I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: feminism and the adaptation of true crime in the #MeToo era

ABSTRACT

This article considers what Liz Garbus’s television version of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark (HBO, 2018) reveals about true-crime adaptation in a post #MeToo era, particularly in relation to questions of gender, authorship, and voice. With reference to Jaimie Baron’s notion of the ‘layered gaze’ (2021), Jennifer O’Meara’s research on the digital remediation of women’s voices and the ‘sonic screen’ (2022), and Lisa Coulthard’s concept of the ‘listening gaze’ (2018), it argues that the feminist force of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark derives from its strategic remediation of McNamara’s voice through digital audio clips of the deceased writer, alongside a voice-over by actress Amy Ryan, who ventriloquizes the no longer physically present McNamara. Through a careful recalibration of women’s voices, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark illustrates how, in bringing the labour of adaptation to the foreground, there is potential for true crime to be deployed for socially and emotionally restorative ends. However, the article also delves into the problematics of the series’ call to viewers to identify with the figure of the dead white woman as both true crime investigator and victim. Exploring the documentary mechanisms and strategies used by the HBO series to adapt the story of the ‘Golden State Killer’ through the voice of the dead McNamara, it concludes with some thoughts on the limitations of its white feminist approach to narrating gender-based violence, suggesting directions for future research into women’s authorship and adaptation of true crime.

KEYWORDS:

• True crime
• voice
• #MeToo
• feminism
• gender-based violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Evans’s (2022) PhD thesis, ‘Evoking Embodied Experience: Contemporary Feminisms and Gendered Violence in Horror and True Crime Film and Television,’ University of Queensland, and in particular Chapter 3, “‘Feminist’ True Crime? Rape-Focused True Crime and Contemporary Carceral Feminism”, for an excellent analysis of how ‘the post-MeToo true crime documentary or drama series takes gendered violence, particularly rape (often, serial rape) as its central crime’ (110). Evans’s key texts in Chapter 3 are I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and the Netflix series Unbelievable.

2. The term ‘white feminism’, as Alison Phipps writes, is ‘used to denote a feminism that ignores the ideas and struggles of women of colour’ (2020, 6). Phipps expands on this to discuss the concept of ‘political whiteness’ which ‘describes a set of values, orientations and behaviours … ’ (2020, 6).

3. Garbus has also explored the subject of violence against women in the true crime dramatization Lost Girls (Netflix, 2020) adapted from the 2013 non-fiction book Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery by Robert Kolker.

4. It is important to note that there were documentaries on sexual abuse prior to #MeToo going viral, including, for example, The Invisible War (Dick, 2012), The Hunting Ground (Dick and Ziering, 2015) and Audrie & Daisy (Cohen and Shenk, 2016). In the UK context, there have been several documentaries on Jimmy Savile that predate #MeToo (see Boyle 2018).

5. Please see Horeck (2023) for a more detailed discussion of #MeToo documentaries.

6. Story Syndicate recently produced Harry & Meghan (2022) for Netflix. Directed by Liz Garbus, Harry & Megan has been described as one of ‘the most-watched documentaries ever’ (Wiedeman 2023).

7. See Evans (2022) for further discussion of how I’ll Be Gone in the Dark juxtaposes ‘this archival material with Barbeau’s analysis’ as part of its ‘critique of … victim-blaming attitudes’ (2022, 123–124).

8. That a man is among the victim-survivors interviewed for I’ll Be Gone in the Dark only strengthens the series’ critique of the damage patriarchal violence causes to everyone. In the interview with Gay and Bob Hardwick, the camera is held in close-up on Bob’s face as his wife Gay recounts her assault, and the poor police handling of it, from four decades ago.

9. The pairing of interviews and reenactments in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is in keeping with a wider trend in post-2017 #MeToo documentaries and miniseries to focus attention firmly on the testimony of victim-survivors. In a range of texts including, for example, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich (Bryant, 2020); Athlete A (Cohen and Shenk, 2020); Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (MacFarlane, 2019); and Allen v. Farrow (Dick and Ziering, 2021), it is typical to find reenactments which depict the spaces of the abuse but not the abuse itself. Interviews with survivors provide details of the trauma, as well as its aftermath, and are designed to ensure women’s voices are being heard.

10. See I’ll Be Gone in the Dark podcast, available at: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0zOR3IjHyizbqtyoiYciFn).

11. See Rotten Tomatoes, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, All Audience, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/ill_be_gone_in_the_dark/s01/reviews?type=user

12. See Gilmore (2023) for a discussion of the ‘intersectional feminist lineage’ of #MeToo. With reference to Harriet Jacobs and Tarana Burke, Gilmore discusses how #MeToo ‘tapped into a lineage that links Jacobs to Burke to become another episode in the longstanding tradition of using personal narrative as a call to action’ (4).

13. Also see Pooja Rangan and Brett Story in the same volume of World Records, ‘Four Propositions on True Crime and Abolition’. Rangan and Story call for the eradication of the very ‘category of crime’ and the attendant fascination with questions of ‘guilt and innocence’. As they rightly argue, what too often gets obscured in the obsession with individual cases is wider, more deep-rooted social and institutional crises for which ‘crime’ is a ‘cover’ (2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanya Horeck

Tanya Horeck is a Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film (2004) and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era (2019). She has published widely on gender, violence, and media cultures.