There was a love story that found its way into my living room and dining room conversations recently. The new hit TV show, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. It presents a whirlwind, dramatic and uncomfortably public romance of an enigmatic career woman and a man with a name that filled in the blanks for him.
I learned the story ends in a tragic plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Though I knew the ending, I still wanted to watch. That made me wonder: Why do stories with tragic endings find themselves on top? Do we, the people, have an appetite for tragedy?
Stacie Friend, in her paper entitled “The Pleasures of Documentary Tragedy,” philosophically cites David Hume for an answer stating, “The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.”
We can’t look away because we find ourselves in the experiences. I mean, how often have you heard, “This could be you one day”?
My gripe with this notion is that though it isn’t wrong to find sympathy or empathize with others’ misfortunes, I find that we revere those with tragedies attached to them. We gnash our teeth and tear at hot fascia like predators taking over territory not their own.
As Friend states, “For it seems that the value we attribute to great tragedies is closely tied to the pleasure we take in them. As usually interpreted, Aristotle located both the pleasure and the value of tragedy in its production of pity and fear through mimesis and the catharsis of those emotions.”
This thinking is most prevalent in the myth of the 27 Club. The series of events that lead to the deaths of these musicians and artists teeters between memorializing and sensationalizing. Language like “club” creates exclusivity and sensationalizes the circumstances, as if saying if you “live fast and die young”, then you too can join this club.
Speech like this primes people for tragedy and spectacle to go hand-in-hand. During major disastrous events like 9/11, the coverage oftentimes did more harm than good. It prioritized sensationalism and views over commemoration and connection.
In the paper “The Role of the Media and Media Hypes in the Aftermath of Disasters” by Peter Vasterman and others, they quote the media coverage saying, “People all over the world watched the dramatic images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center; they saw the gigantic smoke clouds, the panic in the city, the people jumping from the buildings, and finally the collapse of the towers.”
Then they describe how that media coverage affected their public opinion, stating, “The media are portrayed negatively: as writing sensation-seeking, enlarging anecdotic stories, especially on who is to blame; being in the way of rescue workers; repeating the same images (for example, the planes hitting the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers) over and over again.”
In today’s media, I find true crime media to be an extension of this madness, especially when the consumers are placed as the focal point instead of the victims and accuracy.
University of Nebraska–Lincoln scholar Kelli Boling in “Research examines the good, bad and ugly of true crime media” finds how exhaustive it is for families seeking justice for their loved ones and dealing with the loss of anonymity, saying, “There’s a horrible intrusiveness that’s never going to go away and often, it’s going to be covered for the rest of their lives,” and also, “They do feel like they’ve got some innate ability to solve the case that nobody else has, which isn’t true.”
True crime media also raises ethical questions of whether sensationalizing to gain attention is better in the long run for the courts. Someone could get one side of the story being bloated and want harsher punishments, and others could get the accurate information and want a less harsh sentence.
The Florida Pre-Law Review found this to be the case: “These differences in their desired responses to injustice can have significant legal implications as potential jurors with high levels of victim justice sensitivity may argue that a perpetrator should receive harsher punishment or a longer sentence.”
Do you find yourself Shakespearean? Hashing and re-hashing tragic tales for the sheer fact that knowing something someone else doesn’t brings you joy? We all have a little drama in us. You aren’t the only one. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but stopping to check for facts and remembering that there are real people attached to these stories is just as important.
Michaiah Stephens is a 22-year-old English major from Durham, N.C.
