Should We Be Watching The Serpent?
The BBC’s latest true crime drama, The Serpent, tells the story of serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Sobhraj preyed on young, Western tourists exploring Southeast Asia throughout the 1970s, his trail doggedly pursued by Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg. Like many of the characters featured, the real Charles Sobhraj is still alive, currently serving a sentence for double murder in Nepal.
There was something I found deeply disturbing about The Serpent and, having forever been a fan of true crime, I knew it wasn’t just the depravity of Sobhraj and his accomplices. I watch Netflix’s I Am a Killer as I go to sleep at night and the podcast My Favourite Murder accompanies my lonely morning runs. Instead of finding myself terrified, The Serpent’s gorgeous cinematography nursed my yearning for a lost year of travel (thanks Covid!).
In real-life, Sobhraj was released after serving time in India. By this time, the statute of limitations on many of his most shocking crimes had run out and he was allowed to live as a free man. However, only six years after his release he returned to Nepal, where he was wanted for a double murder in 1975. After featuring in a 2003 news report about his return to the country in The Himalayan Times, he was arrested and charged. In The Serpent, Tahir Rahim’s Sobhraj asks a journalist to photograph him at a Nepalese airport. His return appears to solely revolve around press coverage. It was this that I found deeply troubling.
The problem is glaring. The real-life Sobhraj is very much still alive, and the making of this true crime drama brings his life and his crimes firmly back into the spotlight. The Serpent shows Sobhraj enjoying his infamy in Paris, hiring a publicity agent and profiting off numerous television interviews. When juxtaposed with his terrible crimes, I found it repulsive that this man be given a platform to express himself in any way. Although still up for conjecture, his return to Nepal is widely believed to have been an attempt to restore his waning publicity (alongside an evident arrogance and overconfidence in his ability to avoid arrest). And now we’re watching an entire eight-part television series dedicated to him and his crimes.
Despite my appreciation for true crime, the ethics of the genre are questionable at best. Shocking tragedies are bottled up and served as entertainment; are we exploiting other people’s misery? We can learn so much from other people’s experiences. It can teach us empathy through hearing of loss we hope never to endure. But the tendency towards centring the narrative on the perpetrator must be reconsidered.
The Ted Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile is a particularly famous culprit. In life Bundy profited so much off his good looks, charm, and privilege, at the expense of tens of women’s lives. The biopic seemingly allowed him to do so all over again. On Twitter, his crimes fell by the wayside as the ‘Ted Bundy was hot’ trend took hold. At its most horrifying, this glorification is dangerous. In real interviews with Bundy, and indeed with Sobhraj, the sense of self-mythologising is sickening. These men see themselves as fascinating, enigmatic characters. True crime dramas run the risk of presenting them as such.
However, Tahir Rahim’s Sobhraj in The Serpent is far from likeable. He doesn’t murder for enjoyment but rather as a means to sustain his unorthodox lifestyle. His victims are a means to an end, the tell-tale sign of a psychopath. Sobhraj’s menace is evident despite the fact we never see the murders in graphic detail. Perhaps this reflects the viewpoint of Sobhraj’s accomplices. Nadine, for example, takes a few episodes to realise her unwitting involvement in Sobhraj’s schemes while Marie-Andree remains in denial until the show draws to a close.
Importantly, by avoiding the depiction of brutal murders onscreen, the show’s creators go some way towards preserving the dignity of Sobhraj’s victims. Indeed, despite the questionable ethics of still depicting them at their most vulnerable, poisoned and desperate at the hands of the serial killer, prior to this there has clearly been an effort to humanise them. For example, the young Dutch couple who first bring attention to Sobhraj’s crimes (Willem and Lena) are sweet and loving. They’re not ignorant either; we see Lena tell Willem she’s unsure of Sobhraj and Leclerc’s intentions. With another of the victims, Teresa, we follow the friendship that develops between her and another young traveller, allowing the viewer to learn her dreams for the future.
The Serpent does attempt to restore a voice to some of Sobhraj’s victims. It broke my heart when a friend of two of Sobhraj’s victims sobs ‘I just want to go home’. The horror of his crimes and their impact on so many young lives is evident, and the final dedication of the series is moving; to ‘all the young intrepids who set out with big dreams, who never made it home’. However, considering this dedication, I wish these young intrepids had been given more airtime as the series progressed, or that the depiction of the victims in the first few episodes had been sustained. Perhaps due to the nature of a ‘serial’ killer, his victims’ identities started to blur into one another.
As the narrative developed, it lost much of its nuance, instead coming to revolve distinctly around Sobhraj and the Dutch diplomat seeking his arrest. The complexity of the various lives involved was drastically simplified almost to a cat-and-mouse chase. Good versus evil. This left little room for further humanisation or exploration of Sobhraj’s numerous later victims, the couple murdered in Nepal for example. Even more troubling, this crime is graphically depicted, their bodies smoking when found burned, and the more delicate handling of the first few episodes was lost. Furthermore, the reduction of the narrative carried another problem. I was irritated to learn the real Angela Knippenberg felt the script downplayed her crucial role in Sobhraj’s capture. Perhaps a result of spanning to long a time-period with too many fascinating characters, the story was all too simplified.
The issue of simplification is inevitable in true crime dramas. It would be near impossible to capture the true complexity and nuance of real-life events. It also allows us to adopt a more dispassionate, voyeuristic stance. Simplification of a story is easier to follow and removes what might be too emotionally taxing for the viewer, instead adopting a format we are all comfortable with. Something we can understand. But true crime dramas raise another question in relation to this; is it ever appropriate to fictionalise fact, especially when this is the story of somebody else’s trauma? I strongly believe it’s important to tell these stories, to learn and appreciate others’ experiences, but what is an appropriate method to do so?
True crime dramas are problematic in this regard. But even methods which don’t set out to fictionalise the truth are at risk of doing so, especially when the story is removed from the mouths of the victims. My Favourite Murder, the aforementioned ‘true-crime-comedy-podcast’ (a questionable genre title in itself), recently came under fire for a tale featured in their ‘hometown story’ segment. For this segment, listeners send in stories of murders or crimes committed in their local area. In a recent incident, the story of a horrific attack was not submitted by the victim herself, but rather someone who had heard the story circulated third hand. The events were misconstrued, misunderstood and misworded. Awfully, the victim heard their own story read out on the podcast. They wrote to the podcast hosts to express their desire to tell the story themselves, detailing the events in their own words.
Does this mean we should avoid reporting on true crime, out of respect for the victims? We learn so much from these stories; they bring to light the depravity of some pockets of humankind. Nevertheless, we do need to reconsider the ethics of storytelling, particularly in the true crime genre. Although The Serpent doesn’t glorify Sobhraj and some effort has been made to humanise his victims, this could certainly have been better sustained throughout the series. I firmly believe the show’s creators could have avoided centring Sobhraj so much, perhaps by using his crimes as inspiration or a springboard for the show’s events, rather than creating a biopic that followed his life so closely. He doesn’t deserve this preservation for posterity. It’s uncomfortable to think Sobhraj has once again found himself exactly where he wants to be – in the spotlight.
Written by Tegan McN
Tegan is a recent graduate currently working in the non-profit sector. She spends her spare time forcing friends into long, impassioned debates on topics she knows far too little about to feel so strongly towards.
You can find her on socials at @tegan_mcn