What Is <em>The Staircase</em> Trying to Do?
This article contains spoilers through all 13 episodes of Netflix’s The Staircase.
Watching The Staircase in 2018 can feel odd, because audiences have become so habituated to true-crime stories doing work. The ferocious investigative labor of Serial’s Sarah Koenig is pivotal to the podcast series’s success. In The Jinx, Andrew Jarecki stages elaborate reenactments in his efforts to prove Robert Durst’s guilt. In Wormwood, Errol Morris goes a step further by hiring Peter Sarsgaard and Molly Parker to play real-life characters in Morris’s interrogation of the suspicious death of a CIA scientist.
arguably helped spawn all these shows, but what characterizes it now, 14 years after the release of its first eight episodes, is a distinct feeling of passivity. Its director, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, doesn’t up to questions about its journalistic integrity. But in the eight original episodes, two follow-ups, and three new installments recently released on Netflix, de Lestrade has made something different: not a classic true-crime investigation, but a strange, sad portrait of cultural fault lines and their consequences.
