*The following has
minor spoilers for Serial and major spoilers for Season 4 of The Killing. It
does not assume you’ve seen/heard either of these, so if you don’t plan on
watching The Killing, or don’t particularly care about spoilers, you should be
fine.
Over the past couple of months, Serial has quickly become the most famous podcast ever to pod. It’s
the relaying of the results of a real investigation by reporter Sarah Koenig
into the murder of a girl named Hae Min Lee, and specifically whether the
convicted ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed actually committed the murder. The first half
of the episodes of the podcast were focussed almost entirely on the evidence
Koenig had collected about the case, and parcelling it out in a natural form
that arrested the reader and made them care about the results.
The podcast took a turn near the end of episode 6, “The Case
against Adnan Syed.” Sarah had just finished laying out all the evidence that
had accumulated against Adnan, and then her thoughts turned a different way.
She wonders aloud how someone who acted like Adnan, and spoke to her like Adnan
could be capable of this murder. But she also wondered if she was just being
manipulated. The story has progressed in a similar vein ever since then,
focussing on people and behaviours rather than hard evidence, because it seems
the hard evidence for the case has pretty well dried up. It has become no less
fascinating through this stretch, though.
Through this whole process, the listener had the opportunity
to hear many parts of Koenig’s taped interviews with Adnan. And he literally
says all the right things. With everything he says, my immediate reaction is “How
can someone who had committed apparent cold-blooded murder speak like this?”
But it’s not just how he speaks; it’s listening to how those who were in
contact with him, both before and after the murder. He’s always presented by
everyone as kind and caring and gentle, even by those who think he committed
the murder. Anyone in contact with him says he was not overly upset about the
breakup with Hae Min Lee, at least externally. This breakup was said by the
prosecution to be the driving motive for him to commit murder.
Yet the hard evidence points to him, and it pointed to him
enough that he was able to get convicted. And while I don’t believe that he
should have been convicted, that there are more than enough problems with the
prosecution’s case that there is reasonable doubt, if you asked me at gunpoint,
I would say that Adnan Syed killed Hae Min Lee.
This seems so simple. You can’t trust personality evaluations
when looking at murders. People who seem like outstanding citizens have
committed them to the shock of everyone around. I know of these stories, you
know of these stories. However, to this point, I’ve never had such an in depth
look at a real person accused of murder that really doesn’t seem like the type.
And it messes with your head badly. Adnan Syed is not a trained actor; he
should not be able to pull off the role of the innocent victim of circumstance
as well as he’s pulled it off. And that’s not only 32 year old Adnan who is
speaking to Koenig and to the audience from his jail cell, but 17 year old
Adnan was doing the same charming innocent victim bit back them. The judge at
sentencing accused him of manipulating through his charm. It just doesn’t seem
likely that the things Adnan says, and the way he acts both then and now are
the actions of a perfectly rehearsed psychopath, or even the actions of someone
who let their emotions run away with them to such a degree that they committed
murder. This person committing murder seems like something off a TV show.
The Killing is an
interesting place to turn when looking at Serial. It was one of the first
television shows to try to pull off the “one case over a season of episodes”, a
format Serial is sort of piggybacking
off of. I watched Season 4 recently. The conclusion of the matter is the
detectives find out that a son was moved into a trancelike state by his peers
at his military school and convinced to kill his parents. He kills them and the
rest of his family, including his young sister. Afterwards, he attempts to
commit suicide by shooting himself in the head, but fails, and the impact of
the bullet wound causes him to experience amnesia and forget the whole event.
It’s not a great season of television, and the case isn’t
particularly groundbreaking, though it does have a nice hook to it. It has a
cool roundabout narrative, where suspicion is initially on the son (Kyle),
moved off of him for a while, before finally landing back at the place where
they started, that the initial suspicion was correct. But the writers are very
careful to make it seem that Kyle was not capable of murder, and they get to
work on that almost from the moment he wakes up out of his coma.
There’s one scene in particular where the lead detective
takes Kyle back to the house where the murders were committed. It’s a very
emotionally charged moment, as Kyle immediately throws up upon seeing the blood
stains and being walked through exactly what happened. He’s not in the role of
the charming sociopath, he’s in the role of the normal person who doesn’t
understand how he could have done something like this. There’s one point where
the detective asks him point blank whether he could have killed his younger sister,
even if it were possible with his parents, and Kyle says no, and there’s no
doubt at all that he means it. There is no acting about it.
The writers of The
Killing are positing that people who seem normal and grounded are capable
of terrible things if they snap the wrong way, things they themselves wouldn’t
have been capable of, and there have been real cases that have indicated that
to be true. There’s no such thing as the personality of a killer, they can
manifest many different faces to the public eye.
This is what is messing with my head so badly about Serial. Emotionally removed, and
ignoring everything said by or about Adnan, he seems like the killer. And there’s
ample reason to ignore all that stuff. There’s many times where you simply cannot
tell someone is a killer by the way they act before or after an incident. But I’m
wondering if TV is influencing me the wrong way in this regard. How many people
are really like Hannibal Lecter, the charming sociopath? Or like Kyle, the
normal kid who snapped? Maybe TV is making me think these types of things are
way more common than they actually are. Maybe I should be paying more attention
to the character references, both from my instincts from listening to him talk
and the way the people around him refer to him. Maybe people just aren’t as
good as acting as TV, which is built for dramatic purposes, makes you believe.
I’m stuck. I’m reluctant to see Adnan as a manipulative
psychopath, because that seems such a rare and extraordinary thing to me that
he would distribute absolutely no other signs of that to anyone. Is he a
version of Kyle, someone normal who suddenly snapped on the person who broke up
with him, and is just fighting hard to maintain his innocence because he can’t
bear to see people think of him that way? Maybe, but how was he able to
maintain so calm and collected between the breakup and the murder if it made
him angry to that degree? Is he innocent? The facts just don’t seem to back
that up.
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