Does Popular Culture Inspire Crime Or Is It The Other Way Round?

“I wanted him to be a likable person,” said Jeff Lindsay in a 2008 interview of his best-known creation, Dexter Morgan, the protagonist in his crime novel series that was later adapted for the hugely successful American TV series, Dexter (2006–13), now available on OTT platforms. “I wanted people to catch themselves rooting for a killer,” Lindsay had said.

The Miami-based novelist described the character as “a killer who regards murder as a form of performance art” and expressed his belief that the idea of murdering people, who were harming the innocent ones, could be justified to some extent. The ‘likable killer’ that he created has since been blamed for inspiring multiple real-life crimes—as terrifying and cold-blooded as in the series. The ‘inspiration’ was not so much about his moral standing as his modus operandi.

The latest in the list is the recent murder of 27-year-old Shraddha Walkar in New Delhi. The 28-year-old Aftab Poonawala has been accused of chopping his live-in partner into 35 pieces, keeping them in a fridge and scattering them across Delhi’s Mehrauli forest over the next 18 days. Poonawala has reportedly told the police that he was inspired by the series.

Dexter works with the police as a blood splatter analyst, which gives him opportunity to access crime data and work on unsolved crimes. He moonlights to kill those who he believes have escaped the long hands of justice. He kills killers on the loose in an elaborately dramatised manner and cold blood. He has a tool box of sharp-edged weapons—knives, saws and cleavers. He even used chainsaws. After killing, he cuts the bodies into pieces, carries them in garbage bags and dumps them in the ocean. He is on a mission—to take the law in hand against those the law could never reach.

Poonawala was not the first person reported to have been ‘inspired’ by Dexter. Take the South African Dexter-fan couple Maartens Van Der Merwe and Chane Van Heerden, for example. They dismembered and skinned a young man just to enjoy a murder. They were so obsessed with the series that Heerden had Maartens’ phone number saved as ‘Dexter’ and referred to him as ‘my Dexter’ in text messages.

There was the case of Mark Twitchell, an aspiring filmmaker from Canada, who apart from creating a Dexter spoof also created a ‘kill room’, like the one of Dexter in the TV show. Twitchell was aiming to be a serial killer but got arrested after the very first murder. Convicted to life imprisonment in 2011, he hogged the headlines yet again in 2013 when he managed to get a TV set in his prison cell as well as a cable package and had started watching Dexter.

Such instances of ‘inspiration’ from crime-based movies and TV series have frequently triggered debates around the probable ill impacts of such films and shows, a debate that has been on the revival path over the past few years due to a boom in crime-related content on OTT platforms, some of them hugely popular. Shows like True Detective, Mindhunter, Elementary and Money Heist have got millions hooked to binge watch them. Some of the series are based on detection and psychological exploration and some focussed on depiction of the criminals’ life and actions. Content involving serial killers has been found to achieve notable success.

“The success of horror films, popularity of true crime and prevalence of violence in the news implies that morbid curiosity is a common psychological trait,” behavioural scientist Coltan Scrivner, who works at the Recreational Fear Lab at Denmark’s Aarhus University, wrote in a 2021 research paper. He described ‘morbid curiosity’ as “a motivation to seek out information about dangerous phenomena”.

Throughout history, real-life incidents have given rise to many forms of fiction which have, in turn, influenced or inspired people in many ways. The same has been true for crime. People copy from or improvise on past experiences. Therefore, the debate around crime fiction, whether based on real-life stories or not, has also been about treatment and portrayal: Are they critically examining human behaviour or glorifying acts of violence and aggression just because crime sells.

Stories involving sex and violence have traditionally captured large audiences, aptly reflected in the famous quotation that French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard attributed to his American counterpart D.W. Griffth, “What do filmgoers want? A girl and a gun.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that 19-year-old school dropout Charles Raymond Starkweather’s killing spree along with his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in 1958 inspired nearly half a dozen film and television productions. One of them went on to be blamed for inspiring more real-life crimes.

It started in Nebraska with Starkweather killing a gas station attendant for refusing to give him a stuffed animal on credit. He then killed Fugate’s mother, stepfather and half-sister, because the parents had asked him to stay away from their daughter. Driving away together, they killed one of Starweather’s relatives and fled with his car. A young couple, who offered them a lift when their car got stuck in mud, became their next victims.

Starkweather and Fugate reached the residence of an industrialist in the stolen car, killed the man, his wife and maid, in cold blood, and ran away with the industrialist’s car, filling it with jewellery. They killed another person on their way as they felt the need to change their car to evade the police. The next 10 murders happened in a matter of 10 days. The number would have surely increased had they not run out of luck.

There was no pattern in their crimes—either in their modus operandi or in the profile of victims. They shot some to death with a rifle and some with a shotgun, while stabbing some others to death, an ideal plot for detective novel and films, as the murders seemed all disconnected. The chain of events became the inspiration behind Terrence Malick’s 1973 Hollywood movie Badlands, the 1993 TV mini-series Murder In The Heartland, the 1993 Kalifornia, the 1994 blockbuster Natural Born Killers and the 2004 Starkweather, among
notable ones.

Natural Born Killers, in turn, has been reported to have inspired eight real-life crimes, with young couples going on a killing spree. There was a massive hue and cry in American media in March 1995 after the case involving 19-year-old Sarah Edmondson and her 18-year-old boyfriend Benjamin James Darras came to light, all the more so because Edmondson belonged to a political dynasty in Oklahoma.

The duo had left in her white high-tech sports sedan, drove through Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida to return after two weeks. In between, as and when they ran out of money, they killed one and shot another to paralyse her for life. It became known following their arrest that they watched Natural Born Killers over and over the night before they left for the road trip.

The controversy reached such level that novelist John Grisham issued a statement saying that “the artist (director) should be required to share responsibility along with the nutcase who pulled the trigger” and that there was a “direct, causal link” between the movie and the murders. Patsy Byers, the woman who had been paralysed, had sued, apart from the Edmondson family, director Oliver Stone and producer Warner Brothers, alleging that the makers should have known that it could inspire similar crimes. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2001, as the U.S. court upheld the makers’ right to freedom of expression.

The mid-1990s was an important time in the United States in the context of this debate.  In a 1994 study titled “Portrayals of crime, race, and aggression in ‘reality-based’ police shows: A content analysis”, Professor Mary Beth Oliver of Penn State University found that violent crime was overrepresented in TV programmes as was the percentage of crimes that were portrayed as solved.

Director Stone denied the charge of having ‘blood in his hands’, arguing that he wanted to take a critical look at the U.S. media’s portrayal of ‘their favourite killers’. “It is not a film’s responsibility to tell you what the law is. And if you kill somebody, you’ve broken the law,” Stone said in an interview with The Guardian in 2002. Creative work, including films, can influence people in many ways, he said.

There certainly is some justification in his argument. In 2013, historian Ian Burney, a professor at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, wrote in his research paper that French criminologist Edmond Locard and Austrian criminal jurist Hans Gross, two founding fathers of crime scene investigation, were influenced by British writers Arthur Conan Doyle and R. Austen Freeman, the creators of fictional detectives Sherlock Holmes and Dr Thorndyke, respectively. “The stories showcased new methods of CSI: protecting the crime scene from contamination; preserving and recording the relationships between all objects in the scene, even the most trivial; and submitting minute trace evidence to scientific scrutiny. So it’s fair to say that Conan Doyle and Freeman helped investigators to systemise their methods to make the invisible, visible and the inconsequential, consequential,” Burney said.

Back home in India, as many as four Money Heist-inspired robberies have been reported in 2021 and 2022. The accused in a 2007 bank robbery case in Bengaluru reportedly claimed to have taken inspiration from the 2004 John Abraham-starrer Dhoom with regard to the modus operandi. Delhi-based master car lifter Robin had watched the Abhay Deol-starrer Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, said to be based on a real-life character, 25 times to hone his planning and execution skills.

Crimes have been copied even from comedy films in India. A Delhi-based gang had taken inspiration from the Bollywood comedy Khosla Ka Ghosla to cheat people by selling them land belonging to the government. Similarly, the Sanjay Dutt-starrer Munna Bhai M.B.B.S is learnt to have inspired students who were caught cheating in exam halls.

Law keepers and law breakers can both take their lessons from crime stories, fiction or nonfiction, detection-oriented or depiction-focussed. It depends on the taker.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Goading to Commit Crimes")