Macabre

Some time ago, despite hesitation, I continued on my way through Patricia Cornwell's recently diminishing Kay Scarpetta forensic series. The emphasis on science softened the graphic crime scenes and subsequent autopsy details, effectively keeping the wounds intellectualized through the written word. I justified my repeated witnessing of such violence with my accompanied scientific gains. As my natural affinity for written mystery evolved toward thriller, so did an unanticipated interest in literary portrayals of psychopathy including the point of view of the profoundly disturbed. I joined Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in her single minded quest to seek a gruesome revenge of equal depravity. Then I discovered Jo Nesbo's stolid recovering alcoholic detective Harry Hole. With Nesbo, each murder is more frighteningly described than the next and frankly, creeps me out quite effectively, enough so that I have to read Nesbo only in the daylight. (This also happens when I view The Walking Dead). I have spent an enormous amount of time reading authors who specialize in the myriad ways to kill human beings: Karin Fossum, Chelsea Cain, Lars Kepler, Linda Fairstein, Tess Gerritsen, to name just a few more.

Recently a few literary explorations of human depravity also caught my attention, including Koch's fictional family case study The Dinner, Gillian Flynn's operatic twisted relationship study Gone Girl and the dysfunctional family memoir We Are Animals. My fascination with psychology justified these choices. Enter the slow TV movement with the freakish American Horror Story: Asylum, the prequel to the movie Psycho, Bates Motel, and now Hannibal, loosely based on the novel Red Dragon. I can't seem to look away despite having been moved in the past by horror and gore to fear, nightmares, and depression. Something about the macabre draws me in. My latest foray is HBO's True Detective series, an astonishing exploration of the human psyche on the individual level which quickly expands to the universal. It asks what went wrong with a humanity capable of such indifference to one another.

After a two week binge on Criminal Minds reruns and a pretty consistent gross out from American Horror Story: Coven, I began to cut back. Feeling cranky and depressed, I also felt that as a woman I had a big target on my back screaming out "Prey" for all psychopaths to see. I wonder how much my and so many others' readings, watchings of these TV shows, and fascinations with movies of the like function as collusion with the master criminals. By consuming such dark tales with great ferocity, are we ourselves contributing to their own feeding off of the macabre, virtual or otherwise?

I still plan to watch Hannibal season 2 in a few weeks time. I am also in for the last three episodes of True Detective. I need to know what message we are supposed to be decoding. Despite given what I've just recounted. I remain endlessly fascinated by the human mind and its anticipation, sense of suspense, thrill, and yes, horror, particular emotional. Maybe the creatives count on us to be there, to witness their macabre purge of such dark desires. Maybe such witnessing holds some potential inflictors at bay. Maybe indifference to the macabre is in itself, macabre.