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She took four types of medication to manage her illness. She had a documented history of erratic behavior. The facts are these: Lam suffered from diagnosed bipolar disorder.
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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. The show’s cruelest move is to obscure the evidence until the fourth and final episode. 20, 2013 after the disappearance of Elisa Lam.
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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.Ī visitor arrives at the Cecil on Wednesday Feb. Those missing women, often battling addiction or engaged in sex work to survive, are exploited, vulnerable individuals society has discarded.
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But those generally aren’t individuals like Lam, a foreign tourist on vacation. “Women go missing on Skid Row every day,” the voiceover warns us. 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. There’s also a segment that does more harm than good in talking about the dangers of Skid Row. “There's so many bizarre parallels,” says YouTuber John Lordan, who is featured extensively throughout the show.
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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. 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. Its worst moment by far is episode three, which focuses on YouTube channels that put out Elisa Lam conspiracy videos. “Cecil Hotel” rarely does this, instead valuing melodrama over truth. Kelly” series, which gave victims the primary voice and used experts to provide meaningful context. An admirable example is the searing “Surviving R. At its best, though, true crime can be illuminating, thoughtful and just. It takes real human suffering and turns it into entertainment for the masses. The true crime genre is inherently, at the very least, problematic. 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 Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” bills itself as an exploration of Lam’s disappearance and the online firestorm it elicited.
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