Sympathy for the devil: why so many TV series want us to empathise with killers

Have you ever wanted to peer inside the mind of a killer—even if just for a little while?

Admittedly, this question is a tease. It’s impossible to take a dip into anybody’s psyche—including that of a murderer. To get even close to doing so, we have to turn to fiction.

Stories told from inside the mind of a murderer are fascinating because their desires and actions are, for the most part, alien to us. It’s a gripping exercise, but one that comes with some complicated side effects. This storytelling technique not only automatically aligns us with the killer, but also, potentially, encourages us to sympathise with them.

This is definitely true for His Bloody Project, a 2015 novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Burnet’s book contains documents relating to a fictional murder case set in 19th century Scotland. The bulk of the narrative is told from the perspective of 17-year-old Roderick Macrae, who—despite murdering three people—stirs us to sympathy. The fact that we are reading the story from Roderick’s perspective has everything to do with this.

In literature, the use of the first-person means that we experience all facets of a killer’s personality: their brutality alongside other, more palatable characteristics. The same effect is accomplished in television through the use of voiceover, as in the recent Netflix series You. You is told from the perspective of Joe Goldberg, a bookstore clerk who becomes obsessed with a woman who comes into his shop one day, Guinevere Beck. Joe fixates on Beck, stalks her, even kills “for her.”

Joe is abominable. But he’s also darkly funny. He characterizes Benji, the trust fund frat boy who runs an artisanal soda brand, as “everything wrong with America.” As Beck and her friends discuss The Bachelor, Joe thinks, “Sometimes, I swear I’m the only real feminist you know.”

Joe’s deadpan comments are reminiscent of another killer with a dry sense of humour: Dexter Morgan. Dexter, like You, is told from the perspective of a killer; a self-confessed psychopath, Dexter works as a blood splatter specialist during the day and kills murderers who have slipped through legal cracks at night.

Joe and Dexter’s wry internal reflections make us feel like we’re in on the joke. Because we’re inside their minds, we also see their softer sides: we see Joe take Paco, a young neighbour whose mother has an abusive boyfriend, under his wing. Dexter is a natural with his girlfriend’s kids and brings doughnuts to work. (Of course, we are constantly reminded that Dexter’s social graces are copied. “Just like me,” Dexter muses, as he looks down at his emptied box of doughnuts, “empty inside.”)

When our viewing experience is filtered through the story of the killer, we are usually privy to their pasts—which tend to be disturbing. In His Bloody Project, we learn that Roderick lives in squalid poverty and is beaten by his father. We find out that the landlord Roderick eventually murders relentlessly bullies his family and impregnates his sister, who decides to commit suicide rather than carry the baby to term. We pity Roderick, even while finding his actions indefensible.

Like Roderick, Joe and Dexter have challenging starts in life. Joe is taken in by Mr. Mooney, who sometimes hits Joe and locks him up in a glass cage—the same cage in which Joe will later confine victims. As a small child, Dexter witnesses the grizzly murder of his mother. He is adopted by an understanding foster father who teaches Dexter to channel his murderous urges into vigilante killing. (Some people have even compared Dexter to Batman because he only targets other criminals.) All of these character details work to build up, if not empathy, then understanding in the viewer. Their pasts, in part, help explain why Joe and Dexter act in the abnormal ways that they do.

Simply, when stories are told from the perspective of the killer, we align ourselves with the narrator. We hope that Joe and Dexter don’t get caught—and have to ask ourselves, horrified, how we could root for such depraved characters. The truth is, it’s because we’ve been inside their mind. We have laughed at their jokes and noticed their quirks. The creators of these characters have constructed killers that, against our instincts, the audience sympathise with—which makes for a moral quandary, and thus good TV.

For some writers, this set up allows for a twist which challenges the audience even more. After you finish Roderick’s account in His Bloody Project, you are given documents that include a written transcript from court. Reading the transcript, you learn things that Roderick has omitted from his narrative; for instance, that he watches girls sleep at night through their windows. You start to question Roderick’s character and his reliability as a narrator. You are faced with your own folly for sympathising with him.

Anakana Schofield uses the same technique in Martin John, a novel told from the perspective of a compulsive flasher. Martin—who likes the Eurovision Song Contest and dislikes the letter P—is written empathetically. But when we briefly get the perspective of one of his victims, the sympathetic conception of Martin John that we had built up shatters.

Burnet and Schofield remind us that although we’re inside the mind of a criminal, that doesn’t—or shouldn’t—sublimate the experience of their victims. In comparison, You never offers another perspective, which has led people to overlook Joe’s behaviour. Penn Badgley, who plays Joe, has even had to remind Twitter users romanticising his character that Joe is a murderer.

Badgley’s Twitter exchanges highlights a concern about stories that encourage us to sympathise with killers. Namely, it’s possible that, when the story is told from the killer's perspective, the viewer is in danger of becoming blinded to the harm they cause. This doesn’t mean that we have to stop binging the latest ‘inside the mind of a killer’ thriller—I, for one, am looking forward to the second series of You—but perhaps it does mean we have to be more vigilant. While lurking inside the mind of Roderick or Joe or Dexter, it becomes far too easy to excuse the inexcusable.