In recent years, true crime – true crime – has become a devastating genre. In books, in documentaries, in hundreds of podcasts, like the pioneer Serial; sometimes unsolved cases are rescued or new evidence or interpretations are resorted to very famous murderers, in general, the serials. The question is how to retell these crime celebrities without the usual resort of turning them into superstars. Their construction as celebrities is so solid that it is even believed that these criminals are unique to the United States, a product of North American culture, but only a review of information sites as elementary as Wikipedia shows that serial killers exist all over the world, what that there is no judicial, media, cinematographic and transnational machinery that can turn them into global figures. Luis Alfredo Garavito, for example, is the serial murderer with the highest number of registered victims to date: almost 200 children in the 1990s. He is Colombian and is in prison. Had he killed in the Midwest his name would be as well known as Charles Manson.
Today, the treatment of the serial murderer character is no longer clothed with mythical or glamorous aspects, with few exceptions. The Serie Mindhunter dealt with this turn by fictionalizing the work of real researchers in the 1970s: produced and directed by David Fincher (Seven, Zodiac) and the participation of other important names in the team such as Charlize Theron or Asif Kapadia meant a change of look. Fincher had already explored it in Zodiac, his film about the “Zodiac Killer” focused on the work of the San Francisco police and journalists involved in the case. In Seven, instead, he had posed the (fictitious) assassin as an unbeatable force, an idealized sword of Evil. Seven It is a great movie but it is not so easy to build such a character when the victims are real, there are traumatized communities and lives marked by the most aberrant violence. Asking why for decades the victims were secondary has to do with recognizing the enormous attraction generated by narratives of cruelty and the uselessness of moralizing morbid curiosity. Other approaches are necessary because this treatment is not only unfair to the victims but also puts them in the place of sacrifice to these false gods.
The smartest and most loving recent look at a victim was Once upon a time in hollywood Quentin Tarantino: what he does for Sharon Tate is nothing less than taking her out of that image of the pregnant woman who begged for her life and turning her into what she was, a beautiful woman who was just beginning her career. But the documentary is also fantastic Heroes Skelter by Lesley Chilcott: in six detailed episodes, without voice over, it explains everything exhaustively, definitively, and the complexity and banality of the matter is clear. It is understood that Manson and his followers were marginal and also that they were profiteers, narcissistic, if not downright stupid, in addition to having their strings stripped by drugs and the abandonment and disappointment of the late 60s. Explain what they believed and their form of life and their time does not exalt them: listening to arguments is not justifying them, something that Mindhunter understands very well.
Now Netflix has just released a docuseries about one of the most famous serials: Richard Ramirez. The night stalker (“The Night Stalker”) has four episodes and tries the difficult task of not further mythologizing an iconic character, even sexualized; in the series American Horror Story, for example, in the season 1984, is played by Zach Villa, an actor so attractive that he makes one forget that the real Ramírez had rotten teeth and hardly ever changed his clothes.
Ramírez terrorized the city of Los Angeles – and San Francisco a bit – during the spring and summer of 1985. He had no pattern except an uncertain Satanism. That made him difficult to catch: he killed old women, adults and boys, sometimes he raped, sometimes not, he murdered many Asians but it cannot be said that they were his target because he also killed Latinos and whites. He kidnapped boys and girls: he raped them for a whole day and used to set them free. One of those victims, Anastasia Hronas, recounts her abduction in the documentary. He abused her, he remembers, while listening to Madonna. It’s the 80s: Tiller Russell’s direction, despite certain commonplace of the genre – trivial reconstructions, those already silly images of a bloody hammer falling – pays attention to the time and the city. Above all, it highlights the impact of the criminal in the community, a bit in the manner of Spike Lee in the excellent Summer of Sam (1999) where the crimes of “Son of Sam” are linked to New York in the 70s, punk, disco, blackouts, violence in the streets (it is just a reference: The night stalker doesn’t have as many ambitions).
The protagonists of the docuseries are the investigators, the newcomer to Homicide Gil Carrillo – of Mexican origin – and the experienced Frank Salerno, Italian-American and already a policeman famous for having solved another terrifying case. The focus on the police presents them flawlessly despite the blunders committed, but it is a decision that is sustained and serves to talk about that other Los Angeles, a city of immigrants, workers, loners. It is important to note that Ramírez was a Texan from El Paso, on the border. He’s not the stereotype white killer. It is possible that the documentary is missing a deeper look in this regard, but the series’ problems are different. On the one hand, Ramírez is left in a kind of nebula because he is not given a voice. Leaving it in the background in such a deliberate way, beyond its discursive nonsense (“I am an instrument of the devil” and other litanies that are used in off) is also to give it an aura of mystery. Each of the interviewees spoke of the terror that their intense dark eyes gave and how they felt in the presence of an evil being (one librarian even claims that he had a “goat smell”, almost assuring that he felt in the presence of Satan). There are no testimonies to deny them.
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The insistent use of photos from crime scenes is understood because the series wants to highlight the cruelty and voracity of the murderer, but the images are many and it is impossible not to think about the privacy of these people and their horrible end. Isn’t this a new form of pornography disguised as an attempt to make the public understand “there is nothing to admire here”? The pop saturation of the serial killer narrative is under discussion and The night stalker try to get into that debate. The best moment in this sense is the scene narrated by the granddaughter of Joyce Nelson, one of the victims: the young woman leaves the courtroom – she can no longer bear the presence of Ramírez, who also behaves like a rockstar, including dark glasses – and sits next to a teenager. He wonders who he is related to, is about to speak to him. Then the young man rolls up his sleeves and she sees that he has pentagrams tattooed on his arms, the “satanist” symbol that Ramírez left at some crime scenes, painted in blood or lipstick, and that was also drawn on his hands for photos dedicated to the press. The granddaughter realizes, as if touching a snake in the dark, that she is next to someone who does not register her grandmother or her pain. That distance is fascinating to explore and although The night stalker he tries, he lacks the will to be anything other than a very impressive docuseries about a killer fetishized from many angles: even indie singer-songwriter Sun Kil Moon has a song called “Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes. “We didn’t want to fall into the clutches of its corrupting, false and dangerous myth,” Russell explained. The problem is that avoiding it reopens the mystery. The closed darkness is an invitation to enter the darkness.
