I’ve seen a lot of murders over the last couple of weeks.

Not in real life, of course. I live in Canada. But via Netflix, I watched 40 episodes of a show called Forensic Files, and you know what? That’s too damned many.

Not that I saw this coming. When I came across it in the Netflix listings, I was happy because I had seen the show on A&E back in the day, and I loved it. I love true crime shows.

Or at least, I used to.

Turns out, there is a hug difference between watching a murder a week and watching 40 over the space of two weeks or so. I would watch three or four episodes along with my meals most days, and after a while, that shit starts to build up in you and becomes pretty damned depressing.

I feel like I have felt a tiny drop out of the vast ocean of depression that cops must feel when they have to deal with the real world of murder every day in the course of their work. Real world murder is nothing like a murder mystery, an action film, or even a cop show.

Real murder is petty, and mean, and ugly, and downright stupid. Real people commit murder out of jealousy and greed and sometimes just plain fumbling idiocy.

There were some of the “savage animal” type of murders. Some mentally deranged dude abducts and kills random women in savage ways. But these people are no Hannibal Lecter. They’re not even Hannibal from the A-team. They are not villains by the standards of modern Western storytelling. Animals, yes. Monsters even. But not villains.

Villains command a kind of respect. These people…. ugh.

And most of the murders were even less noble. Someone wants to leave his wife but doesn’t want to lose money in the divorce, so he very clumsily kills her. Some redneck wants to keep pursuing his monster truck building hobby, so he finds someone of his approximate weight height and build, lures the victim to his home, knocks him out, then drops a truck on him. Then sets the whole place on fire so nobody could identify the body, all so via his wife he would get $5 million in insurance money.

Note to future criminals : fire does not destroy everything.

And then there was this one woman who got killed just because some crazy chick got the idea in her head that the victim was coming between her and her EX girlfriend. For that, she got knocked over the head and cut up with a chainsaw.

Another note : chainsaws are a terrible disposal method. Bone and tissue end up embedded in every surface around you. The police will find a million times more than the tiny amount of the DNA they need to fry your ass.

The last ten or so episodes I watched were a chore, something to get through rather than enjoy.

(Yeah, I know, the sane thing to do would have been to stop watching once I stop enjoying it, but I am the sort of person who feels compelled to finish that which he starts, no matter what. I have been known to read an entire 200 page book that I stopped enjoying on page 30. )

Anyhow, after all that petty dirty ugliness, I have had to reassure myself about murder being very rare and that these people in no way represent humanity. Instead, they are a tiny aberration in it.

Which brings me back to a question that has haunted and fascinated me for decades : what is the difference between the minds of the people who actually go through with it and the normal human mind who might think it, but would never do it.

I feel like there must be some kind of fundamental difference and it cannot be entirely circumstantial. People of all walks of life, status in society, degree of education, geographical location, age, sex, race, religion and golf handicap commit murder and for the same two reasons : sex and money.

So there must be something about the people themselves that makes them the ones who do it. I can’t help but think there is some fundamental brain hardware that, when broken, causes people to truly believe that their emotions justify murder. That they have the fundamental right to act on said emotions of jealousy and greed, or maybe, they are somehow helpless to stop themselves.

I wonder if they talk themselves into it over time. They start with just thinking about it, and that makes them feel better. Then, they start planning it, all the while telling themselves they will never actually do it, they are just planning it because it helps relieve the stress.

And then one day, they realize that they have the whole thing planned out, and they can’t get satisfaction from planning it any more, and the only way to get that sweet relief is to actually do it. Kill the bastard.

And I imagine they romanticize what will happen afterwards, too. Just do this one thing, and everything will be great. This person is the only thing between you and happiness. When they are dead, life will be perfect.

But one thing that struck me is that a lot of the “problems” these people “solved” through murder were something that could have been solved by non-homicidal means. Pay for the damned divorce, if the alternative is MURDER, for fuck’s sake.

And it makes me feel like these people were, somehow, programmed to kill from birth. Or if not to kill, then with a much higher potential to resort to murder than the average person.

And it has to be something about a weakness in the parts of the brain that restrain action. Some tiny little defect that lurks in the minds of some people, waiting for that moment when the emotional potentials will let it slip through.

Anyhow, one thing that bothered me on the show is that every single victim was female except when it was a mass shooting. And even then, they paid no attention to the male victims other than to give their names.

That is like, double sexist. Sexist because it totally feeds into the “women as helpless victims” narrative that does so much harm in the world. And sexist because it ignores male murder completely, like the lives of men don’t count.

Plus, every episode ends with people praising forensics. Like :

“Oh, if it hadn’t been for the forensics, they would have never found my daughter’s killer. ”
“We cops would have been helpless without the leads we got from forensics. ”
“The key to my prosecution of the killer was good, solid forensic evidence. ”
“All hail Forensics, revealer of the the Truth, against whom no sin can stand!”

Don’t get me wrong, I love forensics. It’s science versus evil. It doesn’t get much better than that. But I don’t need to be told how great it is every single episode.

Oh well. It’s all done now, and I watched this movie and it made me feel all better. Nothing like some pure uncut Frank Miller to make the world seem better to a twisted dude like myself.

And Felicity, check out who did the voice of the Batman.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.