Wine country tragedy as prurient entertainment

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Monday, March 31, 2008

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By MATT POPE

Newspeak

Saturday while browsing around a local bookstore, I found a paperback near the front of the shop titled “Nightmare in Napa” -- the cover photo featuring a model’s ruby red lips sensuously parting in anticipation of a sip from a glass of what looked to be a deep, sanguine syrah or merlot.

At first glance I thought it might be a murder mystery filled with intrigue and deception, set in a glamorized, fictional Napa Valley estate. Before long however, I realized that it was a non-fiction about the very real, very horrible, and still very fresh-in-our-minds double homicide of Napa residents Adriane Insogna and Leslie Mazarra. The author appears to specialize in this type of book, with other titles recounting tragedies unique to specific locales.

This called to mind a long standing observation: that for as perpetually worried as Americans tend to be about crime, we also seem strangely fascinated with it -- provided it’s presented in just the right, tawdry manner and that we don’t have any personal connection to the events depicted.

This book was exceptionally jarring since, as locals, we know that this particular crime was anything but glamorous. Of course no crime ever is, but I guess for readers in other parts of the country there is some prurient interest in, as the publisher’s notes for the book read, “the shocking true story of murder in California Wine Country”.

For some reason, distance -- whether it is the passage of time, or unfamiliarity with a region -- seems to allow brutality to become entertainment. Perhaps there is some deep psychological reason why human beings do this, I can’t say for sure.

Our books, movies and diversions are, to a degree, our stories -- the contemporary myths, legends and illustrative tales that, at the very least, reflect our values back to us. So what does it say then about our collective psyche that a decidedly violent and pointless crime in a simple Napa city home gets packaged up in a veneer of wine country glamour and sold back to us as sensationalist fodder?

Does such a book provide insight for people trying to find some -- any -- sort of meaning in a senseless crime? Does it somehow mute the horror of the event by trivializing it? Or is it just a writer, and judging by the reviews not a very talented one, trying to cash in by playing to the lowest common denominator?

But as much as our stories can be used to exploit, pander and manipulate for the sake of making a buck, they can at times also edify.

One cinematic example that leaps to mind is 1998’s Saving Private Ryan. Every one I know who saw Private Ryan in the theater experienced the same phenomenon that I did: that after the relentless opening sequence, the theater audience was dead silent -- stunned and perhaps even traumatized by the unflinchingly accurate look at armed combat that Spielberg sought to recreate.

For a generation weaned on action movies that often featured our current governor dispatching legions of faceless henchmen with endless rounds and pithy one-liners, this was a profoundly real look at warfare, in which brutality, chaos and naked horror were self-evident. The reverent silence in the theater was hopeful to me; it meant that perhaps we weren’t de-sensitized to violence and horror, but only to trivialized depictions of it.

Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven similarly did an admirable job of upending the myth of the old-west gunfighter, and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers -- as disturbing as it was -- was also a pointed satire of the media’s tendency to make scumbags into celebrities.

The causes of crime are myriad in a society, poverty is usually the greatest undercurrent, alienation another; but there are also genuinely anti-social personalities, usually a combination of bad nature and bad nurture. As much as we worry about crime in this country, it always struck me that maybe one good idea is to question our most salacious impulses by refusing to turn the pathetic and amoral in to superstars, not by censorship, but by voting with our dollars or turning the channel.

Once the market gets a hold of something that will sell -- whether by appealing to the people we want to be, or the decidedly less-resistant path of appealing to what we don’t like to admit to -- it will do everything necessary to get and hold our attention. What sells then becomes what is reflected back to us.

For my money the lives of our neighbors Adriane and Leslie deserve more dignified treatment than a boorishly alliterative title and a crass attempt at cashing in on people’s morbid fascination with crime, and romantic ideas of what life in the wine country is like.

1 comment(s)

JimClark wrote on Mar 29, 2008 6:26 AM:

" Well written. Having worked in mental health, I have seen some very diverse people who seem to harbor similar thoughts save that they were psychotic. One must wonder where one ends and “normal” processes begin. Where do the extremes come from? What our human civilization gives us is the evil Manson’s through the population that gives us the Schweitzer’s or Dalai Lama’s? It is a conundrum that our generation has not been capable of defining.

There is something called negative reinforcement. It is something that earlier generations grew up with before socio/behavioral “science” and the ACLU intervened. A personal sense of ethics ingrained during childhood to do the proper things for the good of all People. A great deal of that seems to have rooted deeply in the American mid-west. It comes as no surprise as that is where Americans settled our land of the free. The east and west coasts seem to be where some “new age” is born every day or two and its values are as momentary. I hesitate to say more as I have seen what Hollywood can do to a state called Montana. Rapid City, South Dakota seems to attempt to become some plastic version of one coast and/or the other. They are the anomaly.
It is not innocence or naivety to hold our American values. It is ignorance of those values that cause many of us to question certain mentalities. "

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