Recently, while watching an episode of a crime show about convicted killer, Scott Peterson, I had the distinct impression that the story would have been much more interesting had it dwelled on the banality of evil. All of the ingredients were there: the handsome middle-class couple, their ordinary life in a modestly-sized city in California, the dashing but sophomoric husband and his cheerful wife smiling at us from photographs.
The only time the show seems conscious of exploring a grave dilemma of the human condition is during interviews, when residents or friends express incredulity that anything like what happened could have happened in their town, and by a man generally regarded as good and normal. Hannah Arendt recorded similar observations in her controversial book on the Eichmann trial.
But the show's producers were uncomfortable with revealing anything as terrifying as that which Arendt uncovered in her book. No, Scott Peterson was apparently not normal. In the episode's concluding remarks, a psychologist cleverly interprets Peterson's condition as bearing the hallmarks of narcissism. As a result of an indulgent childhood and adolescence, during which young Peterson was hardly denied anything (except real promise), the future killer failed to adjust to the realities of adulthood, and particularly to the duties of fatherhood, for he had never really grown up. He is Peterson, the Peter Pan killer.
The viewer can breathe a sigh of relief. What was once an appalling enigma has been encapsulated in legitimate psychological analysis. These things are explicable, he thinks, and are apparently quite rare cases! A psychologist on a television show has told me so! He can go to sleep now without any dread of his close friends or neighbors. He can rest assured of a legitimate explanation for everything, not least of the darkness of his own heart.
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