“Baby I was Born That Way”: Depicting Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong in “Evil Genius” as Bad-Since-Birth.

Diehl Armstrong 2Well, like I said in my last post, yesterday, Michael and I started watching Netflix’s “Evil Genius” series about the bizarre pizza bomber case in Erie, PA.  And, riveted as we were to the story, Michael and I finished the series already.  In my last post, I predicted that Marjorie-Diehl Armstrong would be humanized by the documentary during the second half.  And while the documentary interviews people who saw a human side of Marjorie in the courtroom of her trial, I would argue that the documentary, itself, didn’t do much to humanize her.  In fact, I think the interview clips that were pieced together did a lot to suggest that Diehl-Armstrong was innately bad, and that maybe she’d always had at least a strong proclivity to be that way.  This really interests me, because it flies in the face of what I think I know about human beings, and the existence of evil in the world.  It’s also just a dangerous road to travel down: what can we do to someone when we label them “evil from birth?”  These are some questions this post will consider. Continue reading ““Baby I was Born That Way”: Depicting Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong in “Evil Genius” as Bad-Since-Birth.”

“Baby I was Born That Way”: Depicting Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong in “Evil Genius” as Bad-Since-Birth.