It’s halfway through episode 8 that ‘Serial’ starts to feel gross to me.
Host / journalist Sarah Koenig and her assistant are recapping their “interview” with Jay — which they didn’t warn him about or arrange with him prior to turning up on his doorstep — and they’re talking about him breathlessly, like he’s a celebrity they managed to meet. Yet this is a frenzy of their whipping: Jay’s notoriety is a direct result of their (let’s call it what it is: presumptuous, even arrogant) amateur re-sleuthing of a case closed 15 years prior.
Until this point, ‘Serial’ had been relatively harmless, hypothetical discussion. The ickiest things got were when contact was made with peripheral figures, with their prior consent. Armchair detectives — albeit, ones more tireless in their fact-checking, more rigorous in their research, and supported by a production team — are still the town gossip of criminal investigation.
However, that was until the moment where they approached — again, unannounced and uninvited — a person who was, by their own admission, one of the three key players in this case, and the one who “had all the clues”. This was the equivalent of the gossipers stalking their subject, getting caught spying from the bushes outside the subject’s house, and then, once sprung, turning on their subject / springer and saying, “Well, while we’ve got your attention…”
It’s gross. Until now, I felt like my listening in on the series — my eavesdropping on the gossipers, if you will — was slightly less harmless than the act of gossiping itself, that my complicity was essentially ineffectual. But now, I’ve been dragged into a key participant’s life — again, let’s call it what it is: an invasion — and I am not comfortable with that.
For its first five episodes, I actually thought ‘Serial’ was a fictional radio play. Since discovering otherwise, I’ve found it increasingly disconcerting listening.
As a fictional radio play, many elements that stuck out to me had different significance than they do now. The slick audio production; the musical score; the “casting” — from such a warm-voiced, sympathetic narrator, to the variety of characters and their interesting “choices” in “delivery”; the well-researched background details (for example, in episode one, the exploration of family dynamics in migrant cultures). While read as fiction, these elements in ‘Serial’ add up to artistry: my consent to being manipulated by them is no different than choosing to get caught up in a TV soap opera or staged theatre; in other words, the artifice itself is on display. The “consent”, however, is to playing a game: both the entertainment and my emotional engagement in it are heightened specifically because it’s not real, and therefore harmless to others, and (hopefully) thought-provoking for me.
Yet, as non-fiction, these same elements are instead suspicious; some are, ethically speaking, downright dubious choices. The manipulation here is not consensual; if I’m to engage with non-fiction, especially under the auspices of “unbiased, objective” reporting, then the facts should be presented objectively, and not clouded with added elements — again, ethically dubious choices — such as a sympathetic narrator’s personal journey, or the strategic use of music, or the Oliver Stone-style smoothness of suggestive transitioning.
These tricks are forgivable when used in fiction, because in that realm they mean something else entirely. But by employing fiction devices in a non-fiction enterprise, both genres are invoked and neither is fully realised.
As a listener, I, like Jay in a way, have been invaded.
I’ve been built up solely by the series, and that build-up is the basis upon which that invasion is launched and justified. None of the build-up is actually real — and, as long as that goes unaddressed, the invasion will not be called what it is, and the invader — ‘Serial’ — will go on as an unmitigated ‘phenomenon’.
I paused episode 8 of the podcast episode to write this. I don’t know if I’ll resume listening beyond this point. Part of me wants to believe that this is going somewhere good — and I don’t mean the mystery being solved, but rather that the gossip and manipulation up to this point will reveal themselves to have been means to a morally justifiable end. But I don’t even trust my own motives for wanting to continue now. There are just a few too many extraneous literary devices employed in ‘Serial’ that are designed to draw the listener in — many that I’m sure have been discussed and analysed far more deeply in the myriad podcasts and online discussions about the series (which I’ve avoided the way one would “spoilers” for fiction entertainment) — and so perhaps my desire to see ‘Serial’ through is as manufactured as ‘Serial’ itself.
