ÇScene of the time: The Disappearance at Hotel Cecil it has all the ingredients of a great mystery of true crime: a potential missing victim; an infamous place; a dangerous urban environment; a series of suspects; an avalanche of intriguing details; a viral video that provides many more questions than answers; and a series of coincidences – or are they synchronicities? – who suggest that the case may be the by-product of government conspiracy or supernatural phenomena. Everything anyone could possibly wish for in a gender effort is here, although, ultimately, the best thing about this four-part series from Netflix (debuting on February 10) is its conclusion, which offers a blunt critique of conspiracy theorists themselves – and theories – who first turned their tale into a celestial cause.
Directed by Joe Berlinger, who knows the genre well, having directed the Lost paradise trilogy as well as from Netflix Conversations with a killer: Ted Bundy’s tapes–Crime scene: the disappearance at the Cecil Hotel concerns Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old Vancouver student who disappeared on February 1, 2013, while visiting Los Angeles during her vacation on the West Coast. At the time, Lam was staying at the Cecil Hotel, in the city center, an establishment with a grand entrance and lobby that misrepresented its true dark nature as a haven for drug users, pimps and murderers. As a cheap short- and long-term residence for the inhabitants of Skid Row – among the poorest and most crime-ridden metropolitan areas in America – Cecil had a long and notorious history, including being one of the last reported residences of the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, as well as the temporary home of Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker, who used to walk through its hallways, naked and bloody, on his post-massacre way to his room. His nickname was “Hotel Death”.
Cecil’s scandalous past has made him the inspiration for American Horror Story: Hotel, but Lam probably didn’t know about his reputation. Under the supervision of manager Amy Price (highlighted in new interviews), the hotel split in two, creating a second lobby and entrance, isolating three floors and renaming this new “Stay on Main” section as a means of attracting the budget. conscious travelers. It was that “separate” hostel that Lam visited in early 2013. After a few days’ stay, however, it disappeared, and the pamphlets posted by the city did little to bring promising leads. Through interviews with detectives who worked on the case, as well as dramatic recreations and readings narrated from Lam’s extensive Tumblr, which she treated as a true online diary.Crime scene: the disappearance at the Cecil Hotel establishes its disconcerting scenario, which started a significant investigation of the hotel’s LAPD that revealed few concrete clues.
Until the police discovered the video of Lam’s security camera inside one of Cecil’s elevators and, in the hope that ordinary citizens could help solve his puzzles, posted it online.
What followed was a real sensation on the Internet, as the video of Lam’s elevator quickly went viral, generating intense scrutiny and debate and inspiring a legion of “web detectives”, that is, the types of amateur detectives who helped to topple Luka Magnotta, as described in Don’t mess with cats– to try to unravel what was happening in the confusion clip. Over the course of four minutes, this footage shows Lam entering the elevator, pressing several buttons, hiding in the corner, repeatedly poking his head out to search (or engage?) An invisible figure, moving his hands erratically (as if in a trance) ) and finally leaving. Its behavior is bizarre, as is the fact that the elevator doors remain open for an incredibly long time and, even after closing, reopen to reveal the same floor Lam was on – despite the many buttons pressed on his control panel that I should have sent somewhere else.
There is no obvious explanation for this series of events, which is what has generated so much online speculation and what gives Crime scene: the disappearance at the Cecil Hotel your seductive hook. Even with a third episode that largely spins its wheels, Berlinger’s documentaries generate suspense with the bewildering nature of his tale. Discussions about the area’s decadent danger and Cecil’s sordid legacy increase the number of possible ways in which Lam may have been victimized. And once her body is found – floating in one of the roof’s water tanks, which provided contaminated water for Cecil’s residents for weeks – the question of how she ended up in this fatal situation remains intriguing. Which, in turn, motivates web detectives like John Lordan and John Sobhani to dwell on Lam’s viral video, examine the autopsy report and visit Cecil in an attempt to resolve the case.
“Discussions about the area’s decadent danger and Cecil’s sordid legacy increase the number of possible ways in which Lam may have been victimized.“
Berlinger exaggerates a little with the frightening dramatic scenarios, but Crime scene: the disappearance at the Cecil Hotel benefits from a series of solid speaking heads and a central police officer who is continually intriguing, especially as web detectives begin to make surprising discoveries, such as the striking similarities between Lam’s fate and the 2005 horror remake Dark water, and a government-made test for tuberculosis that was administered in Skid Row a few days after Lam disappeared – and was named, I’m not kidding, “Lam-Elisa”. The director relies heavily on these stupefying revelations, while showing Lam’s Tumblr writing, which paints her as an adventurous but troubled young woman, who may have been looking for strangers to make friends with and who was struggling with a bipolar disorder that you should be taking antidepressants and antipsychotic medications.
In its final version, Crime scene: the disappearance at the Cecil Hotel deduces what really happened to Lam and, in doing so, offers a severe rebuke to the online conspiracy conjecture that followed the debut of his viral video. A distinctly 21st mystery of the century that turned out to be a tragedy about mental illness, is proof that the fantastic online “investigation” (which often equates to macabre killer tourism) says much more about the practitioners’ wishes and dreams than about its nominal subjects – a censure that, coming in 2021 with the scourge of QAnon’s deadly madness, is very timely.