Jodi Arias in the Public Sphere: Rhetorics of Horror and the Monstrous Feminine – Elizabeth Lowry

Introduction

The Jodi Arias Trial has been described as one of the most peculiar and salacious murder trials in American history.[1] In May 2013, Arias, a 32 year-old woman, was found guilty of murdering her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander in Mesa, Arizona on June 4^th 2008. Alexander, a Mormon motivational speaker, was discovered to have been stabbed between twenty-seven and thirty times and had also been shot in the head. In the five years that elapsed between the murder and the trial, the word “monster” surfaced in a variety of contexts. To begin with, Arias claimed that “monsters” had broken into Alexander’s apartment and killed him in front of her. Later, Arias claimed that Alexander himself had been the monster–more specifically, a “sex monster,” whom Arias had been forced to kill in self-defense. Next, as more sordid details of the trial came to light, the popular press seized on classic horror conventions to frame the Arias narrative. Finally, the jury deemed Arias herself to be the monster–and therefore eligible for the death penalty.

This paper situates the Jodi Arias Trial within an American cultural tradition of monster-making and the role of social media and public participation in twenty-first century news reporting. I argue that the public construction of Arias as a monster was accomplished primarily by drawing on horror conventions and rhetorical tropes in order to exploit what Barbara Creed refers to as “monstrous feminine” archetypes. According to Creed, the “monstrous feminine” is identifiable via her association with the abject, her identity as a castrator and “her mothering and reproductive functions.”[2] We are cued to relate far differently to the “monstrous feminine” than we are to a “monster.” The monstrous feminine is not merely the female counterpart of a male monster. She is horrifying in a more gendered way: “she is defined in terms of her sexuality. The phrase ‘monstrous-feminine’ emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity.”[3] While the monstrous feminine is associated with the same sick and violent acts that we attribute to a monster, the monstrous female is the soul of duplicitousness and a skilled seductress—qualities that evoke all the more fear and loathing on the part of her victims. With this in mind, I offer an analysis of how the collective imagination is stimulated by a melding of highly affective genres. Why was it necessary for Arias to be constructed as a monster? What social need does the monster—particularly the female monster—address? What was the rhetorical impact of circulating this specific trial narrative—and what distinguishes this narrative from others of its ilk? What can the Jodi Arias trial tell us about the gendering of a monster and where the “monstrous feminine” belongs in the millennial cultural imaginary? Finally, what does a reliance on horror archetypes combined with Oedipal constructions of truth reveal about American cultural attitudes toward the subjectivity of violent criminals?

The Jodi Arias trial began on January 2^nd, 2013 in Phoenix, Arizona—but audiences were already familiar with Arias. By then, she had been the subject of a press conference shortly after her arrest in 2008, and, more significantly a documentary entitled “Jodi Arias: In Her Own Words” aired in 2009 by CBS’s 48 hours. While CBS and NBC produced periodic documentary episodes on the Jodi Arias saga to keep the public apprised of new developments in the case, the most comprehensive coverage of the day-to-day aspects of Arias’s five-month trial was covered primarily by HLN. Ever since her arrest in July 2008, Arias’s lawyers had dissuaded her from providing television interviews, however, she evidently paid them no heed. On September 24^th, 2008, four months after Travis Alexander’s murder, Arias appeared on camera for a jailhouse interview with Inside Edition. She then began a relationship with the producers of CBS’s 48 Hours that would eventually become the 2009 “In Her Own Words.” [4] This initial 48 Hours episode, hosted by Maureen Maher, attempts to suspend disbelief—and to consider the possibility that Arias might be innocent. In this interview, Arias “admitted that she was present when he was murdered, but she said that his death occurred during a home invasion…the intruders, whom she described as a man and a women dressed in black were armed with a knife and a gun. At one point, she said, the man pointed the gun at her but she was miraculously spared.”[5]

In August 2011, Arias admitted that she had murdered Alexander, but claimed that she had acted in self-defense. This was confirmed by Angela Arias, Arias’s younger sister, who, in a response to a Huffington Post query, said that while Arias had lied about the home invasion, she did so because of her love for Alexander: “She was so in love with that man she did not want people to know what a monster he really was…My sister is innocent of the crime they are accusing her of…She did kill Travis, but it was not in cold blood, it was not for revenge, it was because she was afraid for her life.”[6]

The jury selection for the Arias trial began on December 10^th, 2012. Ten days later, twelve jurors and six alternates were sworn in.[7] On January 2^nd, 2013 the trial began. On January 19^th, 48 Hours aired “Picture Perfect” and on March 1^st, 2013 NBC’s Dateline aired “Along Came Jodi.” In May 2013, when the necessary evidence for a conviction had emerged, and Arias’s guilt was confirmed, 48 Hours produced a final episode entitled “Unraveling the Lies of Jodi Arias,” which offered a retrospective of the trial and various earlier interviews with Arias. That same month, NBC’s Dateline also aired an episode providing a retrospective and commentary on the trial entitled “Obsession: The Jodi Arias Story.”

Body Genres

Through media coverage of this trial, we see the ways in which mythic and psychoanalytic underpinnings of fear, lust, and self-identification shape how news is produced and consumed. As information about the Arias trial circulates from one media outlet to another, we see a melding of genres—horror, whodunit, erotica and reality tv—but arguably, the most prevalent of these genres is a blend of erotica and horror. This particular combination bears a significant influence over the representation of a female criminal, especially if she is young and attractive. Both erotica and horror are deeply affective genres provoking a physiological response in audiences. Throughout the Arias trial, use of these “body genres”[8] worked in concert to foment a sense of intrigue, while personal investment in the trial was galvanized by opportunities to participate in online chats and opinion polls sponsored by major news networks. Over the course of the trial, opinion polls revealed what appeared to be a widespread consensus that Arias deserved the death penalty. However, this consensus was coupled with the peculiar irony of Arias’s growing celebrity: she had a friend open a Twitter account on her behalf and began to sell her pencil drawings and other items over eBay to enthusiastic buyers. From there, the trial proceedings saw unprecedented media hype and merchandising, including a made for tv movie,[9] mass-market publications on the trial[10] and the production of Jodi Arias T-shirts and stickers. Meanwhile droves of people lined up outside the Maricopa County courthouse in Phoenix hoping to get a ringside seat.

Public discourse on various elements of the Arias narrative brought to light during the trial were shaped by allusions to classic horror films of the mid to late twentieth century. The fact that Alexander was stabbed to death in the shower draws numerous comparisons to the film Psycho; the iconic “shower scene” itself reenacted by HLN’s “After Dark” hosts who built a replica of the crime scene in their television studio.[11] In addition to Psycho, the story of Arias and Alexander’s relationship is frequently compared to the plot of the 1987 thriller Fatal Attraction, in which a sociopathic woman attempts to destroy the family-life of a man with whom she has had an affair. A forensic psychiatrist[12] and a Phoenix defense attorney compare Arias to Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction—ostensibly in an effort to help the public better understand “who” Arias is.[13] These comparisons are made repeatedly by Alexander’s friends and reporters, shaping the representation and interpretation of Arias and Alexander’s ill-fated affair. Interestingly, Arias herself also draws on the narrative conventions of a thriller or horror film. In an attempt to argue for her own innocence, she casts herself in the role of Carol Clover’s iconic “Final Girl.” An archetype that Clover popularized in her analysis of femininity in horror films, the Final Girl is sexually pure—sometimes a tomboy—who, after everyone else has been killed, is left to fight the monster alone. She, the Final Girl, is the character that the audience ends up rooting for.[14]

As stipulated earlier, Arias offers three different versions detailing how Alexander came to be found dead in his shower. In the first version of the story, Arias claims that she had no idea that Alexander was dead and that she had been nowhere near his home. In the second version of the story, once photographic evidence had established that she had indeed been at the crime scene, Arias describes a home invasion, detailing how a man and woman had come into Alexander’s home, stabbed Alexander and then tried to shoot Arias, who, fearing for her life, took off running. In the third “official” version of the story, that which was recounted in court, Arias speaks of how Alexander—enraged that Arias had dropped his new camera while she was taking nude photographs of him in the shower—had “body-slammed” her to the bathroom floor and that, fearing for her life, she shot him in the head.[15] By the time this narrative was delivered from the stand in 2013, Arias had adopted a plainer look—one that favored drab colors, large glasses, and no make-up. Adopting the beleaguered, de-sexualized ethos of the “Final Girl,” Arias describes how Alexander—even with a bullet in his head—kept coming at her, which was why she allegedly had no choice but to stab him in self-defense. This, of course, is reminiscent of the classic horror film trope where the monster—believed to be dead—rises up, is again a threat, and must be “killed” once and for all.

A Cautionary Tale

Monsters inspire fear in order to deter us from inappropriate behavior. In this sense, the construction of Jodi Arias as a monster, particularly as the “monstrous feminine,” serves to warn the public about the dangers of giving in to lust; the perils of engaging in promiscuous sexual behavior. Alexander is unable to resist Arias. He allows lust to get the better of him, and so, as a result, his sexual indiscretions kill him when he becomes the victim of a she-demon.

As mentioned earlier, Arias is compared to Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction—a woman who would destroy her sexual partner rather than see him with someone else. Numerous cultural stereotypes support the narrative of the evil seductress luring a more or less “innocent” man to his death. Evoking the vagina dentata, Arias acts as a warning to men who may consider engaging in illicit sexual activity, just as Fatal Attraction famously became a “parable about the dangers of indulging in unsafe sex”[16] Tales such as these, evoking archetypes of the succubus and the siren, serve to maintain social purity by promising punishment to those who succumb to sexual urges. Fatal Attraction is particularly potent in this regard because of its depiction of a perceived “attack” on the sanctity of the family unit; the desecration of family values. It is precisely this issue that comes into play in the Arias trial, which at first seems surprising because neither Alexander nor Arias is married, and neither has children. What matters, however, was that—before his death—Alexander had professed himself to be a devout Mormon and an aspiring family man. Apparently an advocate for conservative family values, Alexander had taken a vow of chastity and was actively looking for a wife with whom to start a family.[17] Needless to say, Alexander did not consider Arias to be appropriate for marriage—and was conscious of the fact that his relationship with her could be construed as a betrayal both of the conservative ideology he represented and of his potential “family.” In short, Arias was cast as representing a similar threat to American family values as Glenn Close’s character had. The burden of responsibility for Alexander’s sexual transgressions is placed on Arias, although there is plenty of evidence that Alexander’s behavior was not beyond reproach.

Although the Fatal Attraction analogy played a significant role in the Alexander/Arias narrative, audiences of the trial (as evidenced by bloggers and media pundits) seemed to be equally inspired by connections made between the murder case and the movie Psycho. For instance, NBC’s Dateline documentary “Along Came Jodi” summarizes Part 3 of the documentary thus: “Travis Alexander, in a scene reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho is found dead in his shower. Everyone suspects Jodi Arias.”[18] Further, a blogger from Crime and Court News contended that Arias had actually intended for parallels to be made between the shower scene in Psycho and Alexander’s killing.[19] The blog included a visual component that juxtaposed images of Janet Leigh in the shower in the film Psycho with photos—taken by Jodi Arias—of Travis Alexander in the shower.[20]  Had Arias staged this murder as an homage to Hitchcock?

Associating Arias with the deranged Norman Bates who dresses like a woman (more specifically his mother) in order to stab his prey seems to add a new dimension to the Arias story—that of gender indeterminacy, or what Clover refers to as the “phallic female”–that is, when a woman takes up a knife or a phallic object, she becomes masculinized in the eyes of the viewer.[21] Hitchcock adds a twist to the Freudian “phallic female” with the suggestion that by dressing as a woman and using a butcher knife as a phallus, Bates is attempting to reclaim the masculinity so denigrated by his monstrous-feminine mother. With these references to Psycho and Fatal Attraction, Arias is portrayed at once as an overbearing mother-figure and as the stalker ex-mistress who frequently shows up unannounced at Alexander’s home, even crawling into the house through a dog-door when she has no access to keys. As the suffocating emasculating “mother,” Arias allegedly cleaned Alexander’s home, read his cellphone messages, hacked into his Facebook account and “snooped” through his possessions. Alexander’s friends describe how, like a child attempting to claim its independence, Alexander repeatedly tries to break away from Arias, but she will not let him go; a mother failing to give her child the freedom he needs—or, as Travis’s friends put it—a stalker.[22]

In Freudian terms, the idea of a female picking up a knife and stabbing a man with it often plays out in a rape revenge fantasy—metaphorically, she is raping him in return by appropriating the phallic power of the male. But Creed challenges Freud’s theory that men are afraid of women because women are “castrated.” Instead, she proposes that men are afraid of women whom they see as castrators.[23] As such, Creed discusses two types of woman in horror films: the phallic woman and the castrator. The phallic woman penetrates a man’s flesh by wielding a weapon, whereas the castrator—who eliminates his manhood altogether–is represented by the vagina dentata. But although the vagina dentata emblematizes the notion of the monstrous feminine, Creed points out that the female as castrator can often come across as being somewhat sympathetic because she is taking revenge against a man who has wronged her or sexually humiliated her—just as Arias claimed to have felt wronged at the hands of Alexander.[24] But while Creed’s 2002 work on the concept of “monstrous feminine” would likely cast Arias—the female slasher—as being a castrator, Clover’s older work of the 1970s prefers to conceive of the female slasher as being phallicized—that is, temporarily relegated to a state of sexual ambiguity. Ultimately, both archetypes are at work in portrayals of Arias. Audiences who interpret Arias as a castrator might see her in a somewhat sympathetic light, believing her to be abused. However, audiences who do not believe that Arias was abused see her as unattractively masculine—the knife being a means by which to assault the vulnerable male. These unconscious hints at gender indeterminacy and the feminizing and subjugation of Alexander, further lend to the notion of duality—the demonic Other that is Jodi Arias.

Our Monsters, Ourselves

The sensational documentary films aired by 48 Hours and Dateline combined with the increasing role of social media platforms inviting viewers to chat and share opinions set the reality show tenor for the Arias Trial. The trial reporting introduced Alexander’s friends and family—all of whom seemed so ordinary that viewers could not help but identify with them. However, in treating Arias’s legal proceedings like a reality show, the public seemed to have stopped thinking of Arias or her family as “real” people. Thus arises a paradox inherent to the reality tv genre: the phenomenon of both identifying with the protagonists of reality tv because they are “real” but somehow feeling that their circumstances or life experiences are distinctly “unreal.”

For decades, parents have complained about children being influenced by depictions of violence in genres that are recognized as exclusively fictional. The suasive power of those fictions has long been considered to be dangerously potent. Creed acknowledges this, asserting that “movies” influence the viewer in a more insidious fashion than reality tv.  According to Creed, “intimate events” in “movies” as such, “unfold in a context which hides its modes of production and pretends that the spectator is viewing unmediated reality.”[25] On the other hand, reality tv makes no such pretense since “the contestants have agreed to put themselves on display in a live context.”[26] In other words, since reality tv does not hide its modes of production it does not trick the viewer into thinking he/she is watching unmediated reality. The viewer can still tell fact from fiction—he/she knows that in a movie, reality is mediated by actors and producers. In other words, reality tv can be considered more authentic simply because it admits to its own artifice. But Shohini Chaudhuri’s interpretation of feminist film theorist Claire Johnston’s work suggests that Johnston would challenge Creed’s perspective by asserting that the very fact that reality tv does admit to its own artifice actually makes it less authentic, because not all of its artifice is made transparent.[27]  Therefore, to Johnston, reality tv has more insidious suasive power than a movie because it tricks us into thinking we are experiencing immediacy when we are not. Yet, the Arias trial is complex enough in terms of its blended genre conventions that neither Johnston nor Creed’s theories seem to hold up in its context. Indeed, reality tv is insidious because it tricks us into thinking we are experiencing something “real,” but that is far from being the problem—the problem is how we actually process and internalize what we see. Evidently even our enjoyment of the “real” does not actually play out as being “real” in the cultural imaginary. Instead, it becomes a spectacle that causes people to forget that others can be deeply affected by their actions. However, it could be argued that the lack of a sense of reality during the trial had to do less with reality tv than with the initial presentation of a stylized murder narrative. Because the Arias story had already been so deeply marked by horror conventions, its rebranding as reality television caused profound cultural confusion.

The confusion seemed to extend to public responses to the trial proceedings which  revealed that due process is unimportant to a culture in which the line between reality and unreality is so easily blurred.  During this time, it seemed that the viewing public had entirely forgotten that this trial was a matter of life and death. In online chatrooms and commentaries on social media platforms such as Facebook, Arias’s defense lawyer, Kirk Nurmi, was excoriated for doing his job: honoring Arias’s right to a trial. Participants in online chats and viewer commentaries on the websites of major news outlets complained bitterly about Nurmi. For instance, HLN viewers complained that the soft-spoken, overweight Nurmi was “boring” and that he looked like a “slob.”[28] Instead of critiquing the very real arguments about justice—not only for Alexander, but also for Arias—presented in the trial, viewers critiqued what they felt to be failures of the entertainment industry: Nurmi was supposed to be good-looking and entertaining. He was not supposed to speak in Arias’s defense because as far as public opinion was concerned, Arias had already qualified for execution.

In this regard, “Obsession” the Dateline episode of May 10^th, 2013, is significant because it provides more reflective coverage on the public’s reaction to the “Jodi Show” than other major news outlets. The trial is described as a “uniquely twenty-first century event” in terms of its attraction to audiences “hooked on the action” and emphasizes the trial’s reality-show style appeal.[29] This Dateline episode refers to “trial tourists”—that is, people from other states flying into Phoenix to try to get a seat in court. Dateline also points out that this type of public interest is problematic. Treating the trial it as if it were as “unreal” as a reality show, meant a heavily biased jury—who had not been sequestered—and defense lawyers who apparently feared for their lives. Equally problematic was the fact that the prosecuting attorney, Juan Martinez, was signing autographs and posing for pictures outside of the courthouse. Michael Kiefer, an Arizona Republic reporter interviewed on site expressed dismay that people were reacting to an event this serious in such a frivolous manner: “This is not Jersey Shore. This is life and death. This is a death penalty case.”[30] But nobody seemed particularly concerned with the provision of a fair trial. The Arias case had given the public an opportunity to express its bloodlust: The condemnation of Arias’s violence had evidently given rise to a socially acceptable and legally sanctioned violence of its own.

A Quest for Truth

The persistence and pervasiveness of social media helped the American public to participate minute by minute in a heavily dramatized trial ultimately cast as a quest for “Truth.” Unified toward this ostensibly noble end, the public followed Juan Martinez’s cross-examination intently, trying to understand who Jodi Arias really was. In this manner, trial-addicted viewers found online affinity groups either for or against (although the majority was clearly for) the death penalty. A consensus of sorts was constructed by media outlets such as HLN and CNN conveying a sense that the American people had unified in order to uncover the “truth” and participate in the ritual slaying of a monster.

When media outlets begin to represent Arias as being a complex character, that complexity is quickly undermined by resorting to a strictly Manichean worldview. For example, Dateline’s “Along Came Jodi” shows an image of Arias wearing red while posing against an acid green background. The picture is replicated multiple times to signal multiple personality disorder. And later, pictures of Arias in her various avatars (blonde bombshell, domestic violence victim, mousy librarian) are presented along with a voiceover alerting viewers to “the many faces of Jodi Arias.”[31]However, the “many faces” are not meant to show complexity, they are meant to inspire fear; to demonstrate that Arias’s negative traits are legion and that her capacity for trickery is unlimited. The possibility that there might be a “good” Arias among these avatars becomes irrelevant when her representation will ultimately be reduced to a good/evil binary. This sense of duality is seen in sharp relief when viewers are repeatedly shown old pictures of Arias.  The difference is stark. The pre-murder Arias had platinum blonde hair, wore makeup and contact lenses and sexy brightly colored clothing. The accused pre-trial Arias transitioned into a more modest brunette; still soft-spoken, pretty, and concerned with grooming and makeup. This change in Arias’s image was used to suggest that she was “hiding” something[32] –an allegation that grew when the Arias on trial later seemed to have changed dramatically even from her transition phase; wearing large unfashionable glasses, no makeup, and drab colors. Newscasters drew frequent attention to this, calling Arias’s new look that of the “mousy librarian.”[33] Now, seemingly all too aware of her folly in having sought the spotlight, Arias appears to shrink from the public eye lamenting that details of her sex life with Alexander have gone public. But when the narrator of Dateline’s “Obsession” asks: “Who was she?” it doesn’t seem as if the documentarians themselves had much doubt as to who Arias was. Although both CBS and NBC aired documentary episodes attempting to attest to Arias’s multiplicity, their efforts were disingenuous. This disingenuousness comes to light in a Facebook chat that invites viewers to weigh in on whether or not they believe the defense’s version of Arias’s story. Dateline muses over Arias’s transformation from “sexy wannabe photographer to Plain Jane killer.”[34] This concept is rhetorically problematic. Why could Arias not have been both—or why was she necessarily either? How would one category have precluded her from the other?  How, could a “sexy wannabe photographer” be pitted as a logical antithesis to being a killer? This rhetoric is evidence of the degree to which duality plays a role in the construction of the monstrous feminine, beginning with the archetype of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve, characterized both as being easily tempted and as a temptress herself, leads Adam into sin. During the trial, this feminine duplicity is remarked upon repeatedly—as are Arias’s good looks. How could an attractive person actually be a killer?[35] Indeed, Dateline’s labels—“sexy wannabe photographer” and “plain Jane killer”—foments the idea that we cannot quite conceive of killers as being attractive people. Therefore, it is possible that Arias actually lost credibility by eschewing the blonde bombshell look in favor of the librarian. On the other hand, however, perhaps it was a savvy rhetorical tactic. Unattractive female murderers such as Aileen Wournos are merely female monsters—and people feel sorry for them—whereas attractive women who commit murder are branded as siren-like; somehow supernatural. This element of the uncanny incites us to recognize these women as being as excessively evil as they are excessively feminine.

In his article “The Cultural Biography of Things,” Igor Kopytoff speaks of the analogous relationship between how people and things are constructed within a culture. In particular, he compares the difference between these constructions within a “small-scale” society versus a “complex” society.[36] In a small-scale society “a person’s social identities are relatively stable and changes in them are normally conditioned more by cultural rules than by biographical idiosyncrasies,” while a complex society is radically different by virtue of the fact that “a person’s social identities are not only numerous but often conflicting and there is no clear hierarchy of loyalties that makes one identity dominant over the others. Here, the drama of personal biographies has become…the drama of identities—of their clashes, of the impossibility of choosing between them…”[37] Taking Kopytoff’s theory of identity into account, I argue that during this trial, major television networks “mediated” by providing signals to help the viewing public choose between possible identities for Arias (monster or sex kitten?). Indeed, the uncertainty of identity is one of the most disturbing elements of the monstrous feminine; the biggest problem to be reckoned with: “classifications and reclassifications in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts with every minor change in context…the drama here lies in the uncertainties of valuation and identities.” [38] It is this categorical instability, this uncertainty of valuation, the contrived either/or dilemmas facing viewers that lead to the shaping of the Jodi Arias trial as a “whodunit.”

The “whodunit” aspect of the Arias trial stems from its narrative attention to the element of horror, particularly with regard to the characteristics of multiplicity and duplicity integral to the construction of the monstrous feminine. The fact that the trial is framed as a mystery can be aptly explained in terms of Teresa de Lauretis’s theory of the Oedipal quest—the idea that the woman is enigmatic and Sphinx-like; a riddle to be solved; a code to be cracked.[39] Ultimately, the way the Arias narrative is framed invites viewers to participate in a sense of discovery; the illusion of uncovering a secret. But is there really a secret? After all, we already know that Arias committed the crime. Apparently, now the question is which (of two or more) versions of Arias committed the crime, and who is she really? The idea that there is some “Truth” to be uncovered is the driving factor in de Lauretis’s discussion of the Oedipal quest. “So many films follow an Oedipal trajectory, usually figuring a male hero-individual, who embarks upon a journey that will involve him crossing a boundary and penetrating the ‘other space’.”[40] The “other space” that is being penetrated is the feminine. The hero must conquer her. Creed too, comments on this dynamic. When the male hero enters the ‘other space’ the “Sphinx, who…knows the answers to the secret of life…[is] no longer the subject of the narrative, [she] has become the object of the narrative of the male hero. After he has solved her riddle, she will destroy herself.” [41] Thus, the trial narrative is set up as a conundrum—the prosecutor will extract the Truth from the accused, and the Truth is dependent, of course, on how the debate itself is framed: abused woman or cold-blooded killer? Although the Arias case is not particularly mysterious, and Arias herself is not exactly an enigma, she must be presented as such because in order to answer the question of who she is, more information—the kind that can be provided only by those closest to the action—is always necessary. However, “Information can’t solve the problem because the problem is one of belief, not knowledge.”[42] In other words, according to media theorist Jodi Dean, once a belief about a particular situation has been fomented, no amount of empirical knowledge is going to change that belief if its supporting narrative continues to be structured in the same way. Dean goes on to say: “The technologies believe for us, accessing information even if we cannot. Permanent media bring us closer to the secret but continue to hold it just out of reach. The secret thus no longer sutures together the split public. Installed in new technologies it now functions as the stimulus and currency of the information economy.”[43] In other words, the idea of building consensus, the notion of constructing a common monster for the sake of unifying the public has now become secondary to the process of building beliefs. The very idea of withholding information, the rhetorical process of suggesting that any day now we might be granted access to the “right” piece of information—the privileged knowledge which will illuminate everything—is what really drives viewers to tune into the “Jodi Show” day and after day. No matter how many “facts” emerge about the case, no matter whose Twitter feed we follow, no matter who is reporting on the drama occurring in the courthouse, as Dean points out, the information is unlikely to challenge what we have already been primed to believe about who the monster is and the position she occupies in the public consciousness. The tactic of genre-melding in the Arias narrative is therefore used as a blind—it appears to be supplying the viewer with new information, but in fact, it is being used primarily to foment belief in the viewer—a belief that there is a Truth to be uncovered.

Conclusion

Certainly, constructing criminals as a monsters serves to dehumanize them, but what does such a construction say about us—those who are engaged in crafting the monster narrative? Monsters do significant cultural work. They act as deterrents or correctives to bad behavior, they instruct or show us about ourselves, and they unify us by providing us with a perceived common enemy. Constructing Arias as a monster serves to promote the idea of social purity, engages viewers by making them feel personal investment in the trial proceedings, and ultimately bonds them in a public quest for “Truth.” In particular, the construction of the monstrous feminine in characterizing the Arias/Alexander story is crucial to generating public interest. Although the case presents what appears to be a drama of identity, the fallacious binaries conveyed to viewers reinscribe the trope of the monstrous feminine. In Hollywood, the monster is always killed, but in real life we attempt to sublimate–or “rehabilitate”–our monsters by sending them to correctional facilities. However, the presence of the death penalty as well as popular constructions of the monster suggest that we do not believe that monsters can be “corrected.” Ironically then, perhaps what we end up attempting to sublimate is not the monster per se, but our own desire to kill it–a desire that inevitably finds expression at an increasingly indeterminate border between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy.

References

“Along Came Jodi.” Dateline. NBC. 1 Mar. 2013. Television.

Boedecker, Hal. “Jodi Arias: Will She Talk Herself to Death?” Orlando Sentinel. Tribune Newspaper, 22 May 2013. Web.

Breuer, Howard, and Jill Smolowe. “The Many Faces of Jodi Arias.” People.com. Time Inc., 08 Apr. 2013. Web. 13 Oct. 2013.

Chaudhuri, Shohini. Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed. New York: Routledge Critical Thinkers, 2006.

Clover, Carol.  Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton NJ: Princeton, UP. 1992.

Creed, Barbara. Media Matrix: Sexing the New Reality. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003.

— The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

Curry, Colleen. “Jodi Arias Trial Puts Mormon Sex Rules in Spotlight.” ABC News. ABC News Network, 1 Feb. 2013. Web.

Dean, Jodi. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Print.

De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984.

Dr. Drew Staff. “Grade Kirk Nurmi’s Closing Argument” Dr. Drew on Call HLN. Cable News Network, 3 May. 2014. Web.

— “How Would You Grade Kirk Nurmi?” Dr. Drew on Call. HLN. Cable News Network, 23 Apr. 2013. Web.

Errigo, Angie. “Fatal Attraction: Glenn Close Turns into a Monstrous One-Woman Adultery-Deterrent” Empireonline.com. Bauer Consumer Media, n.d. Web.

Hogan, Shanna. Picture Perfect: The Jodi Arias Story; A Beautiful Photographer, Her Mormon Lover, and a Brutal Murder. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.

“In Her Own Words.” 48 Hours. CBS Interactive. September 2008. Web.

“Jodi Arias Dirty Little Secret.” MyLifetime.com. n.p., 22 June 2013. Web.

“Jodi Arias Secrets Revealed.” CNN.com. Cable News Network, 18 Apr. 2013.

Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things” The Social Life of Things:

Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Lohr, David. “Jodi Arias Case: Twists And Delays In Alleged Femme Fatale’s Murder Trial.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 29 Dec. 2011. Web.

— “Jodi Arias Timeline (UPDATED).” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 May 2013. Web.

“Obsession: The Jodi Arias Trial.” Dateline. NBC. 10 May. 2013. Television.

Pelisek, Christine. “Will Jodi Arias Go Free?” The Daily Beast. Newsweek/Daily Beast, 03 May 2013. Web.

“Picture Perfect: The Trial of Jodi Arias.” 48 Hours. CBS Interactive, 19 Jan. 2013. Web.

Schwartz, David. “Arizona Jury Foreman Says Believed Jodi Arias Was Abused.” Reuters US Edition. Reuters.com, 24 May 2013. Web.

Skoloff, Brian and Josh Hoffner. Killer Girlfriend: The Jodi Arias Story. Waterfront Digital Press, May, 2013.

“The Closely Guarded Secret of Jodi Arias’ Trial.” Inside Edition. n.p., 03 May 2013. Web.

Thomas, Alexandra. “After Dark Reenacts Arias Killing.” HLNtv.com. Cable News Network, 29 May 2013.

“Unraveling the Lies of Jodi Arias.” 48 Hours. CBS Interactive, 17 May 2013. Web.

Van Horn, Charisse.  “Did Jodi Arias Recreate Psycho Scene with Travis Alexander?” Crime and Courts News. Blogger, 8 May 2013. Web.

Velez-Mitchell, Jane. Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias. William Morrow, August 20, 2013

—  “Verdict Watch Life or Death?” CNN.com Transcripts. Cable News Network, 21 May 2013. Web. 13 Oct. 2013.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (1991):

2-13.