{"id":9830,"date":"2022-07-06T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-06T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9830"},"modified":"2022-10-27T08:25:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-27T12:25:50","slug":"how-true-is-true-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9830","title":{"rendered":"How True is True Crime?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the current issue of Wired<\/em>, cultural commentator Virginia Heffernan writes<\/a> about her long relationship with the true-crime tale The Staircase<\/em> and its seemingly endless, Escher-like iterations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It first came to her attention in 2005 in the form of a six-hour documentary, recorded on a set of DVDs. True-crime was less of a thing on television then, yet she found the The Staircase<\/em> \u201camong the most captivating films I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d It won numerous awards, including a Peabody. And, it was produced by a French filmmaker with the prescient name, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. Not quite Holmes, but a worthy investigator nonetheless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Staircase<\/em> recounts a 2001 case from Durham, North Carolina, in which war-novelist Michael Peterson was tried and convicted for the grisly murder of his wife Kathleen. He claimed she died falling down a staircase, but the authorities didn\u2019t buy it. They were convinced he had bludgeoned her to death and charged him with murder. An argument over Peterson\u2019s bisexuality triggered the assault, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The jury convicted him, and he received a life sentence, but in 2011, the verdict was overturned. (A prosecution witness had lied.) In 2017, awaiting a new trial, Peterson entered an Alford plea<\/a> in which he accepted a charge of voluntary manslaughter, was sentenced to time served, and walked away a free man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since that time, there seems the repackaging possibilities have proliferated. In 2012, de Lestrade updated his original documentary with coverage of Peterson\u2019s second trial (Rotten Tomatoes has no critics\u2019 rating, though one wrote \u201cAppalls in its presentation of the sheer incompetence of one \u2018expert,\u2019\u201d while audiences rated it 75%). In 2018, it came to ABC as a 10-episode documentary, with more new material (Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics\u2019 rating 94%; audiences 82%), and in May 2022, HBO Max aired a fictionalized miniseries, The Staircase<\/em>, by Antonio Campos, starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette (Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics\u2019 rating 92%; audiences 77%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And this probably isn\u2019t a complete list. At this point, where does reality lie? As Hefffernen says, \u201cdocumentaries are filled with staged stuff, and fiction films use real names, real plot points, and often real dialog drawn from court records.\u201d Poor Kathleen Peterson seems a bit lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Lestrade criticizes the recent film for suggesting his team was biased in favor of Peterson, when through its several iterations, his Staircase<\/em> attempted to leave its viewers uncertain as to the husband\u2019s guilt. However, \u201ctaking sides\u201d may be an artifact of de Lestrade\u2019s decision to tell the story from the point of view of Peterson and his legal team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As true-crime television and documentaries proliferate, and podcasts gain in listenership, it may become harder to separate fact from fiction. Without taking sides on this key problem, Heffernen concedes these hybrid genres have \u201clived in the flicker of truth and poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the current issue of Wired, cultural commentator Virginia Heffernan writes about her long relationship with the true-crime tale The Staircase and its seemingly endless, Escher-like iterations. It first came to her attention in 2005 in the form of a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Is \"The Staircase\" a step in the wrong direction? Away from truth or at its heart?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[58,35,104,1596],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentaries","category-real-life","category-the-morgue","category-true-crime"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2yy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9832,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9830\/revisions\/9832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}