if it could happen to us, spurring us to follow each and every case so closely. Because if we can better understand what happened, we can arm ourselves accordingly.

Which of course isn’t how murder works. We do not save anyone by injecting ourselves into the tragedies of others, but we do gain a false sense of control. We tell ourselves that we “get” it; that we can explain why someone acted out or why someone didn’t or how or why or why not or what could’ve happened differently. We (and I include myself) sit and read or sit and watch, wanting and trying to understand because we need to. We need to explain or justify why bad things happen and why they have always, especially as more and more bad things do, hoping we can make them stop.

‘Making a Murderer’’s Steven Avery

Which is the reason, I think, why the last few years have brought a seemingly unquenchable thirst for figuring out method behind madness – why in the wake of economic turmoil, war, environmental collapse, racism, sexism and classicism, we turn to what we know is a constant: cold-blooded murder. Something that happens every day and always has, and shows no signs of letting up.

We tell ourselves that if we can figure it out we’re doing something, even though we may be losing control of everything else. And then we tell ourselves that even if the case is already solved – like with O.J. Simpson – we can still transport ourselves back in time with our advances in technology and psychology, which can help us find new ways of explaining and justifying and looking at and blaming. So we feel useful. And if we ever start to see warning signs in anybody we know, we’ll be ahead of the game. So we revel in our false sense of control in an era where we have so little.

But ironically, it’s our growing interest in true crime that’s starting to heed results in ways we might not have otherwise paid attention to. Had the popularity of “Making A Murderer” not surged over Christmas, a re-examination of the convicted Steven Avery (and the case of his nephew, Brendan) would likely not have happened. If listeners hadn’t rallied around Adnan Syed and helped make him a household name, he arguably wouldn’t be in court vying for a retrial. And if director Andrew Janecky hadn’t followed Robert Durst around for his documentary, Durst would never have uttered that (terrifying and) infamous line, “Killed them all, of course.”

So our control lies not in figuring out the specifics or morphing into wannabe detectives, it lies in our collective interest. In real life, we are not solving crimes by obsessing over them, and our theories and analyses are in no way changing the patterns of criminal behaviour. But our willingness to listen and to react is serving to do something bigger: it’s allowing us to slowly and surely assert ourselves in a way we can in almost any avenue for injustice: protest. We’ve learned we can rise up, speak out, and call for action in the wake of wrongful convictions or deaths, and that makes all the difference.

Now, all we have to realize is that we can do the same for any other cause, provided we commit to the same levels of attention. Which, I mean, shouldn’t be hard when we’re all on the Internet all day anyway.