True crime fascinates everyone. The who, what, where, and why one could stomach committing any sort of such heinous acts is unfathomable enough to keep one up at night. The inhumanity and distance of any sort of brutality, additionally, keeps many people interested in this genre of storytelling. This type of “sick fascination” with the taboo is something that I wanted to explore throughout this project, but under a specific lens of the disconnection between the lives of the audience and the subject matter. I chose three separate texts, The Woman in Me memoir by Britney Spears, The Rapunzel Fairytale by The Brothers Grimm, and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Jennifer Lynch to use throughout my project.
My aim was not to complete a deep dive into the crime itself, or why we as a society are deeply and emotionally invested in the horrific crimes others commit, but instead, my hope was to poke fun at this interest by using a format that was simultaneously familiar and foreign to a modern audience. These events are so fascinating to us because the likelihood of any of the events in each of these sources occurring in our own lives is nearly obsolete. None of the individuals in this classroom are international popstars fighting lawsuits against their father’s conservatorship, teenage girls whose death sparks an investigation full of supernatural and mystical events in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, or princesses trapped in towers. This divide between audience and content is further widened by my choice of newspaper format being used to depict a story that takes place in a much earlier and medieval era. Newspapers did not exist during that period, and the tale of Rapunzel itself is very clearly unrealistic and fictional, which successfully creates a deeper separation between audience and content, not unlike one that could be experienced while reading about a true crime event.
Another one of the aspects I wanted to explore was the parasocial tendencies that either journalists or those interested in true crime have with victims and the entitled nature that these individuals interact with those who experience traumatic events. Like they own it to us to tell every juicy detail of their entire experience. I achieved this by incorporating quotations from each of my three sources at appropriate moments, revealing details about the characters’ personal lives and emotions. In all three of these sources, we are granted inside tellings of the way that each of the main characters felt. The quotes I chose to use, just as stand alone phrases, are deeply powerful and emotional bits of writing, and tell a lot about the nature of the three sources even though they are all small parts of a much larger body of work.
My reasoning behind my three choices was that these were each a piece of media that I had personally enjoyed and connected to, despite not having any of the experiences described within these stories. Additionally, I intended to steer clear of using news articles on real life crime cases as I felt that it would be disrespectful to the victims. Hence, two of my sources were fictional, Rapunzel being a well-known story of a girl with long hair being kidnapped and trapped in a tower, and Laura Palmer’s diary as an accompanying text to the fictional television show Twin Peaks. I did choose to use aspects of Britney Spears’ memoir, but I determined this usage as acceptable, considering this was her personal telling of her experiences. With those three sources, I chose to create a faux newspaper article detailing the story of Rapunzel, with quotations and testimonies taken from The Woman in Me and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer to create the illusion that this was a real event.
I believe that my creation is indeed a plagiarism. Yes, the writing that structures and adapts this project into its newspaper article format is my own, but the remainder of its contents are not my original work. The story of the article is a retelling of a fairytale, the quotes are specific testimonies from the minds or experiences of other people, and the artwork I sourced online. While I believe that this is a new interpretation of already existing themes and topics, I would not categorize this body of work as original enough for it to not be a plagiarism.