Embellished Traumas and Glamorous Detectives

Criminal stories, TV series, and films are perhaps one of the most debated topics in the worlds of literature, art, and cinema over the last 50 years. Embellished Traumas and Glamorous Detectives, with their disturbing backdrops, create deeply ingrained symbolic narratives in popular culture. It is crucial where the reckless Economy of Visibility has reached its peak that unusual stories remain popular. (Especially in this digital age)

There is a body of work that has garnered considerable attention with criminal investigations, unsolved or abandoned cases, and decades-long trials and investigations. Clearly, collections of all these are stored in the archives of the cinema world. In similarly, they are presented to us, interwoven with new events and seasoned with references from the past. Of course, patterning and modeling are not only used in technology and its largest subfield, artificial intelligence.

On the other hand, the criminal world’s emotionally engaging storytelling and finely crafted visual details are timeless content. Even social awareness and intellectual enlightenment have their Google SEO scores. Furthermore, the modern world’s thirst for information has become fuel by giants like Netflix and HBO, which are pumping out content based on criminal history.

Embellished Traumas and Glamorous Detectives: Capture Attention

So, what’s behind people’s interest in these topics? Is the goal here to raise collective awareness or to score points in the visibility economy? In a global environment where instant posts on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are ready to trend in an instant showcasing and sharing the harsh aspects of life captures everyone’s attention. Visual pulses quicken and everyone is glued to their screens.

Ultimately, we know that sexual abuse, harassment, rape, and unimaginable brutality and massacre are among the most powerful emotional stimuli in the human body and memory. Beyond the cultural impact of the perpetrators, this is also a significant stimulus and shockwave for the collective memory exposed to it.

Thus, the sudden spread of the different and the tragic creates a data point for the collective’s attention and memory. After the crime is committed and the punishment is meted out, a retrospective perspective is taken. This perspective also facilitates the re-evaluation of criminal stories in other contexts, their popularization, and their performance by the masses.

Things began to change, especially in the 1970s, when two agents began classifying criminal behavior into categories and classifying criminal behavioral patterns in the basement of Quantico headquarters. A large-scale database needed to be created to facilitate faster and easier apprehension. Two FBI agents were conducting interviews with former serial killers across the country by recording their voices. They were listening the records repeatedly and prison interviews emerged as recorded individually.

Embellished Traumas and Glamorous Detectives: MindHunter

A common criminal profile was created by analyzing the behavioral and thought patterns of all crimes, from pedophilia to necrophilia. Interestingly, the FBI, struggling to deal with Italian mafia organizations in major cities like New York, began experimenting with new approaches in smaller towns. The main reason was that the killers were not being found, and citizens were beginning to cry out in the streets about the state’s inadequacy.

Mindhunter, the recent Unbelievable series, and a Charles Manson-themed documentary are now being added to the Netflix library. The social deformation that emerged in the chaotic 1960s, in particular, created icons and iconoclasms and gave rise to cults. The emergence of these radical subjects and communities facilitated the pattern-collecting capabilities of the nascent behavioral sciences of those years. However, the FBI’s newly established Behavioral Analysis Unit in Mindhunter also exposed the internal conflicts within the unit, which held a conservative perspective at the time.

Recently, Ed Gein, starring Charlie Hunham, was released. Ed Gein was a psychopath who had intercourse with his mother’s dead body, cut off women’s nipples to fashion various objects and items from them, and hid his genitals in a drawer. The background readings of psychopaths and sociopaths disturbed some. Some argued that background readings in behavioral analysis were open to justifying massacres. And that bringing mental illness into the picture distorted the narrative.

Some, however, objected to this, focusing on the sociological and methodological benefits of exploring the background of the subject. Research into the brain of a serial killer with a psychiatric disorder like Jeffrey Dahmer paved the way for psychiatry, which had previously viewed lobotomy as a solution, to shift its focus and approach the subject from a different perspective.

A Turning Point for the FBI: The Vietnam War and the 1960s

Despite everything, extraordinary circumstances create extraordinary personalities. It’s crucial to consider everything within the context of the time. The impact of studies and research that began during that era on today’s development of artificial intelligence and the mapping of language modeling with Neural Networks is profound. (Texas Institute) The Baby Boomer generation taking to the streets, anti-war protests, and the influence of the burgeoning youth movement created an implicit connection in the intellectual and experimental foundations of today’s Silicon Valley.

Furthermore, the development of diagnostic criteria in post-war American psychiatry (PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), as well as the establishment of the behavioral and profile analysis unit within the FBI during the same period, were the seeds of the radical changes brought about by extraordinary circumstances. In fact, today’s robotic coding based on human behavioral patterns and the use of imaging techniques like fMRI and PET to diagnose diseases in neuroscience are the cumulative sum of developments that began during those times.

The reverse perspective on serial killers’ family and childhood histories, coupled with a connectionist approach to behavioral patterns, contributed to the nascent American psychiatry. Clearly, the then-emerging institutions of behavioral science and analysis, as well as research in the social sciences, contributed significantly to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) revision of the diagnostic criteria (DSM).

Embellished Traumas and Glamorous Detectives : Global Surveillance And AI-Based Profilling

Consequently, in the 1960s, there was intuitive profiling. Today, neuroscience and artificial intelligence have transformed the killer’s behavior into a computable model. We now have devices that detect changes in facial muscles and fluctuations in body temperature. Interview transcripts (Ressler/Douglas-style), unstructured crime scene reports (scene photographs, forensic notes), police case metadata (date, time, geography, victim profile), and even sociodemographic data, geospatial data: crime locations, the perpetrator’s likely residence, psychological evaluations, and conviction history, are all considered FBI data sources today.

It’s important to remember how interconnected everything is. Of course, global surveillance systems, AI-powered cameras, and profiling technologies emerged from the chaotic nature of past events and have reached our current state.