Samuel Little claimed to have fatally strangled 93 women in numerous states throughout his homicidal life and Face a serial killer allows you to explain your crimes and motivations during hours of audio interviews conducted by author Jillian Lauren. Both for this docuseria and for the research of his next book Exit Sandman: The true story of America’s most prolific serial killer, Lauren established a friendship with Little after her conviction and imprisonment in 2014 for the murders of three women. And as he repeatedly states throughout this five-episode affair, his goal was to convince the confessions of Little (who died in December 2020) in order to identify his victims and thus give voice to the voiceless. , whose deaths were ignored by a criminal justice system that, according to Lauren, saw them as “less dead.”
So Lauren and director Joe Berlinger want to Face a serial killer be a story about not only Little but, most importantly, the dozens of prostitutes and drug addicts he murdered, a noble cause that unfortunately is undone by the fact that the protagonist and the real theme of this play of non-fiction are: be Lauren herself.
It premieres on April 18 in Starz, Berlinger’s latest effort on real crimeCrime scene: The disappearance at the Hotel Cecil) is the case of a journalist who is allowed to become history. Lauren’s intentions have principles and her triumphs are real, but from the moment she first appears on camera, she has a performative quality in every tearful tear, breathless line reading, prose narration, and reference to Little as and “Mr. Sam.” Especially when she juxtaposes with the other speakers in the rest of the process, Lauren overreacts to the camera, which coincides with the fact that she and Berlinger keep their role constantly in this front-and-center saga, so she quickly it becomes less what Lauren does than by doing it empathetically, fairly, and at great cost to her sanity and the well-being of her family.
Lauren’s husband, Scott Shriner (Weezer’s bassist) and her two children show up from time to time to explain the toll that Lauren’s work is taking on her and her clan. This idea is highlighted by Lauren’s first-person comment, during which, with intense sorrow in her voice and eyes, she speaks of she responsibility towards the victims of Little, she identification with them (thanks to their own history with drugs and abusive men), she the desire to create safe spaces for their children in the midst of their macabre work, she inability to drop the evidence of many victims and, above all,she struggles to endure endless chats with Little. While denying any guilt in his initial trial, Little openly opens up to Lauren during her phone calls, providing all sorts of horrible details about her childhood, her mentality, and her countless disgusting crimes.
Alas, in a way that is the opposite of that of Liz Garbus I will stay in the dark, who married Michelle McNamara’s quest to identify the Golden State Killer with a portrait of the socio-political climate of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, Berlinger turns the processes into a platform for his star. And every time Lauren says she puts the focus on the dead, she feels like she’s doing it herself.
In addition, Lauren de Little’s analysis is of a pedestrian variety, though that doesn’t stop her from delivering it as if she were distributing hitherto unknown ideas. The notion that Little was a “predator” who predated marginalized women whom society presumably would not miss — and who would not justify serious police investigations — is evident and confirmed by the events of Little’s decades of death. However, it is also a fairly obvious facet of this story. Over and over again, the series makes weighty pronunciations that are not as cunning or revealing as is believed, thus making everything a bit exaggerated and empty.
“Over and over again, the series makes weighty pronunciations that are not as cunning or revealing as is believed, thus making everything a bit exaggerated and empty.”
Lauren’s broadest dispute is that the Little saga is a clear example of failures in the criminal justice system, as despite having a rap sheet that totaled nearly 100 pages (including crimes ranging from entry and entry to aggression, to rape and murder), he constantly evaded serious prosecution. This is also true, and speaks of a general disregard for sex workers and drug users (especially when they are women of color). And a new, angry confrontation between Laurie Barros, who survived a small attack, and the prosecutor who failed to get a guilty plea (instead, he settled for a court settlement that offset Little two years between grids) speaks of the misogyny at play here, where the monstrous Little discarded women who suffered from skates in fields, barrels, and landfills, and were then belittled by institutions designed to defend them.
Even in this sense, however, Face a serial killer it tells us things we already know, while indicating things that are not mocked by the material we have on hand. For example, Lauren proclaims that Little’s ability to escape trial for so long is proof that the justice system is racist, even though he was a black man who in many cases killed white women, which you would think it would make the ideal fodder for a racist system. Not helping things is a stark, non-chronological structure that makes things less clear and not clearer, and suggests that Berlinger himself knows that there is nothing particularly profound that can be drawn from Little’s reign of terror, except from the fact that it is depressingly easy to get to kill those who reside on the lower rungs of the social ladder.
In his chats with Lauren, Little offers ample evidence of his own sex-diverted sociopathy, his preternatural coldness, and his arrogance. He repeatedly tells Lauren that she is destined to be with him “forever” and that, like the souls of the women he killed, he “has her.” It’s a creepy creepy, to the end. Unlike their gender siblings John Wayne Gacy: Devil in disguise or The killer of the confession, But, Face a serial killer marks Little as a habitual liar, and yet he takes much of what he claims at face value. The success of Lauren and law enforcement in fixing numerous unsolved murders on Little, based on her own testimonies, suggests that in many ways she was telling the truth. But the possibility that he was also an egotist claiming crimes he did not commit is not examined here, which is not surprising, given the general blind spot of the series when it comes to being absorbed.