Should you watch “Evil Genius,” on Netflix? Sure, but it’s fairly shallow. Spoilers ahead.
Several years ago, a guy robbed a bank. He had a bomb locked, by collar, around his neck. He came out of the bank, was apprehended, and had to sit on the sidewalk for hours. He warned cops that the bomb was real. The cops seemed not to believe him. Eventually, the bomb exploded, and the guy died. All of this was caught on tape. You see a burst of flames, and the guy collapses.
The case seems not-too-difficult to unravel. A disturbed man (different from the bomber) calls the police and claims his girlfriend should be trailed. It turns out the girlfriend is a crazed murderess (she kills many folks!), and she has engineered a plot to obtain money to have her father murdered. (She is angry at the father because he won’t give her her inheritance.) The “evil genius”--Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong--dies in jail, and people feel fairly certain that the guy who died in the bombing was simply a victim. People feel that he wasn’t actually complicit in the bank-robbing; he had been mentally impaired, and Diehl-Armstrong had manipulated him. Meanwhile, his family is understandably upset--enraged because he had been implicated in the crime, and because, after the bombing, authorities decapitated the corpse to get at the collar. (“Those cops showed more respect to the collar than they showed to my dead brother’s head!” is one of many astounding sentences you hear in the course of three or four hours.)
Am I being clear? Marjorie recruited a vulnerable guy, told him to rob a bank, told him, if he failed, a bomb would go off next to his beating heart, then sent him on his way. No one did anything about the bomb (even though the guy did complete his assignment). So the bomb did, eventually, go off. That's what gets insinuated.
So: That's the story. Now: An assessment.
What does this documentary lack? A philosophical moment. An attempt to get into--really into--Diehl-Armstrong’s brain. A sense of advocacy. (Maybe the lesson is that there needs to be better care for people with mental health issues? Maybe the lesson is that local and non-local authorities--who, at times, seemed to be enemies--need to communicate with one another more generously? Either of these scenarios would be a wide, interesting avenue to pursue. Both go un-pursued.)
If you don’t consider why you’re telling your lurid story, then your material can become something fit for “The National Enquirer.” That is what has happened here. Which is not to say the material is not gripping. Many, many people buy “The National Enquirer.”
Here's another thing that bothers me about this apparent Golden Age of the True Crime Serial. People are ignoring Janet Malcolm. Malcolm famously--and persuasively--argued that the “juice” of journalism comes from an obvious (and morally "icky") tension. That tension is between the subject’s self-infatuation and the journalist’s (concealed) skepticism. The journalist must pretend to feel entirely sympathetic, while actually feeling doubtful, puzzled, curious, alarmed. The lie--the play-acting--is necessary to get the story.
Malcolm makes this case in her discussion of a murder chronicled in a tawdry (non-Malcolm) book called “Double Vision.” It seems to me, if you don’t engage with Malcolm’s questions (When is journalism morally defensible? Which, if any, obligations does a reporter have to his subject? In what way does a viewer sometimes become complicit, and what should the viewer make of this?), and you’re doing some (ostensibly) serious long-form journalism, then you’re sort of a fool. So, for example, there’s an extremely uncomfortable moment in “Evil Genius.” It’s toward the end. The reporter is revealing that he doesn’t really believe Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. He has strung her along--literally for years--and now he is disclosing that he actually thinks her story is bullshit. (He needed to stay in Marjorie's good graces until he had amassed enough evidence to challenge her with. He had been plotting a turn-the-tables moment all along, while still "making nice" with Marjorie.) Marjorie--who is not a moron--announces that she feels betrayed.
Here, we might sympathize with the murderess. Indeed, killer or not, she has been betrayed. She is a deeply flawed and lost soul, and a reporter has made use of her story for our entertainment. The reporter has created an illusion of friendship, just to build to a red-alarm bit of story-telling. He then skips right over this troubling fact, as if he thinks we are idiots, or as if he himself is (at least momentarily) an idiot. Unclear.
This kind of opportunism has taken even more noxious forms in recent podcasts. Like many others, I had real problems with the riveting “S-Town,” where a man claims to feel compassion for a dead friend, but has few or no reservations about raiding this corpse’s past for scintillating secrets. (He then exposes these secrets for our delectation.) The (maybe) most exciting--and most insufferable--case of journalistic immorality, in the recent past, was the podcast about Richard Simmons, where a man, intrigued that Simmons had disappeared from the public radar, pursued Simmons as if he were a wanted serial killer. (The obvious conclusion--that Simmons is dealing with his own deep craziness, and that he just acted without grace, and maybe should be left alone--seems not really to occur to the journalist, or just to occur far, far too late.) Throughout the Simmons podcast, the journalist frames his money-hungry concerns as if they were really deep and loving bits of saintliness. (“I’m doing this because I want to rescue Simmons.”) The listener cringes over and over--cringes, but does not silence the iPhone.
Anyway, this is an angle for “Evil Genius” I’ve not seen explored elsewhere. Worth considering. (Vulture does have a piece on other problematic aspects of the Netflix approach to Marjorie's saga.) Do watch the show. As Netflix and other outlets pursue this Golden Age--with “The Jinx,” “The Keepers,” “The Case against Adnan Syed,” “Amanda Knox,” among other stories--I hope they’ll start keeping Janet Malcolm in mind.
P.S. One thing I love about these true crime scenarios: There's often a tip-of-the-iceberg moment. Someone cracks--but just a little bit. Misleading, incomplete, enchanting bits of communication. In "S-Town," a guy calls a journalist and says, "I think a murder happened in my village." But the alleged murder won't really prove to be the thing this show is about. In "Evil Genius," a guy calls the cops and says, "A body is in my girlfriend's freezer." But that frozen body will turn out just to be a thread in a crazy tapestry (and the caller knows it). Divided Selves; people wrestling with their own souls; people giving out the truth in tiny, tiny bits, so that you can see the war happening behind their eyes. Fascinating. Ah, human behavior!
P.P.S. The real irritant in "S-Town": The journalist calls an associate and ambushes her. "Your friend committed suicide, and also I'm capturing your reaction on tape, and also I plan to share that reaction with great heaving hordes of strangers." How can you not sense--in that moment--that the journalist is being less than a stand-up guy? And did everyone really think this moment was OK? The journalist himself? The editor? The producer?
Several years ago, a guy robbed a bank. He had a bomb locked, by collar, around his neck. He came out of the bank, was apprehended, and had to sit on the sidewalk for hours. He warned cops that the bomb was real. The cops seemed not to believe him. Eventually, the bomb exploded, and the guy died. All of this was caught on tape. You see a burst of flames, and the guy collapses.
The case seems not-too-difficult to unravel. A disturbed man (different from the bomber) calls the police and claims his girlfriend should be trailed. It turns out the girlfriend is a crazed murderess (she kills many folks!), and she has engineered a plot to obtain money to have her father murdered. (She is angry at the father because he won’t give her her inheritance.) The “evil genius”--Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong--dies in jail, and people feel fairly certain that the guy who died in the bombing was simply a victim. People feel that he wasn’t actually complicit in the bank-robbing; he had been mentally impaired, and Diehl-Armstrong had manipulated him. Meanwhile, his family is understandably upset--enraged because he had been implicated in the crime, and because, after the bombing, authorities decapitated the corpse to get at the collar. (“Those cops showed more respect to the collar than they showed to my dead brother’s head!” is one of many astounding sentences you hear in the course of three or four hours.)
Am I being clear? Marjorie recruited a vulnerable guy, told him to rob a bank, told him, if he failed, a bomb would go off next to his beating heart, then sent him on his way. No one did anything about the bomb (even though the guy did complete his assignment). So the bomb did, eventually, go off. That's what gets insinuated.
So: That's the story. Now: An assessment.
What does this documentary lack? A philosophical moment. An attempt to get into--really into--Diehl-Armstrong’s brain. A sense of advocacy. (Maybe the lesson is that there needs to be better care for people with mental health issues? Maybe the lesson is that local and non-local authorities--who, at times, seemed to be enemies--need to communicate with one another more generously? Either of these scenarios would be a wide, interesting avenue to pursue. Both go un-pursued.)
If you don’t consider why you’re telling your lurid story, then your material can become something fit for “The National Enquirer.” That is what has happened here. Which is not to say the material is not gripping. Many, many people buy “The National Enquirer.”
Here's another thing that bothers me about this apparent Golden Age of the True Crime Serial. People are ignoring Janet Malcolm. Malcolm famously--and persuasively--argued that the “juice” of journalism comes from an obvious (and morally "icky") tension. That tension is between the subject’s self-infatuation and the journalist’s (concealed) skepticism. The journalist must pretend to feel entirely sympathetic, while actually feeling doubtful, puzzled, curious, alarmed. The lie--the play-acting--is necessary to get the story.
Malcolm makes this case in her discussion of a murder chronicled in a tawdry (non-Malcolm) book called “Double Vision.” It seems to me, if you don’t engage with Malcolm’s questions (When is journalism morally defensible? Which, if any, obligations does a reporter have to his subject? In what way does a viewer sometimes become complicit, and what should the viewer make of this?), and you’re doing some (ostensibly) serious long-form journalism, then you’re sort of a fool. So, for example, there’s an extremely uncomfortable moment in “Evil Genius.” It’s toward the end. The reporter is revealing that he doesn’t really believe Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. He has strung her along--literally for years--and now he is disclosing that he actually thinks her story is bullshit. (He needed to stay in Marjorie's good graces until he had amassed enough evidence to challenge her with. He had been plotting a turn-the-tables moment all along, while still "making nice" with Marjorie.) Marjorie--who is not a moron--announces that she feels betrayed.
Here, we might sympathize with the murderess. Indeed, killer or not, she has been betrayed. She is a deeply flawed and lost soul, and a reporter has made use of her story for our entertainment. The reporter has created an illusion of friendship, just to build to a red-alarm bit of story-telling. He then skips right over this troubling fact, as if he thinks we are idiots, or as if he himself is (at least momentarily) an idiot. Unclear.
This kind of opportunism has taken even more noxious forms in recent podcasts. Like many others, I had real problems with the riveting “S-Town,” where a man claims to feel compassion for a dead friend, but has few or no reservations about raiding this corpse’s past for scintillating secrets. (He then exposes these secrets for our delectation.) The (maybe) most exciting--and most insufferable--case of journalistic immorality, in the recent past, was the podcast about Richard Simmons, where a man, intrigued that Simmons had disappeared from the public radar, pursued Simmons as if he were a wanted serial killer. (The obvious conclusion--that Simmons is dealing with his own deep craziness, and that he just acted without grace, and maybe should be left alone--seems not really to occur to the journalist, or just to occur far, far too late.) Throughout the Simmons podcast, the journalist frames his money-hungry concerns as if they were really deep and loving bits of saintliness. (“I’m doing this because I want to rescue Simmons.”) The listener cringes over and over--cringes, but does not silence the iPhone.
Anyway, this is an angle for “Evil Genius” I’ve not seen explored elsewhere. Worth considering. (Vulture does have a piece on other problematic aspects of the Netflix approach to Marjorie's saga.) Do watch the show. As Netflix and other outlets pursue this Golden Age--with “The Jinx,” “The Keepers,” “The Case against Adnan Syed,” “Amanda Knox,” among other stories--I hope they’ll start keeping Janet Malcolm in mind.
P.S. One thing I love about these true crime scenarios: There's often a tip-of-the-iceberg moment. Someone cracks--but just a little bit. Misleading, incomplete, enchanting bits of communication. In "S-Town," a guy calls a journalist and says, "I think a murder happened in my village." But the alleged murder won't really prove to be the thing this show is about. In "Evil Genius," a guy calls the cops and says, "A body is in my girlfriend's freezer." But that frozen body will turn out just to be a thread in a crazy tapestry (and the caller knows it). Divided Selves; people wrestling with their own souls; people giving out the truth in tiny, tiny bits, so that you can see the war happening behind their eyes. Fascinating. Ah, human behavior!
P.P.S. The real irritant in "S-Town": The journalist calls an associate and ambushes her. "Your friend committed suicide, and also I'm capturing your reaction on tape, and also I plan to share that reaction with great heaving hordes of strangers." How can you not sense--in that moment--that the journalist is being less than a stand-up guy? And did everyone really think this moment was OK? The journalist himself? The editor? The producer?
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