“Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it's not practical. There are no stereotypes.”
~ Ted Bundy
On any given day, you can turn on your t.v. and watch any number of crime shows. Chances are if it's a Tuesday or Sunday, there's a Law and Order: SVU marathon on. Every year, more and more crime shows are released with increasingly extreme premises; we have vampire detective romances and futuristic cyborg police dramas. Psychic detectives and the supernatural have become a norm. Crime shows are no longer restricted to dramas; we have comedies, and even a few failed reality shows. We have become so desensitized that our concumption of crime has become part of our entertainment routine.
Are we drawn to these venues because they accomplish in film what is often impossible in life? In our mass consumption of crime entertainment, we are able to experience justice, again and again. The bad guys rarely get away; when they do, they are usually punished in a later episode or season. More so, these sort of shows put a face to the boogeymen of our fears: they show us what they think the bad people of the world look like, and give false hope that good will always prevail. It is easier to accept that evil must be reflected on the exterior than that there is no "mark of the beast". This blurring of reality and fantasy can cause us to forget that we can't pick the bad or evil people out of a crowd.
Yet maybe these shows help us sleep a little easier at night by making us believe that the recognizing evil is as easy as recognizing our childhood monsters.
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