Many television shows and movies start with a murder; the murder is often the impetus for solving a mystery, finding answers, or setting up the thrill of crimes. Serial and Making a Murderer are no exception to this trope, but they stand apart from the dozens of cookie-cutter television shows in that they are based in truth and fall into the realm of documentary. The girls that start each of these stories were real women and they are treated differently than female corpses of fiction. But are they treated fairly?
Serial, a podcast produced by NPR, tells of the tedious trial of Adnan Syed, convicted of the murder of Hae Min Lee, perhaps unfairly—at least by standards of our justice system. Making a Murderer, released in its entirety on Netflix last year, documents the trials and mishaps of Steven Avery, convicted of the murder of Teresa Halbach. The problems with these stories are that they are an amalgamation of truth and fiction, perspective and omission manipulating viewers’ or listeners’ conclusions. In these stories, the representation and stories of the women—now dead—are lost. We are left with nightmares of the living, horrors of the justice system, and questions about the evils that may be left in the world.
This paper looks to examine the implications of the gendered female corpses of documentary film and podcasts compared to the fictionalized trope of female corpses in fiction: the crime drama, the gendered slasher film, the sexually promiscuous woman “punished” for her transgressions. Are these documentary deceased merely background fodder for their male murderer counterparts? Are their roles in these stories exploited for larger questions of debate? Are they ghosts haunting each episode, not in the foreground, but indirectly controlling the “true” information that is serving as our new form of sensational entertainment?
About the presenterSamantha Przybylowicz Axtell
Samantha is a recent PhD graduate from Northeastern University. Her dissertation was about women who kill in Victorian literature with a focus on gender, genre, sympathy, and representation. Her work combines Victorian fiction with modern true crime in a way that shows the ways we talk and write about crime haven’t changed all that much over the years. Samantha also works with aspects of true crime that emphasize victimology and advocates for the wrongfully convicted. She is the current Graduate Rep for MAPACA and co-chair for the True Crime Area.