When Netflix’s latest true crime show, “The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” dropped Wednesday, it immediately shot to the number one spot on its most-watched list.
It’s understandable. Even if you don’t think you know the case, you probably do. You’ve likely seen the grainy clip of 21-year-old Elisa Lam ducking in and out of an elevator, looking frantic and upset. Or you remember the 2013 headlines about the missing guest found dead in a Los Angeles hotel’s rooftop water tank a few weeks after she was last spotted in that surveillance video. It’s perhaps the most viral missing-person case of the internet age, with a plethora of details that made Lam’s death almost cinematic in its strangeness.
“The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” bills itself as an exploration of Lam’s disappearance and the online firestorm it elicited. It is instead an unethical mess, relying on sensationalism, cheap narrative tricks and conspiracy theories to perpetuate the least relevant parts of her story.
The true crime genre is inherently, at the very least, problematic. It takes real human suffering and turns it into entertainment for the masses. At its best, though, true crime can be illuminating, thoughtful and just. An admirable example is the searing “Surviving R. Kelly” series, which gave victims the primary voice and used experts to provide meaningful context. “Cecil Hotel” rarely does this, instead valuing melodrama over truth.
Its worst moment by far is episode three, which focuses on YouTube channels that put out Elisa Lam conspiracy videos. It throws out theory after theory, none of which is fact-checked until the very end of the show, allowing the episode to stand alone as a compilation of garbage best left at the dump. Among the grotesque theories that get air time are superficial similarities to the horror movie “Dark Water,” and the fact that Lam shared a name with a type of tuberculosis test, which is fodder to speculate she was a bioweapon unleashed on L.A.’s unhoused population.
“There’s so many bizarre parallels,” says YouTuber John Lordan, who is featured extensively throughout the show. “You can’t ignore that.”
You can. And you should.
There’s also a segment that does more harm than good in talking about the dangers of Skid Row. While there is no question this is a dangerous part of the city, the show continually uses actual violence in the area to drum up panic. “Women go missing on Skid Row every day,” the voiceover warns us. But those generally aren’t individuals like Lam, a foreign tourist on vacation. Those missing women, often battling addiction or engaged in sex work to survive, are exploited, vulnerable individuals society has discarded. The show makes a false equivalency between those disappearances and Lam’s, because it is narratively convenient to drive fears that a serial killer is on the loose near the hotel.
A visitor arrives at the Cecil on Wednesday Feb. 20, 2013 after the disappearance of Elisa Lam.
Nick Ut / AP 2013The show’s cruelest move is to obscure the evidence until the fourth and final episode. By holding back facts that should have been stated from the beginning, it gives the show free rein to pretend for three hours that Lam might have been murdered. But despite how strange it seemed at the time, there is little unexplained about Lam’s tragic death.
The facts are these: Lam suffered from diagnosed bipolar disorder. She had a documented history of erratic behavior. She took four types of medication to manage her illness. When police found the pills in her hotel room, they realized that based on her prescription fill date and the number of pills in each bottle, she had stopped taking them. This sudden break from a regime of antipsychotics and antidepressants could have catastrophic effects. All of Lam’s “odd” behavior is explained by this. The thousand conspiracy theories about how she got into the rooftop water tank are just that: conspiracy theories. The fire escape would have given her unfettered access to the roof, the water tank lid wasn’t closed, and Lam, sadly, was in the throes of a major mental health episode. Whether intentionally or not, she could have easily climbed inside, where she drowned.
The show’s hours of hype, murder and fear add up to this. Even though the last episode dispels all the previous theories, the show does exactly what it said internet sleuths did: It puts fantasy over facts, and sensationalism over empathy.
The question of true crime, the one we should ask ourselves every time we write about it, film it or talk about it, is: Does the benefit outweigh the harm? Does putting a magnifying glass on someone’s private suffering, likely the worst moments of their life, bring us closer to justice or understanding? The best thing — the most ethical thing — we can do for Lam is to let this case disappear from public discourse.
Each retelling must bring her family unimaginable pain. Their loved one, who struggled with a mental illness that ultimately ended her life, died in a highly public way. That’s traumatic enough. Then, she became the “spooky” girl on the internet. “Cecil Hotel” ends with a short montage of strangers talking about how wonderful she was, how she affected their lives. But in the context of this show, which has been an almost unrelenting four hours of exploitation of her short, often painful life, it feels disgusting.
It is telling that no one who knew Lam personally appears on “Cecil Hotel.” Somewhere out there, the real friends and family of Elisa Lam want to grieve in peace. If we care at all about her, we should let them.
