Psychos, True Crime, and "You."

I was recently quoted in this article about the Netflix show "You," revolving around a serial killer. The show is currently enjoying smash-hit success on the streaming service and has become the latest buzzy pop culture phenomenon. 

As the article explains, while there are many people who are big fans of the show, there are just as many who are worried about the possible dangerous societal impact of serial killer films, TV shows, and true-crime entertainment. As it also discusses with my quotes, true-crime entertainment and the obsession with the macabre is certainly nothing new. In the 1800s, after all, we already had the forerunner of true-crime entertainment in the form of the National Police Gazette magazine and people would turned out with their entire families to watch the public hangings of wild west desperadoes ranging from murderers to cattle rustlers and horse thieves.

Then, in the twentieth century, the news media would once again satiate a public appetite for knowledge about real criminals like Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floy, Machine Gun Kelly, and underworld kingpins like Al Capone. Among the most popular films at the time were the gangster films that made superstars out of actors like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G. Robinson playing underworld thugs and tough guys.  But even before frontier justice or stories of organized crime in the United States were turned into public entertainment, we had millennia of people all over the world turning out to see the brutal public flogging, skinning, burning, disembowelment, decapitation, and dismemberment of people who had defied the law. It is remarkable to behold the incredible level of mathematical and architectural accomplishment of the ancient Romans thousands of years ago, and then to consider the fact that they applied such advanced knowledge to the construction of the Colosseum, an immense amphitheater dedicated to displays of violence and brutality. For the ancient Romans, watching marathon sessions of gladiatorial combat where people from criminals to slaves, prisoners of war in the empire’s foreign campaigns, and all sorts of imprisoned undesirables being forced to fight each other to the death was as entertaining as watching football or baseball is to us. 

 

So, taking in such a history of violence, we have to recognize that the twenty first century’s violent entertainment, like movies or documentaries discussing true crimes, pales in comparison to the blood lust of our ancestors. We merely hear about serial killings or see actors recreating crimes in TV shows or movies. We no longer watch people torn limb from limb in front of us or watch see them get crucified, scourged, or burned at the stake.  

 

The point is that we need to realize that a fascination for all manner of information about or depictions of violence is a part of human nature. There are areas of science that have long sought to understand this. Perhaps there was an evolutionary advantage to constantly thinking about possible threats, possible sources of violence. An imagination of threats kept our ancestors on the lookout for dangerous predators. This fixation on the violent and morbid, in turn, kept them alive long enough to reproduce and pass those traits on to descendants who merely enjoy a TV show like "You" about a murderous stalker. Today’s threats we need to be on the lookout for, the new unseen danger that haunts the imaginations of modern humans, is not a wild animal hiding in the bushes but the serial killer who might be living among us. It is the friendly person who lives down the street or a boyish coworker we talk to every day who might be a twisted, blood-thirsty psychopath. Our fascination with true crime then is merely our evolutionary programming at work. Films, TV shows, and documentaries dramatize this programming. 

 

But, ultimately, is a violent show like “You,” or any number of serial killer films, slasher horror films, or true-crime podcasts dangerous to society? No, it is not. Research has long sought to find a causal connection between watching violence and violent behavior and could not. What we have instead are correlations between the enjoyment of violent entertainment by some people who also happen to have committed crimes. But a correlation is not a causality. Perhaps people with a propensity for violence mere just enjoy watching violence as well. True crime shows or serial killer movies do not make real life killers and criminals.  

Literary Titan Review of FATAL POSE

Seeing a story you had spent years crafting, polishing, rewriting, and just generally fussing over night and day until it's ready for publication connect with readers and critics is always fantastic. Very happy to have gotten this excellent review of FATAL POSE by Literary Titan.

Close Encounters of Every Kind

I was recently interviewed about a subject that's quite a favorite of mine because it's so hard to come to conclusions about. It's a topic that requires and open mind, but one that won't be easily filled up with garbage...

UFOs.

This article on the How Stuff Works website (and you can listen to its podcast version as well) details the complex classification system of alleged UFO encounters, everything from strange lights in the sky to encounters with otherworldly beings and all the way to purported human/alien hybrids walking among us. The classification system was originally devised by the legendary astronomer J. Allen Hynek, and it would eventually provide the title for Steven Spielberg's iconic science fiction film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Hynek's system only had three kinds of close encounters. As the article details, at least seven more have been added, including complex subheadings of encounters.

But Hynek's involvement in UFOs I find very intriguing since the eminent astronomer who had originally worked for the Air Force's research projects into the phenomenon was originally a skeptic. He changed his mind while working on the infamous Project Blue Book.

I'm quite open minded about the topic of UFOs myself, but I guess I would consider myself an open-minded skeptic. The recent Pentagon report on UFOs (or UAVs as they like to call it), I thought, made an intriguing case for the consideration of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. There is something flying around in the skies, physical objects of some kind, aircraft that could not have been built by any known technology on Earth today. So where does that leave us about this issue...?

I don't know.

I kind of like the Sherlock Holmes approach to UFOs: once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, has to be the answer. So far the Pentagon report made a pretty good case for the elimination on Earthly technology behind the phenomenon.

So does that leave aliens?

I don't know. 

So my mind is open about the issue, but just as long as we don't get into the territory of absurdly complicated government conspiracies about back-engineered UFOs, demonic UFOnauts, and U.S. presidents having made deals with aliens in abduction/technology-exchange deals.

5-Star Review for FATAL POSE on Reader's Favorite

It's always great to see your work recognized and I'm very excited to receive this 5-Star review from Reader's Favorite for FATAL POSE. Check it out right here.

In the world of LA's pro bodybuilding scene, health and fitness can be deadly!

"FATAL POSE" sample chapter!

With the release of my new novel, FATAL POSE, take a sneak peek at its entire first chapter!

                              CHAPTER 1

With a face like a homecoming queen, she had a body that must have been some one hundred and seventy pounds of lean muscle. At about five feet and six inches tall, her physique was flawlessly proportioned. She had a disarming smile, wore her hair in a well-styled pageboy, and sported a low-cut flowery summer dress. The wide neckline of her dress was snug atop the dense pectorals and reaching toward a pair of wide, hulking deltoids. The tight fit at the top, though, allowed for the dress to slacken at the waistline. There, her torso tapered from her hard-pumped lat muscles, creating the precision V look of her upper body . 

“Perfect,” Laura Preston whispered as the flash bulbs strobed around their model. 

They were snapping the final pictures for Muscle Quest magazine’s “Bodybuilding R&R” segment for next month’s issue. Laura was about to worry the shoot would run too late again. She had made a point of staying all the way until the end, but now she absolutely had to get going. Her mind was on the drive up to Big Bear Lake more than anything else. Well, the drive, the Smith and Wesson automatic handgun in her desk upstairs, and the meeting with Brad Holt. 

“All right, and that’s a wrap,” Dave Sachs, the photographer, called and glanced at Laura. 

She nodded her approval. 

“We’ll have the proofs for you by tomorrow,” Dave told Laura. “My word on that.” 

“I know,” Laura said.
“I’m sorry we had to reshoot.”
“At least we’ll make the deadline. That’s what matters.”
“Hey, Laura,” called Christy Gilmore, the model with the spectacular physique. “I think it’s a good thing we had to do a second shoot, you know.” “How’s that?” Laura asked.

“I got a full circuit in since last time. Chest, legs, back, everything. This morning it was biceps and triceps.”

She quickly raised her right arm and contracted her bicep. The fresh pump in the gym had the athlete’s muscles gorged with blood, looking as if the hypertrophied hunks of muscle were straining to explode right through her skin. 

Back when she used to compete, Laura was merely a shadow of the enormous musculature on Christy Gilmore. 

Christy flashed one of the winning smiles that helped propel her to victory three times in a row over the past year and a half. Winning the Ms. California Invitational, the National Physique Association’s All-National pro-qualifiers and the Muscle Extravaganza women’s championship had earned her the photo spread in the next issue of Muscle Quest. 

The “Bodybuilding R&R” column was the human-interest section of each issue. It profiled what normal lives the physique competitors really lived outside the gym. Fighting the ongoing battle to mainstream the sport, Laura had conceived of the column three years ago. The R&R feature alternated between male and female athletes from month to month, and Laura knew most of the attention had to go into the women’s version. In the twenty-first century, she still had to fight wars to get the female athletes the respect they deserved. Someone like Christy Gilmore making it to the pro ranks was a godsend, Laura realized. Not only did Christy have an otherworldly physique, but her dimpled, girl-next- door smile might just generate a renewed interest in the floundering women’s division of the World Body Building Federation. Or maybe one day, Christy could start making movies and get herself elected governor of California. 

That’s when Laura felt something like a spear of pure, solid ice ramming into the middle of her chest again. The blast of adrenaline flooding her body felt as if someone was deliberately tearing into her soul. 

Because they were, Laura knew and fought to keep a convincing smile on her face as she said goodbye to Christy. Laura knew how precisely, how deliberately, her life and her career were targeted for complete destruction. 

Brad Holt. 

No, it was more than her career, Laura knew. Brad Holt would not be satisfied with that. He wanted to step on, to defile everything she believed in, everything she stood for in the WBBF organization, everything she wanted this sport to represent. 

Except she would not give him that chance. 

The Spike Lee controversy and the end of the conspiracy theorist hero

I was recently interviewed for this article for the French film-magazine, Telerama, about Spike Lee’s new documentary miniseries about New York and the strange, needless controversy surrounding it. As the article details, Lee appears to be a conspiracist who inserted a 30-minute-long segment about the claims of the so-called 9/11 “truth movement” into the final episode of his upcoming HBO documentary, “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021 ½.” 

Lee’s film focuses on New York City and how it has fared over the last two decades, from the 9/11 attacks until the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, since the miniseries foregrounds New York culture over that twenty-year period rather than dealing specifically with 9/11, the insertion of what critics have called a virtual endorsement of one of the most repellent 9/11 conspiracy theorists seems peculiar.

 

The segment which Lee has since removed, reportedly leaving the final installment of the documentary series only 90-minutes-long whereas the other episodes each clock in at two hours, essentially gives the microphone to Richard Gage, the founder of “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.” Among 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Gage’s claims about the attack are particularly offensive and deranged. Aside from the standard, debunked canards of the 9/11 conspiracy mythology – that jet fuel couldn’t have melted steel, that the collapse of the towers was a controlled demolition, and that the collapse of Tower 7 is some kind of a “smoking gun” proving a conspiracy – Gage has argued that the towers were actually hit by drones camouflaged by holograms. He has repeatedly endorsed the claims that the Israeli government was behind the attacks, appearing on numerous podcasts and conspiracy-friendly outlets that also believe the Holocaust was a hoax and that all the world’s miseries are caused by all-powerful, all-controlling Jewish cabals. Recently Gage has also jumped on the COVID-conspiracy bandwagon, arguing that the pandemic was a government-engineered false flag operation, that vaccines will kill people, and it is all but a part of a grand New World Order plan to exterminate large swaths of the human population. Then, for good measure, Gage has also blamed Bill Gates for this massive conspiracy.

 

To be sure, the examination of the cultural impact of these tragedies on New York City is an excellent idea for a documentary. Why Lee would choose to mar that work by giving the floor to an opportunistic charlatan like Gage is somewhat odd. And I say “somewhat” odd because Lee had often made comments to the effect that he, too, believes in the main tenets of 9/11 conspiracism. He had recited those now debunked theories about jet fuel and steel and controlled demolitions. At one point, sounding spectacularly ignorant, Lee had also said that he hoped there would be a full-scale Congressional investigation into the causes of the collapse of the World Trade towers on 9/11.  Except there has been such an investigation. In fact, it had been carried out between 2002 and 204 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly referred to as the 9/11 Commission. So since Lee appears to be a full-fledged fellow traveler of the Richard Gage and Alex Jones conspiracy crowd, it makes sense that he would want to propagate their theories in his documentary. Now my impression of Spike Lee, from what I have read about him in the entertainment news media, is that he is not a stupid man (an assessment I am reconsidering now in light of this controversy) I am stunned that it wouldn’t occur to him how offensive the majority of Americans find Gage and his ilk. There is a reason none of Lee's colleagues in Hollywood have given 9/11 the Oliver Stone “JFK” treatment; because they understand how the 9/11 truthers are a bunch of bottom-feeding ghouls, a collection of grave-robbers attempting to capitalize on the deaths of thousands of Americans. Giving Richard Gage a platform in a documentary like this is akin to someone making a documentary about the Moon landing and giving the flat Earth theorists and the moon-landing-hoax crowd equal time to argue their beliefs. The fact that Lee does not realize this is stunning.

 

But what happens now that Lee had wised up and removed Gage’s segment? Because Lee was foolish enough to put Gage in the documentary to begin with, he has merely been made a martyr for the conspiracy cause. Richard Gage is a now an idealistic “truth seeker” who is being silenced by The Man for getting too close to the dangerous truth. Just like Alex Jones, Gage might be able to appeal to an even bigger legion of those who are delusional and pathologically alienated from the real world. Gage’s acolytes are those who can’t live in the real world and would rather make up their fantasy version of it, a version in which they are smarter, more astute, more vigilant to the hidden truth than all the “sheeple” around them. 

 

The unpleasant irony in this is that the bookend of Lee’s documentary about New York is the COVID pandemic, a plague that has killed so many more people than it should have and a plague that appears to be intensifying once more because of the madness of conspiratorial thinking. The COVID deniers, the anti-vaxxers, the conspiracy theorists ranting about Bill Gates depopulating the world and putting microchips into vaccines and altering the human DNA are driven by the same fantasies fueling the 9/11 derangement. And, yes, I do loath to call the 9/11 conspiracy theorists “truthers.” They are lying parasites who feed off the blood of three thousand and some innocent Americans. The COVID vaccine conspiracy theorists, in turn, are the kinds of people we had seen stand trial for encouraging the mentally unstable to commit suicide.

 

Although, as the article concludes and as I have been writing for years, this entire Spike Lee controversy appears to be bringing a change to the entertainment industry. The conspiracy theorist hero might soon disappear from popular culture. Films, TV shows, and books – just as I had done in my books like CONFIRMATION: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE UNEXPLAINED, and THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT – might soon show them to be the villains they really are.

Win another FREE book!

 

Like I had written a couple of posts before, I'm running two book giveaways on Goodreads as a lead-up to the release of my new novel, FATAL POSE, coming out on September 14.

Only until August 31, you can win a copy of THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT, a science fiction thriller that ask how the best and the brightest in the quiet small town of Cedar Valley, Illinois, could collude to hide evidence of a world-threatening evil. 

So go to Goodreads.com and check out this story of people would rather see their world burn than try and work with those they disagree with.