Special Victims + Surrealities

“The girls tell her what she needs to know. She is right to be afraid.”

Several weeks ago, I caught a weird cold that left me incapable of doing anything that required any amount of coherent thought. I couldn’t write, couldn’t do my job, couldn’t make myself food. I couldn’t even read or game my way through convalescence because I couldn’t follow an idea for more than five minutes. I am horrible at resting when I’m sick, though, so I needed to do something. With zero ability to tell the difference between a good idea and a bad idea, I decided it was time to learn just what is going on in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to do ever since I finally read Carmen Maria Machado’s acclaimed weird fiction novella Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU last fall. The piece struck me as a unique sort of cosmic mystery. Not just due to the subject matter, but due to its format: a set of 272 episode guide synopses from imagined episodes of Law & Order SVU. The novella also happened to originate from a period when the author was feverishly sick and had SVU autoplaying in the background. As Machado states in an interview with Lauren Kane for The Paris Review, the writing came later, surrealist interpretations prompted by episode titles.

Having watched more television satirizing Law & Order than the show itself, and being completely incoherent, I determined that the best way to understand SVU’s soul was to take a day to watch a bunch of compilations from the official Law & Order YouTube channel. My ‘reasoning’ was that I wanted to simulate the kind of faded, unevenly specific and non-comprehensive memory of the show that I would have had if I had watched the seasons featuring the detective duo Benson and Stabler when I was younger. The same distanced memory that even someone who kept up with the series might have.

For those unfamiliar with the Law & Order franchise, I cannot overstate how large of a shadow it casts on US police procedurals and crime dramas. I’ve never deliberately watched SVU, and yet I will never be surprised by anything that happens in an episode of SVU. The official YouTube channel compilations all have titles like ’30 Minutes of the Biggest Plot Twists’, ‘The Victims Were Just Babies’, ‘Olivia Faces Her Inner Demons’, ‘Paranormal Reasons to Kill’. (That last one ended up being mainline Law & Order, not actually SVU, but it did feature an episode where online outcry against police violence gets shell-gamed by the plot, I think? into a story about a woman who believes that people who text and drive are possessed by the devil.)

These half-hour videos are trying to get you to subscribe to Peacock+ to see what happens, so they flash you a voyeur-y crime scene, an explosive confrontation, a contextless emotional breakdown, and move on. Chronology isn’t considered, so hairstyles and fashions flicker in and out, supporting stars come and go, and pinning down the nature of Benson and Stabler’s working relationship is impossible, even in compilations focused on their dynamic. Time is a flat circle: crimes happen, Benson and Stabler run around New York, nothing changes. After everything started to bleed together—the victims, the suspects, the methods, the motives—I knew I was ready to revisit Especially Heinous.

(I waited until I was better.)

Machado’s approach to fantasy, horror, and the surreal feels to me like a cousin of why I’m drawn to cosmic mysteries—the best ones use the cosmic to highlight the eldritch strangeness of contemporary reality. In the same interview for The Paris Review, Machado responds to Kane’s question, ‘What draws you to that space between reality and the fantastic?’:

It’s very close to how I actually perceive the world, but turned up to a higher degree. I don’t actually believe in ghosts and angels, I don’t believe in anything really supernatural, but I’m attuned to what they could look like in the real world. My imagination is very vivid, and I feel like life is a little surreal already, so when I’m writing from my own experiences, I’m really just pushing the situation in the story slightly further than what I perceived in reality.

The 272 synopses of Especially Heinous are peppered with many of Machado’s surrealities. Some are episodic one-offs, but some are throughlines, running beneath everything and occasionally breaching the surface. Ghostly girls-with-bells-for-eyes; a gift of prophecy that spreads by touch; a hallucination of the show’s hallmark dun-dun musical sting; an obsession with vegetables; doppelgängers of the lead detectives Benson and Stabler. Due to the synopsis format, the novella is a collection of suggestions of countless cases, but it’s these supernatural mysteries that the reader is able to follow most clearly to their resolution.

Synopses have a way of making even the most ordinary of stories a little surreal. So much information gets omitted, you have to have faith that the connective tissue makes sense, which in turn relies on your knowledge of the norms of the genre. I like to say that you can tell when a mystery/thriller author has experience with more fantastical genres, because the text trusts the reader to pay attention to and be patient with uncertainties about the nature of the world in which the story is taking place. Machado is famous for genre facility and fluidity, and knows how to work with that attention and patience. Sometimes a synopsis is a quick summary of the events of the hypothetical episode, as in this triptych:

“GHOST”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too tired to become a spirit.

“RAGE”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too angry to become a spirit.

“PURE”: A prostitute is murdered. She is too sad to become a spirit.

Sometimes, it’s just a conversation, or an account of a brief moment, an odd little aside to the main action, as in “‘STRAIN’: Benson gets the flu. She vomits up: spinach, paint shavings, half a golf pencil, and a single bell the size of her pinky nail.”

This is how those larger supernatural mysteries get woven into the synopsis format. They’re strewn amidst the more typical-sounding episodes, just often enough for you to question how ‘typical’ the other episodes actually are. As the seasons progress, they take over. What strikes me is that a hypothetical viewer would have to be patient for four, five, eight seasons of television, sitting with these mysteries tainting the mundane ones for so long before reaching some understanding. The same way it can take time to see the shortcomings in the systems of justice portrayed for entertainment by police procedurals and crime dramas.

(I wonder what the compilations of these episodes would have been called. ‘Best of the Bell Girls’? ’28 Minutes of #RelationshipGoals with Benson, Henson and the DA’? ‘The Victims Were Just Strippers’?)

There’s a sense of willful teasing in the story that merges with the sensibility of a promotional teaser. Like the YouTube compilations I watched, these glimpses prompt you to imagine what else is going on. Because there are no real full-length episodes, the novella becomes an exercise in cooperative fiction that evokes and undermines the reader’s expectations for this kind of show. It’s a unique piece of fanfiction/critical response that encourages you, even requires you, to take as many liberties with the source material as it did. As in most cosmic mysteries, imagining is as close as you’ll get to knowing everything.

There are police procedural cosmic mysteries, as well as cosmic mysteries that omit many of the procedural steps of the investigation in favor of devoting more time to their cosmic elements. Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU is a weird fiction novella about police procedurals, purposely stripped of its step-by-step procedures to call into question the usefulness of these standardized steps of investigation in the face of some truly ‘special’ circumstances. The story also contains its own surreal, supernatural mysteries, and those mysteries get solved—or at least resolved—by the story’s conclusion.

Part of the reason I landed on the phrase ‘cosmic mystery’ was because of weird fiction’s kinship with cosmic horror, and because other labels for mysteries within weird fiction felt too narrow to make room for all the various stories and formats and mediums that I thought belonged in the same conversation. As I keep trying to figure out what makes a cosmic mystery, I treasure the experimental works like this that allow me to step back and consider the mystery genre’s past, and its many possible futures.

NEXT MONTH

Thank you for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know to check out the Cosmic Mystery Club.

Usually when a mystery involves eating mushrooms and gaining a greater understanding of the universe, it’s not the kind of ‘cosmic’ I’m interested in for this newsletter. But next month, I want to talk about the animated series Common Side Effects. A delightfully weird mystery/thriller show, it places a cure-all mushroom (with some uncommon side effects) in the crosshairs of Big Pharma, and in doing so, explores our relationship to suffering, success, and each other. See you then.