Catch & Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
by Ronan Farrow
I read a twitter thread where someone was complaining about creators injecting themselves into the non-fiction stories they’re presenting. It was directed at podcasts—Dolly Parton’s America, to be precise—and I thought it was a pretty weird critique. Particularly because Jad Abumrad, one of the ur-podcasters, who to my knowledge, has never offered up a singular self-insert during his tenure at Radiolab, has a tie to Dolly Parton. More than one! What a weird thing to say, that he injected himself into that story!
When I went back to source this to make sure I remembered the tweet correctly, I found a response that echoed my sentiment at the bottom of a big thread where the top twelve tweets were “unavailable.” I seems even the original poster found it to be a weird criticism, eventually. Or they were tired of getting dunked on. Comme ci comme ça.
That was what was floating around in my head when I read Catch & Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators; Ronan Farrow, the author, is part of the story in such a way that to take issue with it would feel strange, like a complaint in search of a problem. It’s relevant, who he his, what happens to him, and why his perspective on these events is important. But being part of the story has its own pitfalls; mainly, the world in which the author lives is immersed in both subject matter—the film industry—and his personal and professional connections. So there are a lot—a lot!—of names. And I cannot always remember why it is imposing, say, for Rose McGowan to be meeting Diana Filip. I need a little refresher, because these names, all these new names, are names I am seeing for the first time. Take, for example, the number one good joke in this book:
Trying to get ahold of Davis later on, I asked Jonathan, “Who would have Lanny Davis’s number?” He replied, “I don’t know, Pol Pot?”
I remember being in Italy when Pol Pot died, but that’s about it for names I recognized before reading the book. The name “Jonathan” was mentioned once, no last name, in a paragraph describing a phone conversation, and thereafter comes up every so often, usually coupled to a witty rejoinder or bon mot. My wife loves Jon Lovett, so at some point during my time with Catch & Kill I had a crash course on Ronan Farrow, Jon Lovett, and their relationship. I learned, extratextually, exactly to whom “Jonathan” referred, but what if I lacked that real-world anchor? I don’t know Rose McGowan. I don’t know Lisa Bloom. I did not know the author’s parentage, which i guess is a mea culpa but perhaps gives insight into why this book didn’t hit for me; not for specifics—he was very clear in the first ten pages—but I found out that don’t know a lot things that were taken for granted I would know. In contrast, No one expected me to know Theranos or the lady from Theranos before Bad Blood, and I’d really like Catch & Kill to treat me like I’ve never picked up the Hollywood Reporter before. I’m absorbing all these details—these factual, well-reported details—but unable to pin them onto the broad character portraits I expect this type of book to deliver. “Matt Lauer; is a creep. Got it.” Comes up again later. “Still a creep. Yuck.” But the heel turn of Lisa Bloom was foreshadowed only if you were current with your subscription to The Atlantic. I’m poised to see her now, but during the pages of Catch & Kill she was a lackluster source of villainy. Which is to say, she was the real type of bad—self-serving and banal—rather than the literary type of mephistophelian agent of chaos. The swirl of the film industry insider touches all the pages, except in ways that would make it transferable from factual document to thrilling documentary.
This genre, this true-crime, fast-paced genre of competitive non-fiction—a sea change wrought, in my opinion, by Too Big to Fail (the book), where fly-on-the-wall dialogue-heavy reenactment is the shibbolith—could be called my guilty pleasure if ever I felt any guilt in enjoying it. Bad Blood, American Kingpin, Killers of the Flower Moon. Love ‘em. And so does the film industry, because they’re simple frameworks that easily moralize. Despite its ties to Hollywood, I don’t expect Catch & Kill to land on Lit Hub’s list of film adaptations next to Hulu’s High Fidelity or Harrison Ford as Jack London, and not just because the subject matter shows a darker crust than the industry would like most people to see. Catch & Kill is too Eustace Tilley to be a trash spectacle, too sombre, too respectful as it internalizes serious subject matter, too close, too soon, too decent. It’s the opera Pagliacci when you’re searching for the “But, doctor, I am Pagliacci” joke format.
I feel declasse admitting it—like when a twelve-year-old me, trying to shed his "treefort/four-wheeler” childhood admitted to myself that I enjoyed beef jerky—but Catch & Kill didn’t scratch the voyeurism itch I’ve been trained to expect from this genre. “Trained to expect.” That makes it sound like I blame the book, or society. No. No, I like a crap-trash tale— “feel good,” some might call it—where the narrator fights for justice and the truth eventually wins out. It’s a genre that now extends to all of non-fiction, if you believe The Baffler article They Made a Movie Out of It: “This is because the book-to-film complex is bolstered by two imperatives that now govern our nonfiction almost without exception: foreground story as an ultimate good, ahead of deep personal insight, literary style, investigative reporting, or almost any other consideration that goes into the shaping of written work; and do not question too closely the aristocracy of tech and capital that looms over us, the same people who subsidize the system that produces America’s writing.”
Catch & Kill flounts both rules: the reporting is forefront, and the outcome is muddled by what actually happened rather than enshrining a fulfilling journey of positivity. While we humans of the future may know the overarching storyline, at least insofar as, “Judge James Burke, reflecting on the severity of the sentence he ultimately handed down, said to Weinstein during sentencing, ‘This is your first conviction. It is not your first offense’,” it isn’t a clear that wrongs would be righted, that a studio system of entrenched hierarchical fiefdoms ruled by callous predators would be broken apart. It isn’t clear, at all, what Catch & Kill wants to say, because all it can do is show how fucking difficult it is to hold powerful people responsible for their actions. There’s no triumph in these pages. No conclusion that makes it all seem worthwhile. Just a bunch of shitty things happening to a reporter when he tries to report stories of abuse by powerful media figures.
I think that’s my problem. Most of these “real events as portrayed by actors” retellings flatten things down. Real people are too complex to cleanly fit into narrative flow. Catch & Kill presents nuanced reporting and creates a snapshot of events where the edges aren’t clean. I want the thick outlines of a cartoon rendering, where the world is small and all the spaces came already filled in, a paint-by-numbers version of events that can cleanly translate into a six-part miniseries. I don’t want to have to bring anything into non-fiction book that isn’t already there, preferably with its rougher edges already filed down. An unfortunate consequence for a genre where the biggest prize is now a Netflix season rather than a Pulitzer.
Yet I’m the one that keeps buying these things. And reading them. And complaining when they aren’t full of things that cannot possibly be known, like when authors guess at mind states and motivations, or when people who were not in the room write like they are omniscient: “On March 15, at 6am, the wind blew a little harder, carrying with a smell that foretold the coming troubles.” Cleanly conflating what there is actual proof happened with why it happened requires such unearned confidence that one cannot help but be assured.
Where is my assurance that all the bad things people suffered within the pages of Catch & Kill led to the world becoming a better place, somehow? Surely, bad people doing bad things don’t just get away with it.