Rather, while watching the new movie Boston Strangler on Thursday night, I had my attention drawn to a speech detail we see popping up in movies about detectives, which this one was.
It's always in discussions between detectives, or in this case, between a detective and a reporter. And it must be a real thing, because we see it so much.
It's them talking about who they "like" for a crime.
"I like the husband for this," one of them might say. "He had a motive and he has no alibi that night."
Or "I like the nun. She was possessed by the devil at the time and witnesses said her eyes were glowing red."
Boston Strangler takes it one step further, as Alessandro Nivola's character, in discussing the titular case with poster girl Keira Knightley, says of one potential suspect who had recently been ruled out, "Yeah, I loved him for this."
Nivola's character also at one point takes a job as a creative consultant on a TV show, a guy from the profession in question who sits beside the director and offers his opinion on whether the portrayal seems realistic. I don't suppose that makes his character any more likely to be realistic himself, but it does suggest Boston Strangler probably had someone filling that function on set, and probably gave using the word "love" and (more implicitly) "like" the thumbs up in this context.
I don't doubt the authenticity of the trope, to be sure. In fact I rather like the phrasing. It's insiderish and jargony without alienating the viewer. You feel like it's how a real detective would talk in shorthand with other detectives, and the meaning is easy to grasp.
What I think is funny about it -- and it may speak to that larger obsession I mentioned in the first paragraph -- is that at the most superficial level, it talks about liking or loving someone who has just decorated an apartment with somebody's guts -- or in this case, left them a strangled corpse.
Of course you can't remove the context of the rest of the sentence, but you still have sentences that feature the phrases "I like" and "I love" in relation to this hideous monster.
Is it true that on some level, these detectives -- and by extension, those of us who watch their exploits on TV and in movies -- do like these criminals? I think that goes without saying. For one, without them they wouldn't have a job. But on a deeper level, it has always been said that cop and criminal can be two different sides of the same character. Many cops go into the profession to channel a violent nature and an unfocused hatred -- or even, sometimes, a hatred that is focused, as their job gives them chance to vent it. The events of the last 15 to 20 years have left no doubt of that being the case.
But if we don't want to indict cops specifically, we can just chalk it up to part of human nature. We are indeed fascinated with these people who show behavioral aberrations, who will violate the laws of society by just killing some random person who was having a normal day up until that point.
I'm getting back into hot take territory now -- and by that I really mean "hot take," as in, not a hot take.
I think I just wanted an excuse to talk about the jargon, and Boston Strangler, a pretty mediocre movie overall, gave me that excuse.
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