5 minutes
a crime!
Abdullah Al Qamzi
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
August 22, 2021
Have you not asked, “Why do you stop in the street or slow down when you see an accident?” If the accident results in deaths and you see the police covering the victim with a white blanket, why do you look when you know it will hurt or frighten you?
Because it is difficult to look at the accident and even more difficult to avoid looking at it.
An accident, murder or terrorist act anywhere in the world is a disgusting sight and a dismal event, but we do not stop following its news.
It is precisely this feeling that makes us watch crime movies or series.
Crime stories vary in cinema and television, there are mystery stories, or the so-called “who is the killer?”, biographies of criminals, or watching the crime upside down, meaning that we know the criminal and are waiting for how the investigator will reveal him, and the most famous who used this method is the famous seventies series “Colombo”.
Crime has never been absent from cinema and television, because it feeds on the public's fear of it.
Crime stories release the hormone “adrenaline” in our bodies, and this hormone is useful in small doses daily, because it gives us more energy even when we are immersed in the comfort of our comfortable seats.
The crime makes you think with the detective and keeps your mind occupied with solving it, and if the detective does not solve it, the product risks losing the audience, because our minds are programmed to enjoy crime stories, and there is an attractive and captivating side to the dark part of anyone's personality.
There are series and movies that thrived on the audience's love for the criminal's character, the most prominent examples being "Joker", and on television, "Walter White", the good chemistry teacher, who turned into "Heisenberg" the biggest drug dealer on the US-Mexico border in the famous series Breaking Bad.
All the phrases "Joker" and "Heisenberg" are printed with their pictures on T-shirts, cups, and socks, and all their statues and figurines are sold at high prices and acquired by nerds.
An ordinary viewer cannot commit a crime while denouncing the crime if he sees it even in entertainment circles, but there is a human feeling that raises the curiosity of every person to know the motives for committing any crime, or what are the limits of our actions if we do not have morals, religious scruples, or fear of God.
This is what brings the lovers of these stories together from the non-violent individuals in any society.
Attitude
Hollywood has fought bleak endings for five decades in a row, and films in which the criminal wins failed at the box office, while the bleak endings remained popular in Europe, especially in France.
In the nineties, crime literature flourished in Scandinavia in a way that swept the European continent, during the same period the Scandinavian police cinema flourished, and it drew the attention of Hollywood, which did not hesitate to buy the rights to these works and Americanize them.
When that happened, the taboo fell and the dark ends came to light in Hollywood.
In parallel, Scandinavian police dramas flourished in the first decade of the new millennium until today.
As a result, the largest channels in Europe, Britain, Australia and New Zealand bought these works and provided translations for them.
While Hollywood remade some of them with the same names with changing places of stories.
Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com
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Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com