Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel awkwardly attempts to take on online sleuths

BuzzFeed News

Netflix's four-part true-crime docuseries "is a muddled attempt to revisit the story" of Elisa Lam's 2013 disappearance and death, says Alessa Dominguez. "Presenting itself as a study of the cultural appetite for crime, it revisits the hotel’s infamous history and rehashes the online conspiracy theories around Lam’s disappearance. But the story is an odd fit for a commentary on online sleuths because the case was neither solved by sleuths nor really disrupted by them. And the series’ relitigation of the mystery’s unanswered questions ultimately makes it an awkward attempt to exploit the hunger for crime mysteries, while simultaneously attempting to comment on that appetite." Dominguez adds: "There are certainly interesting ethical quandaries involved in the way true crime cases grab our interest, and how crime rumor-mongering plays into existing cultural prejudices, around, say, violence and people who are unhoused. Netflix’s own Unsolved Mysteries reboot did a good job of unpacking such questions throughout the multiple cases it covered. But the Lam case — as a single story — doesn’t really lend itself to that kind of analysis, at least not as presented here. The third episode of the series is titled 'Down the Rabbit Hole.' It could have been the subtitle for the entire series — and not in a good way."

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• The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel completely glosses over the systemic racist history of L.A.'s Skid Row: "The docuseries paints Skid Row as the reason for the decline of the Cecil Hotel by exploiting the stories of former Cecil Hotel residents, including Kenneth Givens, who moved to Los Angeles after losing his job in New York in the '80s, and featuring interviews in which the participants refer to it as the 'Wild West' and 'a space where people are allowed to just suffer,'" says Monica Sisavat. "At one point, (Detective Jim) McSorely even tells a story about how he once witnessed a man biting a pigeon's head off purely for shock value. However, the show fails to point out the history of Skid Row's connection to systems of white supremacy and how that's ultimately led to addiction, crime, and mental health issues over the years."
• Why The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel relied so heavily on web sleuths: “The sleuths are very integral to the structure of the show because what’s interesting for me is perception,” says director Joe Berlinger. “I wanted the viewer to really experience it the way the web sleuths did in terms of putting together information and the rabbit holes they went down.”
• Elisa Lam's Tumblr is still online