Community Service: The Female Serial Killer Narrative in Stay Close (2021)

The small screen seems to attract serial killer narratives like a magnet, whether in the form of true crime documentaries like Night Stalker, shows that engage directly with serial killer lore (think Mindhunter), or ones that feature serial killers as primary or secondary plot devices (Dexter is a good example, or even The Mentalist on CBS, a show which introduced me to this subgenre as a teenager). In spite of their popularity, I try hard to avoid them. Serial killer narratives have their own tropic elements, most of which make me deeply uncomfortable. 

They usually revolve around a male killer hunting down female victims, taunting and showing off for the profiler trying to track him down, and they often have an intense focus on what Lee Horsley calls ‘body horror’ – those gory descriptions of torture and dismemberment which are so common in serial killer narratives – because here more than in any other kind of crime story, the violence inflicted on the body of the victim carries immense symbolic weight (141). No matter how hard the narrative might work to make the female victims of the serial killer more than just anonymous bodies, I find myself increasingly less able to engage with plots which feature women carved up or branded in nauseating ways simply as a means to round out the psychological portrait of the male criminal for the audience.

When I started Stay Close, the 2021 Netflix show adapted from the novel of the same name by Harlan Coben, I wasn’t expecting to find myself watching a serial killer narrative. I haven’t read the book, and I barely even glanced at the plot synopsis. Truth be told, I just saw James Nesbitt on the cover image and hit play immediately. The show charts the convergence of two investigations: one by Megan Pierce (Cush Jumbo) into the rumoured reappearance of a shadowy figure from her past life, when she worked as a dancer under the name Cassie, and another by Nesbitt’s detective, Michael Broome, who is investigating the disappearance of a young man and its possible connections to a cold case which still troubles him. By the second episode, I had a hunch about where the story was going (an occupational hazard of working on serial killer narratives – you can never turn off the Spidey Sense it engenders), and my suspicions were confirmed shortly afterwards when Broome discovers that a number of men have been murdered on the same carnival weekend for almost two decades, indicating the work of a serial killer. However, in spite of my aforementioned reluctance to engage with serial killer narratives on screen, I found myself not only racing through the remaining episodes, but pleasantly surprised by what Stay Close was doing with what can be a quite predictable narrative frame.

  We are culturally obsessed with serial killers; this very blog feed is no exception. David Schmid describes serial killers as occupying a position of strange celebrity in the cultural imagination, capable of inspiring conflicting feelings of “attraction and repulsion, admiration and condemnation” (6). Jane Caputi, examining other facets of serial killer lore in popular culture, reads the serial killer as an archetype of violent masculinity that patriarchal culture endlessly reifies and reproduces, always in opposition to a dominated or defeated femininity (17). The enduring interest in narratives about Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy, to name just two, seems to support this. Stay Close flips this heavily masculinised story on its head by portraying a female serial killer who targets male victims. Female serial killers are billed as rarities – firstly because society constructs women as non-violent, and secondly because we understand women’s violence, when it does happen, as a one-off occurrence triggered by extreme need or by mental illness. The dominant vision of female serial killing is one which takes place within the home, targets intimate relations, and uses methods which don’t require great physical force, such as poison. Notable exceptions like Aileen Wuornos, who killed strangers with a gun in the middle of nowhere, are subject to intense fetishization by virtue of their divergence from this image.

Stay Close presents a female serial killer who is similarly divergent. Lorraine Griggs, who manages the local club Vipers, targets men who have assaulted or harassed either her employees or her female customers. These men appear physically bigger and stronger than Lorraine, but the show depicts her taking them down with equal physical force, using rocks or other weapons, and then disposing of their bodies by trucking them in a handcart to a tunnel in the woods. No pillows or poison here, and equally surprising is the end reveal that Lorraine has a cancer diagnosis, the treatment for which makes her very unwell, but which appears no obstacle to her intensely physical murders. There’s potential here for Lorraine’s violence to be chalked up to a mental imbalance provoked by her ill health, as is so often the case for criminal women, but notably Lorraine isn’t ill with something associated specifically with women – such as endometriosis, postpartum depression or that old classic, ‘hysteria’ (Benn; Morris and Wilczynski). Nor does she appear ‘mad’ (apart from her homicidal streak, obviously); she seems to be a perfectly ordinary person, who runs a successful business, is trying to figure out a relationship, enjoys drinks with her girlfriends, and is funny and understanding. This façade of normalcy is understood as part of the serial killer’s disguise, but here it also works to move Lorraine away from the stereotypical labels of ‘mad, bad or sad’ which attach to female criminals (Morris and Wilczynski 199).

Of course, serial killer narratives aren’t just interested in the how; the why is also of importance, but in a limited way. Carla Freccero explores how male serial killers, both fictional and real, are portrayed as separate from the wider social order – as products of an individual trauma or psychosis, with its roots in a “decontextualised family romance” (48). This separation is necessary for the audience; we cannot, at any cost, acknowledge that the society we live in and contribute to could be responsible for the creation of such a monster as the serial killer. I think Stay Close makes an effort to combat this myopia by presenting us with a serial killer whose murders are a response to individual enactments of socially sanctioned misogyny. Lorraine eliminates men who have creeped on or violated women at her club, and their predatory or outright illegal behaviour is shown to be part of a culture that is indifferent to the suffering of women and girls and actively encourages such forms of violence. The show’s subplots reflect this: Megan/Cassie is on the run from her former abuser; her daughter and her friend are almost spiked by a man twice their age; a young employee at Vipers is preyed upon by male clients and is pitilessly murdered for information.

Revenge for sexual violence is now a familiar narrative for the contemporary female criminal (think Helen Zahavi’s 1991 novel Dirty Weekend, or Emerald Fennell’s 2020 film Promising Young Woman), and what is interesting to me is the way Stay Close offers a fresh take on it. Lorraine’s first murder was that of her abusive husband, but her subsequent sixteen were of men who preyed on other women – the employees and clients for whom she is a maternal figure. Her violence becomes, to her, an act of public service in the name of her fellow women – very different from typical images of the female serial killer who kills off a suite of husbands for the private gain of insurance money or personal freedom. This “community” dynamic to Lorraine’s revenge refreshes what can be a familiar storyline for the female serial killer, and prompts some welcome reflection on the ways serial killers themselves are products of their wider society. In spite of the “body horror” which eventually made its appearance in the final two episodes, I quite enjoyed Stay Close’s take on the serial killer narrative frame – and all thanks to my weakness for James Nesbitt.

References

Benn, Melissa. “Body Talk: The Sexual Politics of PMT”. Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, ed. by Helen Birch, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 152-171.

Caputi, Jane. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Coben, Harlan. Stay Close. Orion, 2012.

Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho”. Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 2, 1997, pp. 44-58.

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Morris, Alison and Ania Wilczynski. “Rocking The Cradle: Mothers Who Kill Their Children”. Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation, ed. by Helen Birch, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 198-217. 

O’Hara, Daniel, dir. Stay Close. Netflix, 2021.

Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2005.