Let Me Enjoy A Little Retribution

We have a peculiar appetite for the discomfort of others. I know I eagerly await Love Island’s Movie Night episode, in which contestants are brutally confronted with footage of their wayward partners’ indiscretions, and took delight in watching a beleaguered Hannah Fry squirm at The Traitor’s Round Table. Germans have a word for this, as they so often do: Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. Yet to mistake this pleasure for cruelty is to overlook a crucial distinction. 

Surely there is a real difference between relishing needless suffering and taking satisfaction in the downfall of someone deserving of it. The former looks an awful lot like sadism; the latter speaks to our instinct for retributive justice. Perhaps these look indistinguishable from the outside, but the moral distinction lies in why we take pleasure, rather than simply that we do. We revel in the exposure of wrongdoing not out of a grotesque desire to see someone in distress, but because we genuinely believe justice demands accountability. 

Critics of To Catch a Predator would have us believe that the programme’s appeal reveals something intrinsically ugly about its audience. That laying dormant beneath our performed concern for child protection is a primitive thirst for humiliation. This author dismisses the show’s 200 indictments and 120 convictions across nine American states as a convenient ‘excuse’, gifting viewers a convenient hiding spot behind the veneer of moral righteousness all the while indulging a rather less defensible desire for public cruelty. But to reduce the programme’s allure to this alone is to commit a false dichotomy, assuming that moral conviction and morbid curiosity are mutually exclusive. Surely we are nuanced enough creatures to be capable of desiring justice to be served while also finding its pageant compelling; how else do we explain courtroom dramas, true-crime podcasts, and my own rather unseemly glee at the sight of a greasy-haired Russell Brand facing criminal charges on my TV screen? 

The suggestion that victims are so far removed from the televised confrontation, and the crime so obscured by the theatrics of production, that all that remains is the spectacle of a man’s suffering is equally questionable. The close-up of the predator’s ashen face is compelling precisely because we understand the heinous acts that got him to this position. Quite far from being incidental to the spectacle of it all, our sense of vindication is precisely what makes such blatant voyeurism so fulfilling.  

I would even go as far as to suggest that TCAP is merely a sensationalised extension of open justice, albeit sufficiently dramatised to warrant an A-lister biopic in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime. We have a sex offenders registry, criminal records, and public court proceedings because we believe that justice ought not to operate behind closed doors. Chris Hansen hardly invented public scrutiny. 

I do admit there is a difference between transparency in the interest of accountability and degradation for the sake of entertainment. There is something to be said for the spectacle of punishment serving only our baser appetite for watching another brought to their knees, but a few camera men and a cheap soundtrack do not, in themselves, curdle the pursuit of justice. The notion that finding the drama in retribution somehow makes our desire for it any less sincere is objectionable. I can rejoice at the image of Russell Brand at last facing the ferocious press scrutiny he deserves, just as I can appreciate Chris Hansen’s quiet dismantling of a predator’s psyche. I would like to think that our enjoyment of these moments does not make us morally bankrupt, but something closer to honest. 

 

Words by Josie Stern.

Art by Darshini Pitchamootoo.