‘It was better than the soaps’: the O.J. murder case and its modern parallels

The ’90s are alive and well in 2017. From the resurgence of fashion trends we once rocked as children to the ubiquity of the phrase “only ’90s kids remember,” that captivating decade continues to exert an influence on modern culture, whether we realize it or not. Countless beloved ’90s shows have been rebooted to varying degrees of success, and those that remain untouched by modern media can be revisited with the help of streaming services like Netflix.

I recently realized that I continued to revisit popular ’90s television shows despite the plethora of new television seemingly being cranked out every day. It didn’t matter that I was roughly twenty years late in watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” because the themes and sentiments underlying the show continued to feel modern (despite the laughable special effects). The same fascination with the decade I was born into led me to Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” which was recently made available on Netflix. I’m not proud to admit that I watched all 10 episodes of it in one sitting, but I quickly realized that voracity is nothing compared to those who watched its events unfold in real time.

Once I had plowed through a few episodes, I called my mom to ask for her take on what seemed to me to be a dramatic plot that was too good to be true. While I knew the general framework of the case, I found it incredibly difficult to believe that the theatrics were rooted in reality. My mom recalled the case with nostalgia, “I used to watch that trial every day while I was pregnant with you. It was better than the soaps. You know, you were almost named after O.J.’s daughter.” I couldn’t help but wonder whether the case’s influence on my formational years stopped at the potential baby names.

It’s always an interesting if not slightly uncanny experience to learn about cultural landscape you were born into yet can’t entirely recall. Yet, perhaps the most unsettling elements of Murphy’s reenactment were the thematic threads that connected the “case of the century” to the cultural discourses that we interact with on an almost daily basis in 2017. Each episode came with modern parallels: the Black Lives Matter movement, the discussion surrounding the likeability of female public figures, the rise of Real Housewives and Kardashians, the failure of the 24-hour news cycle and our national fascination with true crime.

It was that fascination which brought me to the show in the first place. In the same vein as “Making a Murderer,” “Serial” or “My Favorite Murder,” “American Crime Story” draws on the allure of playing lawyer, detective and juror for discrete periods of 58 minutes (or 10 hours if you’re like me and have no self control). Yet, “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” moves beyond the shallow sensationalism of the true crime genre by contextualizing the conflicts we so often view as contemporary issues and highlighting their earlier manifestations. In essence, it proves that they’re even more complex than we initially thought.

It’s often said that in order to understand something, you need to understand where it came from, and this notion applies just as much to societal discourses as it does to people. Perhaps we should keep this in mind when we feel the desire to romanticize the past, since the issues we face today won’t ever exist in a vacuum.

Marisa Papenfuss is a UF English senior. Her column appears on Tuesdays.