To be a woman and interested (in an anthropologically
detached way) in another woman’s murder isn’t subversive
anymore. It’s as brave as eating
battery farmed chicken or setting fire to a crash test dummy.
If a thing’s very purpose is suffering it isn’t radical
to enjoy inflicting violence upon it.
But wait – the study of canonical violence
isn’t the same as the infliction of violence.
But looking at an act isn’t the same as studying it.
And witnessing an act isn’t the same as committing it.
So, I guess we’re at an impasse.
Somewhere between depravity and righteousness.
And where’s that?
The recent market demand for velodromes,
I suppose. We can edit this later. Throw in some xylophones.
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week’s poem is *Outtake #3 by Susannah Dickey, and it poses a simple but seemingly timeless question: Is nothing sacred?
In this particular poem, that question has a very important context, and that’s entertainment. I read this poem this past weekend in the Forward Poetry Collection for 2024 and loved the way in which it mimics the language of one of the most subtle forms of predatory entertainment today, the True Crime Podcast.
Dickey’s poem is a clever look at the ways in which something can pretend to be a form of support and study while also monetizing it in the most troubling of ways.
The whole poem's message, and indeed the message of the collection it comes from Isdal, is that there might be no ethical way to enjoy content that comes from the suffering of others.
Isdal is Susannah Dickey’s debut poetry collection. The title of the collection comes from the real-life case of the Isdal Woman. To quote the BBC:
‘’In November 1970, the badly burnt body of a woman was found in a remote spot in Norway's Isdalen valley.
Someone had cut the labels off her clothes and scraped distinctive marks off her belongings, as if to stop her from being identified.
And as police started investigating her death, they uncovered a trail of coded messages, disguises, and fake identities—but never cracked the case. ’’(Cheung 2017)
This, as you can imagine, is the stuff true crime podcasters and documentarians dream of. A cold case with no clear answers, full of mystery that only gets increasingly tangled when more is uncovered. Ironically, the BBC itself has a podcast on the case called Death in Ice Valley. (“Death in Ice Valley” n.d.)
It is on this case that Susannah Dickey creates a fictional podcast of her own, complete with two inappropriately chirpy, occasionally flirty, and usually tone-deaf co-hosts. One male and one female.
This fictitious production makes up the first section of the collection named Podcast. The other sections, as the poet herself puts it, are:
‘’a lyric essay trying to figure out why true crime appeals to us, and what failures of conscience and kindness are necessary to its production and success. Finally, there is a sequence of poems written about the young girl who found the Isdal Woman's body, centred around the longevity and lasting impacts of trauma and gendered violence. (Doyle 2023)
All sections examine the strange cognitive dissonance required to actually engage with entertainment around something as gruesome and harrowing as femicide.
*outtake #3 is an unused excerpt from the fictional podcast. Where the speaker, presumably one of the co-hosts or both, seems to have a sudden moment of clarity and realise the macabre nature of what they're doing.
That unravelling live on air, as it were, is what, for me, makes the poem so engaging.
As you may have guessed from the number 3 in the poem's title, this is one of a sequence of outtakes in the first section of Isdal. Each one revealing the more predatory, shallow, or realistic elements of true crime. The first is an attempt at controlling the audience's reaction to the violence of the podcast by choosing just the right sound effects. The second is both co-hosts worrying about whether their chosen gruesome murder will be ‘’popular enough.’’
To make analysing Outtake #3 a little bit easier, I’ve split the poem into three distinct sections. The first of which seems to act as a mouthpiece for the poet’s own thoughts on the astounding popularity the true crime genre is enjoying:
To be a woman and interested (in an anthropologically
detached way) in another woman’s murder isn’t subversive
anymore. It’s as brave as eating
battery farmed chicken or setting fire to a crash test dummy.
If a thing’s very purpose is suffering it isn’t radical
to enjoy inflicting violence upon it.
From the very beginning, the poem adopts the impartial, almost cold tone of documentaries and podcasts, claiming a lack of bias. Words like anthropologically are often employed by these podcasts to lend an air of pseudo-objectivity and credibility to the production (Keeler n.d.)2021).
The point of the section is simple: there isn’t anything rebellious or counterculture-esque about learning about violence against women, to quote the poem; another woman’s murder isn’t subversive.
The poet goes on to draw comparisons to battery farming and Crash Dummy immolation, two other acts of violence that are ubiquitous and widespread, just like the murder of women. The poet is not belittling femicide or indeed violence against women but rather pointing out the bizarre logic of some people who attempt to justify their listening to True Crime. Or those who attempt to rationalise away the macabre nature of such entertainment.
Dickey’s imagery here is strong and vibrant; it jars the reader and forces them to examine something that has become mundane. In using the examples she’s chosen, she highlights the absurdity of using the word brave to describe engaging with murder content.
The kind of justifications for true crime I’ve just described are becoming more and more widespread, particularly in the wake of the self-awareness and criticism now being levelled against that style of content.
Scholar Pamela Burger neatly encapsulates the backlash in this phrase:
‘’This debate about the value of true crime speaks to our ambivalence over consuming real-life tales of horror. That anybody benefits—through monetary gain or personal titillation—from domestic murder, sex crimes, and grotesque violence seems distasteful, and so we want to consign true crime to the lowest rungs of culture.'' (Burger 2016)
Her article delves into the history of the true crime genre (it’s cited and linked below in the substack transcript and is well worth a read), but like many articles of its kind, it goes on to attempt a justification of the genre.
Dickey, on the other hand, refuses this. Her speaker puts it to the audience that you can partake, even enjoy true crime, but don’t treat it as a virtue.
If a thing’s very purpose is suffering it isn’t radical
to enjoy inflicting violence upon it.
The poet puts it best in her own words. Here is a quote from her interview with Forward Prizes:
‘’Maybe, as a woman, there's a self-protective element to ravenously consuming the images and details of other women's deaths. If you choose to view it as entertainment and allow it to entertain you, then you are about as psychologically removed from the victim as it is possible to be; you become a voyeur, not a victim, and as long as you are not like the victim, the pervasive and frightening violence that exists around you can't touch you. It's not a mode of thinking that is useful or generative, but it makes sense.'' (“Susannah Dickey” 2023)
These words from Dickey herself mimic the musings of her fictional cohosts in the next section:
But wait – the study of canonical violence
isn’t the same as the infliction of violence.
But looking at an act isn’t the same as studying it.
And witnessing an act isn’t the same as committing it.
So, I guess we’re at an impasse.
Somewhere between depravity and righteousness.
Here we see our speaker, or speakers, attempt to engage in the psychological removal just described by Dickey. But wait—there is a pause both for the reader and the hosts themselves as they attempt to escape the frightening violence they consume and, thus, the frightening reality of what they’re doing.
They hope that, using the objective, academic approach highlighted in the first section of the canonical study, they are somehow not complicit in the further exploitation of the victim.
The logic of the speaker's statements, or perhaps their conscience, is catching up with them. They begin to contradict themselves:
But looking at an act isn’t the same as studying it.
And witnessing an act isn’t the same as committing it.
Dickey’s clever use of repetition of the words But, it and isn’t helps to create a kind of looping, labyrinthine frame of logic, which leaves the reader mildly confused because it just doesn't stack up. We can almost feel the co hosts sweating, as they try and make sense of what they're doing. What we are not confused by, is the mild hint of insincerity creeping into the speaker's words.
The multitude of comparisons—study and infliction, looking and studying, witnessing and committing—all serve almost as dead ends for the speakers. They must finally admit defeat of some kind.
So, I guess we’re at an impasse
Except an impasse isn’t surrender, and we realise that nothing’s been admitted here except that the speaker hasn’t found a resolution they find satisfactory.
Susannah Dickey’s web of rhetoric does a great job of aping the tone of many people’s arguments in favour of true crime and allegations of exploitation. They argue that the content built around other people's murders is useful in an academic sense, that it raises awareness of violent crimes, that they are somehow educational, or that there is a social value to studying cases like these.
These rousing defences often cite the social impact of early examples of true crime podcasts like Serial or Jinx. Particularly how they shed light on the cases they were based on and pushed them forward.(Keeler 2021.) However, many academics and journalists have been quick to point out how these shows are outliers and how entertainment networks have taken the wrong message from their success; Audiences were drawn to quality production and storytelling, not just murder. However production companies have chosen instead to simply churn out more and more true crime content. (Saraiya 2016)
Other scholars, however, have noted that even if there is some kind of social benefit to these programmes, that doesn’t negate the harm and exploitation of the victims and their families. Jack Miles is one such academic, who states in his essay Imagining Mayhem:
‘’There may be a social utility in such writing, but recall that when psychiatrists write up their cases for professional literature, they change the names. If the authors of "true crime" wanted to spare the victims or collateral victims of violent crime further unwelcome notoriety, rather than building on just that notoriety to build the audience for their books, it would certainly be possible for them to change names as well. '' (Miles 1991.)
Jack Miles wrote this in 1991, around the time of the American Psycho scandal, but his point still stands: the creators of true crime content do not take enough responsibility for the harm it might do.
Dickeys cutting self-consuming logic deftly exposes that fact. There really can be no justification for exploitative true crime, or even well-meaning examples. So the last line of the section, Somewhere between depravity and righteousness, is just another hollow substitute for responsibility from the hosts. The impasse they speak of is an abdication of the impact their content will have.
There’s another clever nod to pseudo-credibility or pseudo-dignified tone in the use of righteousness and depravity. These grand concepts are there to make it seem as though this podcast on the Isdal Woman is a moral pursuit that understands it’s own weight.
The final section of the poem assures us that the exact opposite is true:
And where’s that?
The recent market demand for velodromes,
I suppose. We can edit this later. Throw in some xylophones.
The phrase and where’s that shatters the lofty musings of the last section. In doing so, it shows that our speakers, and thus our hosts, are both unaware and uncaring of the absurd, tone- and nature of their discussion. The final two lines are incredibly well observed, paradoxically chilling and comedic in equal measure.
The recent market demand phrase lets us know that both co-hosts are marketing savvy and very much aware of the success and monetary gain their exploitation stands to bring them. The velodromes reference, I have to admit, has completely thrown me. For me, I think it might be a reference to all the Peloton subscriptions, fitness food programmes, and supplements you constantly hear advertised on popular podcasts. It is an all encompassing image for the fitness fantastic industry that uses popular podcasts as marketing platform. But I could be completely wrong on that. I’d love to hear your interpretation, if you want to share it.
If we take that interpretation to be accurate, then the goal of these two isn’t to raise awareness for the victim to help solve the mystery, but rather to provide cold, hard slot for sponsorship.
The next line begins with, I suppose, a nice reminder from Dickey that we are listening to an outtake and not a finished, polished product.
The final two sentences reveal our speaker's ultimate cynicism. All their doubt and moralising will vanish with the click of a mouse as they edit later. Finally, they’ll finish it all off with a xylophone outro.
These last lines prove how cold our hosts are and how calculated their intentions are too. However, they also showcase Susannah Dickey’s keen insight into the formulaic structure of true crime. To quote the website Screenrant:
The general formula for true-crime podcasts is usually to reiterate a story with faint background music with multiple pauses for added tension (Minjares 2022).
This tried and tested structure seems very familiar to Dickey,as the faint background music described often takes the form of a chilling piano or eerie xylophone jingle.
Ultimately, it shows that our speakers have no intention of producing ethical content. They will say anything and edit it with some clever tricks later to make it seem like something of worth.
Throughout *outtake #3 Susannah Dickey establishes multiple layers of meaning with a surprising economy of poetry. It is relatively short poem, but within it, we as readers are exposed to some very important questions around the exploitation of trauma. On the one hand, the language of the poem is two co-hosts trying to adhere to a worn-out structure utilising the language audiences have come to expect to achieve success. On the other hand, for us the reader, the same language is being used by the poet to make us question the inherent predation of a form of entertainment that is ubiquitous in our culture. These layers of meaning for the same language, manage to reveal our co-hosts ultimate vapidness while also having a poignant message for readers. It is a testament to Dickey’s skill as a poet.
I will admit to a bias of my own in this episode. I happen to think that true crime as a genre is inherently exploitative, and I have probably allowed that to dictate my reading a little too much. With that being said, Susannah Dickey does a far better job of exposing it than I ever could. This poem is one of the many that make up Isdal. The collection is a treasure trove of metafiction, intertextual poetry and incisive commentary on popular culture. Dickey writes her poems with great intricacy; there are many layers, but in a way that ensures the reader will remain engaged and thinking long after her verses have finished.*Outake #3 is a wonderful example of all this in a convenient package, but I strongly recommend you continue on to reading the whole thing. It’s a masterclass in writing poetry on a single subject from a multitude of angles.
But now I want to know: What did you think of the poem? As always, this is my interpretation, and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me, there are a few ways to do so.
If you enjoyed the episode or know someone who might, consider sending it to them directly or leaving me a review wherever you listen.
Words That Burn is written and produced by me, Benjamin Collopy.
Thank you once again for taking the time to listen to the podcast.
Citations:
Burger, Pamela. 2016. “The Bloody History of the True Crime Genre.” JSTOR Daily. August 24, 2016. https://daily.jstor.org/bloody-history-of-true-crime-genre/.
Cheung, Helier. 2017. “Isdal Woman: The Mystery Death Haunting Norway for 46 Years.” BBC News. May 12, 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39369429.
“Death in Ice Valley.” n.d. BBC. Accessed January 14, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/2ab14c36-b4d9-0571-9e33-b14f80d41d33.
Doyle, Martin. 2023. “Susannah Dickey: ‘I Get Really Bugged about How the North Is Discursively Infantilised.’” The Irish Times, July 22, 2023. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2023/07/22/susannah-dickey-i-get-really-bugged-about-how-the-north-is-discursively-infantilised/.
Keeler, A.2021. “True Crime Podcasts.” Jstor. Accessed January 16, 2024. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.11435021.11
Miles, J. n.d. “Imagining Mayhem: Fictional Violence vs. ‘True Crime.’” Paperpile. Accessed January 16, 2024. https://paperpile.com/app/p/388768ba-f2e6-07b5-8de0-71b11454e168.
Minjares, Leonardo. 2022. “10 True Crime Podcasts With Unique Formats.” ScreenRant. November 11, 2022. https://screenrant.com/true-crime-podcasts-with-unique-format/.
Saraiya, Sonia. 2016. “The Sad Evolution of TV’s True Crime Explosion: From Highbrow ‘Serial’ and ‘The Jinx’ to a ‘Law & Order’ Menendez Murders Miniseries.” Salon.com. April 8, 2016. https://www.salon.com/2016/04/08/the_sad_evolution_of_tvs_true_crime_explosion_from_highbrow_serial_to_a_law_order_menendez_murders_miniseries/.
“Susannah Dickey.” 2023. Forward Arts Foundation. June 30, 2023. https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry/forward-prizes-in-conversation-with-susannah-dickey/.