Your Quarterly CrimeCon Hot Take

This time Vanity Fair steps up to the plate and it is a hot mess

cw: mentions of sexual violence

One of the few reasons I continue to visit the desolate hellscape that is Twitter X is because Brandon Taylor posts there from time to time. Last week, Taylor—essayist, novelist, scientist, and author of the essential Substack sweater weather—posed the following question:

If Brandon Taylor was talking about true crime content, I knew something interesting must be going on. So I read the Vanity Fair article on the True Crime convention, and . . . hoo boy.

As regular readers of my newsletter know, I’ve been tracking the New York Times’s ambivalent relationship to the current true crime moment with some interest.¹ See, on the one hand, you find articles with this tone that combines “oh my stars did you know this was happening” pearl-clutching along with patronizing snark over the commercialization of true crime content and the “fandom” of its consumers. On the other, the Times owns Serial. So. Now it’s Vanity Fair’s turn to both “discover” and judge a pop culture trend that has been with us both for at least ten years and since, you know, humans decided to communicate. This piece attempts to combine both the snark and the seriousness into one article and the result is, well, I’ll refer back to Brandon Taylor:

I wholeheartedly concur that the tone is “truly bizarre.” I’m not sure I totally agree with his analysis of the content? I can see the argument both about how the essay essentializes a certain experience of inhabiting a female body, but I think the problem is not “no analysis” but rather a misplaced attempt to shoehorn anecdotal experience as analysis of an impulse (attending CrimeCon) that the author doesn’t seem to understand or respect.² And that’s before things go well and truly off the rails.

The problem starts with the title: “The Dark Origins of the True-Crime Frenzy at CrimeCon” (emphasis mine). I know the author, Kathleen Hale³, probably didn’t compose this header, but I think it concisely captures the problematic position of the piece as a whole: a mysterious and ominous series of events has produced CrimeCon attendees who are out of control, unpredictable, and a little bit dangerous.

The first third or so of the piece describes the events and participants of CrimeCon⁴ with a condescending and critical tone that is honestly a pretty big turn-off, even to someone (such as myself) who is inherently skeptical of the event. You have the typical descriptions of attendees participating in ethically suspect activities like posing with police caps and collecting crime themed merch, but Hale’s editorializing is so snarky that I was put in the unfortunate and unexpected position of mentally defending the behavior of the attendees. A few examples:

• relating how two sisters were warned by their mother about “bad men” since childhood, and speculates that’s why “perhaps they were here tonight, still alive”

• describing women in “sequins and feather boas shimm[ying] to a bracing cover of ‘Shama Lama Ding Dong’

• noting how two friends “fondly recalled how they’d been talking about murder”

• categorizing any (female) fans of the true crime celeb Paul Holes as “true-crime junkies who lust after the troubled male detective archetype”

• observing a woman who “zoomed past . . . on her surgery scooter, pushing herself along with one good foot, unstoppable in her quest for more crime stories”

It’s not just me, right? It’s something about those adverbs and adjectives: a “bracing” cover; the “fond” recollection about a gruesome topic; the “unstoppable . . .quest.” The implied silliness of the two sisters surviving only to attend a CrimeCon disco. The casual assertion that any interest in Paul Holes is sexual. And FAR be it from me to stand up for Nancy Grace in any context, but I cringed when Hale called her the attendees’ “patron saint of trauma” and emphasizes how “the fringe on her leather blazer trembles with every emotional turn.” She’s setting herself apart and above not just from the event but from the women engaging with it. There’s more than a little taste of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” and I don’t mean that as a compliment.⁵

Which makes Hale’s move in the rest of the piece even more disorienting. She digs into the past experience of a handful of attendees, and uncovers their history of sexual assault, repeated abuse, and traumatic encounters with men. Hale writes that she herself relates to and shares some of these experiences. Suffering from and surviving patriarchal violence is, presumably, the “dark origins” that leads to the “frenzy” of choosing to attend CrimeCon. And this is one of the things that sticks in Brandon Taylor’s craw, I think. Hale’s statement that:

. . . being a woman leads to trauma, and exposing oneself to other people’s traumas helps to make sense of one’s own experiences, to contextualize them, and to find community.

I wasn’t as affronted by this argument. Listening, contextualizing, and connecting doesn’t sound much like a frenzy, but whatever. The connection between women’s attraction to true crime and fear of being a victim of violent crime is not new, but maybe it is to the readers of Vanity Fair. It appears to be a gesture towards empathy, even if packaged in a voyeuristic posture of “can you believe what these women are doing” so ugh, fine. What I found truly jaw-dropping was this paragraph, swinging into the last third of the article like a wrecking ball. Hale relates how an attendee

perfectly distilled what is, arguably, the most fucked-up layer of womanhood; after a certain age, the constant threat of rape fades, leaving in its wake a deafening silence. And pathetically, it’s only then, once the constant catcalling and threats of violence wane, that the truly pathological part sets in: Suddenly deprived of all the little indignities that have soundtracked our lives, we miss them. The patriarchy leaves an indelible mark on us, and we hate it for that, even as we still crave its attention.

Reader, my wtf was audible. The totalizing assumptions about the experiences, psychologies, histories, and desires of the “our,” “we,” and “us” of “womanhood” that Hale makes here are as astonishing as they are simplistic, superficial, and unexamined. My questions about what in the world this diagnosis of a “pathetic” “pathology” common to all “womanhood” has to do with CrimeCon are secondary to my dismay over its place in any article at all. I never set out to write a hit piece on anyone because I don’t think me dunking on an essay for six paragraphs furthers true crime scholarship. I have not read Kathleen Hale’s other work, so this is not specifically about her, but rather the choices that were made in this essay. I think it’s important to think through how and why I feel some pieces fail, in addition to amplifying those that succeed, and this article doesn’t manage to pull off a coherent critique of CrimeCon or to contribute to an understanding of how true crime operates now.

SO. If you’d like to read more sophisticated and thoughtful analyses of the intersection between “ordinary people” and true crime, I recommend, as always, Drusilla Moorhouse’s “Suspicious Circumstances” newsletter for Buzzfeed. In the past few months she has published an excellent piece on The Midnight Order and another on how “people with ties to notorious true crime cases are using social media to tell their stories on their own terms and connect with each other.”⁶ Not an ounce of snark in either.

I think these sorts of exposé pieces keep appearing because it is important to reckon with how true crime is reflecting and responding to this era of social media saturation, and how it changes the way consumers in turn relate to the content. This relationship, between a reader and a text, is one that is constantly renegotiated and reappraised as our media landscape evolves. Which brings me to one last mention of Brandon Taylor. This has nothing to do with true crime content, but he wrote a truly exceptional reflection on the recent revelations about Alice Munro this month, and I will take any excuse to recommend it to you all.

what i'm doing about alice munro

1. In general here and their take on CrimeCon in particular here.

2. In case it’s not obvious, disagreeing in any degree with Brandon Taylor scares the dickens out of me. Not because he’s a cruel or aggressive online presence who is aware of me in any universe, but because my respect for his intellect and analytical prowess is truly boundless.

3. Hale is a crime writer who has published a true crime book on Slenderman, which makes the authorial pose of this piece even more puzzling.

4. 2023 in Orlando, not this year’s convention in Nashville. I’m not sure why there was such a delay in publishing the piece?

5. You probably know this, but it’s a David Foster Wallace essay, first published in Harper’s as “Shipping Out,” about the existential despair Wallace experiences on a seven-day cruise, which is in and of itself I think (I have done no research so this might be a very obvious point) a riff on Hunter S. Thompson’s classic “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” which I love. It really makes a difference in which direction one punches, it seems.

6. The Times, in their piece on how survivors are using TikTok that came out yesterday, is way behind Moorhouse on this angle.