Don’t be surprised if the media these days are turning with frenzy-like enthusiasm on the ongoing murder trial in Thailand against Daniel Sancho. As you must know, I am referring to that well-built young man with an undeniable Beach Boys air who, in addition to being a prestigious chef on social networks, turns out to be the son of the great Curro Jiménez – the real hero of the Spanish transition – and a bad day killed a slightly less attractive and much wealthier citizen.
It is normal. Especially when, as Hitchcock said, one of television’s great contributions to modern life is to have brought crime back home, where it belongs. At the end of the day, and especially if there are people in the middle with a good presence and the hint of a sexual drama a bit rough, the murder seduces us, the victim is neutralized and we applaud that the photographer of the crime scene was thorough with the details. Then some expert exhibits his science on how a corpse is dismembered and death becomes a magnificent spectacle.
Don’t get me wrong. Even if I shoot the hearings, I am strongly against killing anyone and I agree with Thomas de Quincey on this. If one begins to indulge in murder, he soon gives no importance to stealing, from stealing he passes to drunkenness and to disregarding the Lord’s day, and ends by lacking good manners and leaving things for the next day, for the gate that leads to destruction is wide and the way is easy.
Therefore, I have not the slightest doubt that, if it is possible to avoid a murder, you must do everything in your power to achieve it. In this I differ from the famous and overrated Kant, who, taking the demands of unconditional truthfulness to the extreme, went so far as to let loose the nonsense that if someone sees a person running away from a murderer and the latter questions him about his whereabouts , his duty will be to answer the truth and point out the hiding place of the innocent, even if he has the certainty that this will be the cause of death. Then there are those who are surprised by the discredit of metaphysics among the young generations!
But it is one thing for the moral judgment on the criminal to be severe and another thing that, in the face of the fait accompli and irremediable, a certain morbid fascination cannot be avoided. The exemplary citizen is disgusted by violence, but devotes long hours to true crime and follows with delight the adventures of Rosa Peral in the Urban Guard or the Crimes of Carles Porta. Because you will agree with me that, since the days of the newspaper El Caso or the chronicles of the great Enrique Rubio, event journalism – a noble art practiced by Dostoevsky himself – had not had such a good reputation among us.
And don’t think that the attraction of crime is a problem of an intellectual nature as posed by the novels of Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle, populated by circumspect ladies and gentlemen who kill with such lovable elegance and wit that one ends up regretting its irremediable capture. Nothing like that. I’ve met some killers and they were pretty ordinary guys, proof that this is a raging world where people do unimaginable things, things they themselves never thought they’d do, and nothing else. Apart from the mark of their crime, they held little interest and said little about the human condition. In fact, we say much more about the human condition when we waste hours with the tribulations of Daniel Sancho.
The murder is not interesting because of its abstraction, nor because of what it can say about the type of society we live in generating a social and political debate, but because of its tremendous materiality. Not even mystery and intrigue are essential: the very radicality of the crime unfolds its drama in the theater of the imagination and sustains an emotion known to all trapeze artists in the world: that what the public wants is for something to fail acrobatics and let them fall. Especially when those who fall are handsome, rich, famous, or at least some of these three things.
Maybe that’s why that old colebrot, Los ricos también lloran, had an unexpected success in the late Soviet Union (where it should not be ruled out that it was taken for an exotic comedy), or the entry into prison of any famous becomes an inexhaustible source of entertainment. Or just that we have been contemplating corruption and violence for so long that we drag it everywhere, like a disease.
