Detective tv programmes and lingering shots of dead naked women

[msrisotto]

So, i'm watching The Fall (only on the second episode but rotten tomatoes gave it 100% so i'm expecting it to be decent!) and am struggling to look at the screen much of the time as the serial killer is washing his latest victim's dead body and posing her on the bed and there is just so much footage of this naked dead woman. Full length, wide shots with only body positioning hiding her vag. Lots of full on boobs and ass on display. This is more graphic than i've seen before but it is very similar in loads of other programmes like CSI - dead woman head shots that show cleavage.

It's almost always women too. Am i missing something? This is sick isn't it?

I've heard of the 'disposable woman' tv trope before, but i'm not sure it quite covers it.

isnt that what necrophilia consists of
the ultimate in objectification?
not suggesting that's the only thing woven into this theme in detective programs, it has multiple interwoven meanings

I don't know. I don't know what drives necrophiliacs

I would have thought though that it encourages people to see women as objects more, just attractive outsides with no personhood inside IYSWIM, than encourages them to fantasise about / actually have sex with dead bodies? Dunno.

I think pilchard is right. The camera would probably act the same around an unconscious naked woman. It's objectification and passivity that's being worshipped.

Wanting to have sex with an unconscious drugged or inebriated women is (I would suggest) linked to wanting to have sex with a dead women.
The link being (as you say) that they are
'objects...just attractive outsides with no personhood inside'

you can claim that the camera would be the same around an unconscious woman but the woman are dead, and the fact that they are dead (rather than unconscious) is not a minor detail ?

Hmm, I disagree, I think it's also about exercise of power and hurting someone who still has capacity to be hurt, but as we agree both are odious and criminal, I don't really want to discuss further as I may get nauseous!

Empress I was just coming on to say about Val McDermid and to praise Kinsey Millhone by Sue Grafton. Those books are great IMO

I noticed years ago that violence was getting more graphically violent though. Must be at least 10 years ago I noticed that, and started to avoid them where I could (eg definitely nothing with an 18 cert on it). Things have been getting steadily worse for a long time.

I don't watch any of those programs, but last year on holiday I went looking for a book to read in the stack left at the cottage. Out of ten books only one didn't feature the rape/murder or women in the blurb on the back of the book. It was fucked up reading one after the other trying to find something to read. The one that didn't was a John Grisham book which I read but don't remember much of, but fairly sure it had zero women characters beyond the obligatory love interest.

rosie

Agatha Christie killed off a fair few women as her initial victims and at least one child

Sexy wise??? Dead mans Folly and Death on the Nile spring to mind

Can't think of any others off the top of my head

Completely agree with the person who mentioned strip club scenes, it can be very distracting

I want to be Kinsey Millhone when I grow up!

I don't watch 18 films either, Gibbering. A defining moment for me was Reservoir Dogs. I hate that film and the subsequent justification of the gratuitous violence as being 'real'. Quentin Tarantino can fuck off to the far side of fuck as far as I'm concerned.

And YY to strip club scenes. It's almost every programme in some series.

It's so common, it's embarrassing for the writers/producers don't you think? Very unoriginal.

The Body in the Library. Two bodies in fact (spoiler sorry) both teenagers.
First Agatha Christie I read.
But it's different in books isn't it? Not the same opportunity for long lingering shots ...

Mark Billingham's books have a very high rate of graphic sexually motivated murders of women. He was confronted about it at a Haye Festival event, and to his credit, IIRC, in a later interview he said he hadn't given it much thought beforehand, and that since it had been brought to his attention he had made a conscious effort to address it in subsequent books. (Don't know if he has).

But it says quite a lot for an author to admit that he hadn't really thought about the staggeringly high murder rate of females in his books.

James Patterson too with his Alex Cross books. Really horrific stuff in one of them I read.

The one with the snake, scallops?

I wish I could say yes Yonic. But no. It involved an industrial meat mincer prefaced by torture, of course. (I, Alex Cross I think it was). I can't really remember much about it. I've consigned it to the compartment in my brain I don't open!

Has anyone mentioned Luther yet? I had to give up watching it due to the over the top terrorising, torture, and murder of women in it. I tried to watch The Fall but stopped for the same reason. It's not entertainment IMO.

I stopped reading books like the ones being mentioned when I had DD, something clicked in me and I saw them for what they are - murder porn.

I do think that part of the reason there is so much of this stuff around is to remind us what men can do to us, and keep us deep down scared so we keep quieter about things like equality and shit.

I see strip club scenes as "Woman, know your place!". And that's tits out, dead, or both

The snake was in Kiss The Girls. Like you, I've only read one Alex Cross. Never again.

I stopped reading and watching anything like this as a teen when I decided not to see "Seven", depressing that this kind of nastiness in fiction had got worse.