I started watching the Jinx because, like many others, I
needed some true crime methadone to Serial’s heroin. I ended up getting pulled
in, but not for the same reasons. Serial was engrossing because the people
tangled up in its Dickensian yarn were likeable. Sarah Koenig is a smart,
funny, relatable reporter who you can imagine being friends with. Adnan is
easily sympathetic and even Jay –an early candidate for the villain of the
story – comes across as a reasonable person when he finally shows up. The lack
of obvious bad guy actually raises the stakes. Because someone has to be lying,
but the more we know the harder it is to believe that any of the principle
characters would mislead us. And the fact that (I’m assuming) the majority of
listeners were rooting for Adnan the whole time gives this eerie undertone to
everything. Was the case mishandled? Definitely. But he still might have done
it. We all might be rooting for a murderer.
Fiction is storytelling without responsibility to facts. And
facts have no responsibility to the conventions of fiction. In the case of
Serial, the facts didn’t arrange themselves into a satisfying ending the way
they would in a fictional crime series. Although an intriguing coda was added
IRL when it was announced that Adnan had been granted another appeal, partly
due to evidence that Koenig herself dug up. We’ll see what happens there.
In the meantime, Serial’s anticlimax left us salivating for
more true crime, and HBO obliged with the docu-series “The Jinx: The Life and
Deaths of Robert Durst.”
The Jinx is different from Serial in a few important ways.
Most obviously, it’s video not audio. Which is a different kind of
storytelling. The images that we had to use our imaginations for in Serial are
in the Jinx reenacted in ghostly, slow-motion heightened reality sequences
accompanied by the requisite photographs and talking heads.
The backbone is the same. A storyteller (not a cop, a
detective, or anyone involved in criminal justice of any kind) is given access
to the primary suspect in a murder case, the details of which remain murky. The
two players aren’t likeable the way their radio counterparts were. Director
Andrew Jarecki comes across as a goateed Hollywood type because that’s what he
is. And Robert Durst, with his nasal monotone and sunken black eyes, barely
registers as human let alone sympathetic.
It’s easy to say that the circumstances of Robert Durst’s
life are stranger than fiction. But somewhat more amazingly, they’re exactly as strange as fiction. Every detail of
his story seems cribbed off of John Grisham. An eccentric, alienated man from a
family of New York Billionaires. An unsolved disappearance of a beautiful young
woman. Another woman with mob connections executed in her own home. Cross
dressing. Dismemberment. All the lurid details that people expect from any
paperback potboiler. Right down to the satisfying ending.
This is another place where the Jinx differs from Serial. It
has an ending. A piece of evidence linking Durst to a killing for which he was
previously acquitted surfaces, and Jarecki confronts him about it on camera.
Durst denies everything and then proceeds to go to the bathroom WHILE STILL
WEARING HIS MIC and mumble what sounds a whole lot like a confession to himself
while taking a piss.
I watched the final episode the night that it aired. And
like most television viewers I did so while also looking at other things on
other screens. Before I made it to that crazy final scene, I saw that the top story
on NYTimes.com was that Durst had confessed during the finale. This came
several days after the news that he had been arrested in New Orleans for murder
based (once again) on evidence discovered not by professional detectives but by
filmmakers.
The narrative arc of Serial bends in Adnan’s favor. Koenig
and her colleagues are journalists, and they attempt objectivity. They make
compelling arguments against him. But really it’s clear that she thinks/hopes
he’s innocent and we do too. Now he’s getting another appeal. Similarly, you
don’t have to watch more than the opening credits of the Jinx to know that in
spite of the apparent chumminess between Jarecki and Durst, the producers of
the show are pretty fucking sure he’s guilty. Now he’s behind bars again.
“True Crime” as a genre has been around for hundreds of
years, and it’s easy to see the appeal. The whodunit/police procedural is a
foolproof storytelling mechanism, and if it actually happened – if these
rapists and murderers and dismembering billionaires actually walk among us –
that just adds spice. It makes us feel a little more in danger, which we like. But
this genre means something different in the internet age. Citizens are becoming
citizen journalists and journalists are acting like detectives, so it’s only
natural that the world of Twitter/Reddit/et al be overrun with budding citizen
detectives. We saw it after the Boston bombings. We saw it while Serial was
still unfolding. It’s going to keep happening as the news becomes more and more
immersive. This will help some innocent people, hurt some innocent people, help
some guilty people, and hurt some guilty people. If the fad passes, we can all
tally up the results and argue over whether it was a good or a bad thing
overall.
