Ann Curry introduced the night of gore and horror, and at its outset I couldn’t help but think about the fact that a nipple can’t be shown in prime time but bloody crime photos of murdered bodies are a okay. Even more nauseating was the sideways-baseball cap toting wigger son Ryan who recounted the moment when he told his brother what had happened: “[I told him] mom and dad have passed. He said, ‘What do you mean Mom and Dad have passed?. I said Mom and Dad passed somebody killed them somebody hurt them they are not alive. The mother’s dying scrawl, a smudged and mopped away phrase written in her own blood
First of all, a month after the murders he told his uncle he “wasn’t sure” if he killed his parents or not. Chalk it up to a demanding Vicodin addiction but adding to that his alibi was weak and I mean c’mon guys he totally did it. That was more or less the prosecution’s case, without any physical evidence to back it up most of the scene had been mopped of blood, guts, and fingerprints by the murderer.The indignation I felt at the hypocrisy of our viewing standards washed away as I became more and more compelled by this story.
We talk about how terrible it is and ask for every gory detail. The urge to rubberneck is always there. And that’s okay, I guess; it’s not like Dateline is making us more violent. What gets me is how prudish and dramatic we still are about acknowledging sex. It’s absurd that a pecker is still somehow deeply offensive and traumatic. I know we’ve come to this point after hundreds of years of history.
It just doesn’t make sense that graphic violence is acceptable programming and sex or benign sexual organs is not. No wonder we have nuts like Jared Loughner and Seung Hui Cho psychos who are smart enough to know they will be forever memorialized and made infamous by the media.
There’s nothing wrong with being compelled by true crime stories I guess, but let’s be real. There buckets of innuendo and sexual suggestion everywhere in the media. We all know everyone fucks or wants to. I can’t help but feel the cognitive dissonance we all experience every day has a lot to do with these arbitrary contradictions.