Murder is Fun!

I’m too tired to draw, too wired to sleep. Settle in for an essay. (What’s a blog for but the ramblings of someone who thinks their thoughts worth reading about?)

As you know, I served on a jury a couple weeks ago and it really got me thinking about murder and violence as entertainment. My case involved a woman who’s husband had hired someone to kill her. It's a scenario totally out of noir fiction and it was hard to believe it was real. I mean, how do you even go about doing something like that?

The woman is an emergency room nurse. She came home from work one night, took off her shoes and started sorting her mail. Suddenly, a man jumped out from behind her bedroom door swinging a hammer at her head. Can you even imagine? What a nightmare! It was a typical claw hammer discovered later to have been picked up out of the woman’s own tool box. The woman fought. He said, You’re a tough one. It’s the only thing he said. Perhaps counter-intuitively, she leaned in to him which reduced the force of his blows and made hitting her awkward. She actually wrestled the hammer away from him and hit him with it, then tried to flee. He tackled her and they struggled on the ground. The woman testified at this point that she expected to die. She bit and scratched at him with the deliberate intention of leaving DNA evidence on herself and on him, hoping it would help the police identify and apprehend him. However, she managed to swing around on top of him, so that he was lying face down and she was kneeling on his back. She’s an obese woman and the images conjured during testimony of their struggle are almost comical. She got her arm around his throat and held tight. She saw him turning purple and eased up. She offered to call an ambulance. (When asked for her exact words she said, “Tell me who sent you and I’ll call a fucking ambulance”) The man only started struggling again and the woman was convinced she wouldn’t stand a chance if she lost her position on top of him. So she resumed her choke hold until he passed out, and then she fled to her neighbors. It was later discovered that she had killed him.

I was a juror in her civil trial, so I didn’t have to determine her husband’s guilt. He’d plead guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and is serving jail time. The trial was to determine damages, medical expenses and pain and suffering. We had little difficulty finding in her favor. (The last trial I was a juror on was over a fender bender, and we spent a lot longer trying to come to an agreement on that one) She suspected her husband was behind the attack. Though she couldn’t imagine him capable, they were going through a divorce and she couldn’t imagine any other enemies. Ends up the attacker had her husbands name and phone number in a bag he had brought with him to her house, so it wasn’t much of a mystery.

Watching her testify about her ordeal and what her life has been like since made me realize, no matter how good an actor is, there’s still always part of you appreciating the performance. You don’t actually believe it. Hearing this woman tell her story I was moved like I never really have been.

Now, I loves me a good murder, with some juicey violence on the side, but attending the trial was entirely unpleasant. I realize even as I say that, the story is tremendously “entertaining”. It was difficult for me to talk about for awhile afterward because people seemed too tittilated and eager to hear the details. It felt like an exploitation of her horrible trauma.

I’m fascinated by that line between where I’m entertained and where I find it unsavory. And I’m fascinated by movies that cross that line. I have yet to fully understand what defines the line, but there are certain things I’ve figured out.

Cartooniness helps. Quentin Terentino is a perfect example of a film maker who takes me there, and then sometimes just beyond. I can watch delightedly as bullets fly, swords swoosh, and for good measure, some spikey ball on a chain crashes through stuff. I can giggle boyishly when geysers of blood spray out of someone’s decapitated neck, or someone gets their crown sliced off, exposing their brain. But then, broken arm – OUCH! Can’t look. There’s something about a joint bending the wrong way I just have a hard time dealing with.

The film Sin City, as I imagine you’re aware, is a faithfully recreated film version of the comic book. I’m a big fan of both. This provides perfect examples of how essentially identical imagery in different formats elicits different responses. At least in me. For example, there’s a scene where Marv is brutally interrogating his way toward Goldie’s killer. I found this sequence really amusing and entertaining in the comic book, I just didn’t think it was funny in the same way to see him dragging a guy behind a car in the film version.

Another interesting example of crossing the line is the TV series Veronica Mars. I was a big fan of the first two seasons. (Well, the first season and a half. I thought the second season screwed it pretty bad at the end there, mostly due to Steve Guttenberg.) The first season revolved around the mystery of who killed Veronica’s best friend. Lots of twists and turns, highly entertaining, surprising and satisfying conclusion. The second season opened great. It established a pretty interesting mystery that I assumed was going to be the season’s thread. THEN – in the last couple of minutes, a school bus Veronica was supposed to be on is sabotaged and flies off a cliff into the rocky ocean surf, killing all aboard. I squealed with delight. An interesting reaction to seeing a school bus full of kids plunge to their deaths. It’s a horrible, horrible thing if you take it seriously at all. But of course there was nothing serious about it, and it was especially delightful because I was already perfectly satisfied with the episode, and then they suddenly and unexpectedly cranked the intrigue up to 11!

Season three, however, lost all my good will. The main arc revolved around a serial rapist, prompting the telling comment, Murder is more fun than rape!

So cartooniness and a lack of a real sense of gravity or tragedy can help make the violence entertaining and palletable. But that’s not the way it has to be, either. It’s easy to think of tons of examples where taking the events seriously is indeed the point. The tension you feel can be very real and uncomfortable AND entertaining. That’s a little outside the scope of Ruby Rocket, I believe, so I’ll leave off that discussion for now.

I’ve actually spent some time trying to imagine “funny” murders, or situations that might lend themselves to the noir, yet comedic world Ruby inhabits. I had the idea of a poor guy who gets his hat nailed to his head. I imagine a scene where he’s tied to a chair and getting worked over by a couple of thugs. Teasingly, like school yard bullies, they smack him or punch him and his hat flies off every time they do. They keep replacing it, taunting him. “Why can’t you keep your hat on?” Punch. “Windy day, huh?” Smack. Finally someone comes up with a solution to keep his hat on and nails it into his skull.

I like the idea of finding a dead man tied to a chair with his hat nailed on, but I also thought it would be “funny” if the guy actually didn’t die, but it was determined to be too dangerous to remove the nail. So he goes through the show with a hat nailed to his head. Of course they nailed it on crooked! In this scenario he becomes a recurring character and it wouldn’t even be necessary to show the scene where this happens to him. It’s just part of his back story.

When does something cross the line into offensive, or when do you shake your head and chuckle but say, that’s horrible! What’s it got to do with Ruby Rocket? I don’t know. You’re the writer.