Unless you have been living under a rock or if, by some admirable personal choice, you have chosen to avoid the onslaught of true crime entertainment content offered up on countless streaming services almost daily; your experience of the past year and its endless lockdowns and self-isolations will have been marked by some form of a courtroom drama or another. Buoyed by addictive podcasts and docuseries, it is no exaggeration that our entertainment consumption has changed drastically in the last several decades. To an extent, we have traded the whimsy of love stories for the cold-blooded twists of the latest crime thriller. So how did we come to root for the conventional villain on the stands? When did this cultural shift change storytelling on screen?
This phenomenon can be traced back, in some part, to Rob Marshall’s 2002 movie-musical Chicago and its electrifying tale of the merry murderesses of Cook County jail, willing to put on a performance of a lifetime for the media as they await death row. Based on the various stage iterations of the same name, Chicago burst onto the scene to industry acclaim and the fanfare of sweeping Oscar night. Almost as if overnight, Renée Zellweger’s Roxie became America’s sweetheart — and with it — the archetypal expectations of victim and criminal on screen were dismantled.
The 1926 stage play was inspired by a real-life murder case in Chicago and inadvertently came to encapsulate the American psyche of the early 20th century. Amidst the fallout of economic depression and the subsequent frivolity that came to define the 1920s, crime was quickly becoming the centre stage of a changing society. Booming newspaper circulation and fascination with criminal trials like never before led to the creation of the media circus. In turn, more or less everyone became invested in the twists and turns of the latest high-profile hearings.
And while the the meteoric rise and acquittal of Roxie Hart is not wholly reflective of the real life story it is based on, artistic license over subsequent adaptations determined that growing fascination with crime in entertainment meant characters like Roxie need no longer fear the judgment of the audience or be cornered into being the revenant wife seeking redemption, but rather shrewd and hellbent on proving that she deserves full and unconditional acquittal.
Now almost a century later from the creation of the stage play, streamers like Netflix are leading the pack with high quality true crime docuseries, and movie studios are responding to a pent-up demand for serial killer biopics. Just in the last half of 2020, Netflix brought audiences Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of The Chicago 7; dramatising the events that lead to the trial of the titular activists in the 1968 Democratic convention uprising, and subsequently the broken system of justice that presided over the proceedings, in marked contrast to the sympathy and affability afforded to the heroines of Chicago. This in succession with the earth shattering triumph of previous true crime staples like Making A Murderer, Don’t F*** With Cats, and Tiger King shows just how deep our obsession with crime goes.
The instability and rigour of modern life is in so many ways the opposite of the Chicago Roxie Hart found fame and glory in. Yet, the true difference is we have seen it all now. With a 24-hour news cycle and readily available archives at your fingertips there are very few cases that have garnered the same shock and outrage the cases of female murderers did in the 1920s. Yet, we continue to spend precious down time with the best of them.
Of course, Hart and her sidekick Velma Kelly (Catherine Zeta-Jones) have advantages that helped propel their public tour of redemption; less of a protestation of innocence from the get-go, but rather a loud and proud defiance against their unfaithful partners. Both are white, pretty, urban socialites who have the privilege of constructing their own narratives and benefit from a hawkish press circuit that historically falls head over heels for these attributes in the courtroom. It’s clear that the continuing popularity of a large and glaring section of true crime spectacles have emerged from the shadows of Chicago, always utilising these socially pre-determined redemption arcs to draw sympathy from the audience.
Another weapon in the movie’s armoury that others simply lack is the music. From the outrageously entertaining “Cell Block Tango” to the brilliantly choreographed puppeteering of a press conference in “We Both Reached for the Gun”; the music is the secret ingredient pulling out sympathy for Roxie and Velma. By the time the rousing final number is set into motion, we have no choice but to root for the underdog murderers who used everything to their advantage and stumbled upon their dreams on the back of their own crimes. Just like Roxie’s lawyer advises her to razzle dazzle the press and the public with a carefully curated display of emotions, it may be that we simply have come to embrace the farcical bureaucracy of a system unfit for purpose. After all, audiences are no strangers to the gaping faults of the justice system and those who enable it. Chicago set the stage for changing perspectives of crime on screen, but with the rolling juggernaut of content to feed our obsessions this is not a trend we will see die down anytime soon.
