Noir and True Crime

The algorithm rots again. I have just subscribed to Channel 4 in order to be able to stream without the ads (well, almost without the ads, but that's a separate issue). And I decided to let them send me emails about what's on offer.

I like noir. Can't get enough of it, especially in foreign languages. I watched well over a series a week last year, many of them on Channel 4. So they send me notices of the noir series that are coming up. That's often pointless, because I already know, but fair enough.

They also clearly quite desperately want me to watch True Crime. I get endless emails about True Crime this True Crime that. "You've finished Pushover. You'll want to watch In The Footsteps of Killers". No, I effing well won't.

C4, or its algorithm, clearly don't understand that noir and true crime are worlds apart. Sure, there might be some people who really like watching both, but they are two utterly different genres which provide satisfaction to the viewer in almost entirely opposite ways.

Noir is an examination of the human condition from the inside. OK, there's poor noir, as there is poor anything, but good noir gets you right under the skin of the characters and enables, sometimes forces, you to experience their world and how they made and are making their decisions. It gives you a real sense of the possibilities for the human race - both good and evil. (Case in point "Honor" which I didn't really get into until the brilliantly symbolic final scene where the young man, who was a naive pampered student at the beginning, literally washes his hands of the blood of the people whose deaths he has caused. And his face still looks so innocent. That character change was gripping.)

Well done noir also nearly always gives a palpable sense of place. The sanitised board room, the delapidated flats, the rusting chains on the dockside, the body of a crow rotting in a field (rustic noir has its own special pull) unite to ground the characters' actions in the society that forms their home, and can spark very meaningful insight into the relationship between agency and structure.

True Crime, on the other hand, is rarely capable of being anything but voyeurism. You are always examining things from the outside. Even if we have on screen the actual victim, the actual perpetrator, the actual investigator who had the case, we never really see inside their minds. Whether it's in interviews, or monologues, or voice overs, what we see is - inevitably - carefully and thoroughly scripted interactions. Scripted either actually on paper or in the mind of the speaker. It's rarely if ever unguarded in the way we get inside the head of a noir protagonist. It's flat, it's trite, it's often exploitative because it gets people to revisit difficult times, without actually adding anything new or coming to any conclusion that wasn't already blindingly obvious.

Now, lots of people like True Crime (at least I assume they do, as it's on 93 different channels every day, including Christmas), and that's fine. TV gives people what they want; if that's what they want, so be it. I don't like it, but I don't have to watch it, and I have no wish to stop other people watching it if they want to. (There's a separate issue about the extent to which True Crime is part of the panoply of lobotomy TV which is intended to prevent the body politic from actually thinking about things.) I do, however, wish that Channel 4 - and other providers for that matter - would lift their heads out of their algorithms for a minute and recognise that noir and True Crime are worlds apart, entirely different genres of TV and liking one does not for a moment imply liking the other.