Crime is punishment

Eager to start the new year on a note of high purpose and industry, I cajoled myself into performing two tasks that I had been putting off for the longest time: archiving two years’ worth of blog entries, and darning three buttons back onto their respective shirts. The archiving was a tiresome chore, but as it happens, I do enjoy sewing for some strange reason — I used to hem pants bought off the resale rack by hand during my grad-school days, so the button job was a pleasant diversion. In these mid-50s, threading the needle should be the hardest part of sewing, but I’m nearsighted, so that’s not a problem; it only becomes a problem — and it did — when I drop the needle on the floor and can’t bend over to pick it up.

With these self-assignments out of the way, I congratulated myself, eased back into my La-Z-Boy, took one remote control in each hand — one for the TV, another for the cable Digibox — and fired away like a grizzled gunslinger. The TV’s old, but the Digibox is new; I usually make a grab for any black box with blinking lights, but I’d stubbornly resisted getting digital TV, too cozy with my current setup to make the transition. What nudged me was the realization that with the little black box would come two channels that I waste every free minute of my American vacations on — the History Channel (not so much for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire but for such plebeian pursuits as Pawn Stars and American Pickers) and, even more importantly, the crime channel (here, Crime & Investigation or CI).

I say “more importantly” because I have a crime fixation. I’m not a criminal (well, at least not yet) but I love reading crime fiction and true-crime stories, and watching crime movies and programs. I started out with the Hardy boys, but soon graduated to Erle Stanley Gardner and then The Godfather, which I surreptitiously read while hiding underground during martial law. (My Marxist handlers denounced it as capitalist trash but I finished it anyway, enthralled by all that artificial blood even as the real stuff was flowing around us; later, when I was arrested, I even wangled a day pass to watch the first Godfather movie, marching back to prison afterwards with a satiated smile.)

I’ve tracked all three CSI flavors since they came out, and know the characters from Dexter and Law & Order better than my cousins. I want my crime books and movies raw and bloody, not artsy-fartsy (I’ll take Michael Mann’s Heat anytime over Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, thank you); if possible, I like them real, with dates, timestamps, crime-scene photos, mug shots, the works.

Semi-Buddhist Beng, who literally can’t hurt a fly (she shoos them away with such perplexed pleadings as “Mr. Fly, what are you doing here?”), can’t understand this obsession of mine with malice, mayhem, and morbidity. She prefers cooking and makeover shows — you know, those shows where you learn cool new words like “frittata” and “sabayon,” and see reasonable people justify hoarding a roomful of toilet paper, a sentiment I can sympathize with.

Mind you, I like these, too — especially when they show cheese (which I hate), or houses stuffed with garbage, both of which make me squirm. Come to think of it, it’s the squirming I probably enjoy, whether it’s from looking at the stringy mozzarella on a pizza or at the grisly aftermath of a murder. It’s sick, especially since I know there’s nothing truly funny about death and suffering, but there’s a very human reason for all this, as I’ll explain shortly.

“No wonder you get all these nasty dreams,” Beng tells me. It’s true — some demonic crook keeps chasing me in my nightmares, where I’ve been shot three or four times, only to be saved (and nudged awake, screaming) by Beng, who probably dreams of pink marshmallows and saffron-robed monks.

So why wallow in the pits of human depravity, to the point where I can recite a litany of the world’s worst serial killers from A to Z (that’s Charles Albright to the Zodiac Killer) and their ghastly deeds? Maybe because, first of all, there’s just too much of it around us; death — gory, senseless, dripping death — is no longer a TV taboo, and CSI accustomed us to watching autopsies over dinner. Today we can use words like “epithelials” and “blunt force trauma” in the same sentence as “birthday” and “wedding anniversary.”

And why even bother with TV — why, there’s the Philippines, all 7,100 islands of it, the sunny hospitality of whose people is matched only by the propensity of a notable few for crimes of power and passion (never mind, for now, the smalltime pickpockets, cellphone snatchers, and sampayan sungkiteers). Years ago, writing an essay for an American literary journal devoted to the theme of “Crime and Punishment,” I remarked that “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.”

“It relaxes me” is the most honest answer I can give Beng, and it’s the terrible truth. The answer to “why” is the same answer I can expect to get to the questions I keep raising in class: Why don’t we write more stories with happy endings? Why does bad news sell better than good news? Why do we consider tragedy timelessly sublime, and comedy a passing chuckle?

There’s a German word — Schadenfreude — a literal conjunction of “harm” and “joy” that tries to describe how we can find pleasure in the pains and misfortunes of others. Even before the Germans, the Greeks had a similar idea — catharsis — which involves those paradoxically good feelings you get from feeling bad. The idea is, hey, it’s happening to them, not to you; if you see someone else die, then you, lucky you, must be alive, so drink and be merry (and never mind the continuation)! Is this inhuman, or just plain human? You tell me.

I suppose that, like Beng, I should get more pleasure from seeing oranges turned to marmalade and virtual dump yards turned to showrooms. Surely, positivity has its virtues — it’s just not as interesting.

To accommodate our preferences, Beng and I keep separate TVs — hers in the bedroom, mine in my study. But sometimes I get bored watching bloody murder all by myself, and sneak back to bed while she’s watching, say, Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson making pear pudding (Nigella I don’t mind watching for longer stretches). Then my fingers find their way to the remote, and as soon as the next commercial comes I switch over to the crime channel.

“Oh, look,” I tell Beng, “there’s a new show called Crime and Punishment!”

“Crime is punishment!” she mutters, then rolls over.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.