Dexter Morgan, a ‘very meticulous monster,’ carefully neutralises his prey, then dismembers, wraps the pieces in plastic, and disposes of them covertly. Aftab Poonawala said that the setting of the US crime series served as a major source of inspiration. The media is producing tantalising depictions as the authorities uncover more information on the horrifying Shraddha murder that has shocked the nation.
Patrick Graham, a filmmaker and the director of the Netflix series Ghoul and Betaal denies accepting link between film and crime. Graham criticises the prevalent efforts to put the blame on films and adds, Films have always been made a soft target. It has always acted as an excuse but never a justification.
The obsession with true crime and drama comes from the vicarious thrill of experiencing someone else’s problems, without having to go through them ourselves. Crime thrillers cannot be banned because they have always piqued the curiosity of human minds. ‘It gives us an opportunity to access and negotiate a negative emotion and verbalise it, often for the first time in our lives,’ Professor Sarah Niblock said.
Dexter creator Patrick Ness says he would not want to show violence for the sake of it. Violence has been a part of storytelling since time immemorial and people are drawn towards it because we don’t want to experience it as a first-hand experience yet they excite us in the safe space of fiction. Dr Anuja Kapoor, a Criminal Psychologist and Supreme Court advocate says ‘we can’t run away from our own real-life emotions through fiction’.
Any show with criminal eloquence is not responsible for a person, who, we would call a ‘psychopath’, says Dr Kapoor. Criminal mind is 50 per cent genetic trait, 25 per cent of which relates to what goes inside the pre-frontal cortex and the rest can be attributed to society and culture. Following the case of Aftab Poonawala, the media have highlighted that the young man has shown ‘no signs of remorse,’ Dr Kapur reiterates that these are ‘signs of being a psychopath’.
In a case that was thought to have been carefully planned and carried out, Dr. Deepak Poonawala was found guilty of the murder and mutilation of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991. Dr. Deepak Kapur, a psychiatrist, claims that he displayed early signs of abuse and showed no remorse for his actions. The serial killer and sex offender Jeffrey Dahmer, also referred to as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, had a similar emotional response.
The disturbing details of Jeffrey Dahmer’s crime are discussed in an interview with Inside Edition from the late 1990s that shows him speaking in an incredibly polite manner. Childhood experiences are well-remembered and stored in the subconscious mind for later use. We can only speculate as to what Poonawala may have experienced as a child, whereas Jeffrey had an uncomfortable childhood and dealt with issues of abandonment.
What a person experiences while growing up is stored in the subconscious mind, which is 6,000 times more powerful than the conscious mind. However, what Bhargava emphasises is the social development a person goes through to develop a ‘critical judgment’ of actions, that helps us decide what is ‘right and wrong’. The unstable mind coincides with what one reads or watches and triggers them to trigger aggressiveness, he says.
A further crackdown on movies under the guise of protecting society from criminality on this scale, according to film critic Dr. Patrick Bhargava, will definitely destroy India’s ‘freedom of expression’. He claims that movies may be trying to escape the unrestrained behaviour that leads to disorderly behaviour. Criminals like Dahmer and others have acknowledged that ‘some compulsive actions,’ which we refer to as ‘obsession,’ can also lead to criminal behaviour. Due to a lack of appropriate preventative or therapeutic measures from a young age, they go undetected.
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