Abstract
This essay explores the affective impact of contemporary real crime documentaries through an examination of Kurt Kuenne’s 2008 documentary Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father. In its dramatic use of home video footage in the context of crime reconstruction, Dear Zachary exemplifies the contemporary crime documentary and its mediated re-enactment of the past. Looking at the deployment of real crime images across different platforms, the author analyses how the crime documentary circulates as a cultural object, and explores how the emotional and affective attachments it solicits from viewers foregrounds the new contexts in which questions about judgement and the law, crime and ethics are being formed. Exploring its online reception on websites such as IMDB.com and Amazon, the essay considers how Dear Zachary calls upon the affective labour of spectators to reaffirm dominant social values regarding crime, victimhood and the family. Tracing the affectivity of the crime image as it is routed through the remediated home video footage in Dear Zachary and then, through the ‘extras’ on the DVD format, the essay suggests that the vehemence of the emotional response to Dear Zachary is ultimately not only about the horrible crimes it reveals but about the anxieties it raises regarding what is at stake in the public circulation of ‘private’ family images.
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