The rise of the so-called true crime, or the reports and podcasts that deal with more or less terrible crimes, raise a whole series of questions and challenges, which are painful to address from the culture of spectacle and inexhaustible entertainment. All these crimes—often sexual, sexist, always morbid, bloody, serial—have become another branch of the narrative tree, a literary and cinematic genre that doesn't draw on fiction. If a story amazes and excites us, it can do so even more when we know that 'it's true,' that what we're being told really happened, and that the characters shown to us as dead died irrevocably, and that the culprits are real people, etc. It's even more frightening, it fuels the morbid fascination even more.
There's often a class theme: middle-class audiences are entertained by the crimes committed by the working classes, or by the murderous misery of the rich, demonstrating that money doesn't save anyone from the threat of the psychopath.
More than the attraction to crimes and morbidity - something as old as the press of the 19th century, or already in the 20th century, with The Case as a paradigm of the Francoist tabloid press – what has been 'invented' is now a particular way of approaching the case. true crime It's more of a "what" than a "what." It's more a technique for telling crime stories than a pure fascination with evil and other people's blood. What's become fashionable now is a particular way of moving from the story (a real crime story) to the plot (a serial and calculated spectacle) of its narrative, aimed at an audience eager to get hooked on the tricks of a story that is chopped up, disordered, uses the ending backward, and that creates high doses of mystery. Not only is a victim dismembered, but also the audience's attention.
However, now the Spanish government wants to ban certain types of true crime Based on sexist crimes. The narrative of certain things can continue to harm the victims, something that has been brought to the forefront by the novel's case. Hate, about the murder of a father and his children, a work that, despite already being printed, has not been distributed or put on sale due to the wave of moral—not literary—criticism that its imminent publication had raised. We used to think that literature could be made out of anything, but it seems that's not the case. There will be subjects prohibited by law, something that seems unprecedented in history.
It's true that words can hurt, or that explaining certain things can further deepen the wounds victims have endured. But this seemed protected by freedom of expression and information. Let's not forget, however, that it's also a business, since it produces "content" that generates vast profits, which usually never end up in the pockets of the victims. Banning by law certain types of content about crimes that continue to harm victims seems inevitable to me, as does reflecting on a certain imitation or normalization effect that the continued repetition of this type of news can have.
