All Forms of Art

  The Crash  is a shocking story that shakes our beliefs as a society. Unlike many  Netflix  documentaries, this one is not in episodes; it is a one-and-a-half-hour movie that hits you like a huge wave of horrifying events. It is about a horrible car accident that killed two young men. The car was driven by the 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, and the story has more to it than you might think at first sight.  The Idealization of Youth  As a society, we tend to avoid looking at very young people as evil. We like to think they are naive and kind. Are they immature? Totally. Are they reckless? No doubt. But cruel?  We don't like to think of our teens that way, but it happens more often than we'd like.  Regular Teen or Bad Parenting? The documentary begins by portraying Mackenzie Shirilla as a regular teenage girl, but you quickly realize she isn't. Her behavior and attitude go beyond those of a regular teen in many ways. She is rude, she is mean, ...

This is not the sort of show that I usually talk about on this blog. However, as a psychologist, I’m usually quite curious about criminals and their minds, and one day I started watching this documentary on Netflix. Taking into consideration the kind of thing this is, I can’t say I ‘liked’ it. I mean, what you see in there is nothing to like, but I was rather terrified, which is probably the usual response.  Nonetheless, it was definitely a good documentary. The eyes of a killer Everything displayed in this story was terrible. The descriptions, Bundy’s posture, everything seemed like some sort of horror show, putting into perspective what we may consider to be lucky or unlucky in this life. Before I even start watching it, I read somewhere that this was the kind of thing you shouldn’t watch alone. Sounds accurate right now. At the time, and considering my mostly academic experience, I didn’t think that this could actually be so upsetting. Every time...