Meeting Evil: The Crowd and the Conductor in Try and Get Me

Detours, episode 6
Meeting Evil: The Crowd and the Conductor in Try and Get Me!
Stephen Broomer, October 25, 2021

Try and Get Me was inspired by a vigilante killing that happened in San José in 1933. A mob of four-thousand gathered, stirred by the emotional tenor of news coverage, dragged out two men accused of murder, and executed them. The mob of 1933 finds a direct parallel in the mob of 1950: McCarthyism and the red scare, another cruel manifestation of populism, share the sentiments of the newspaper and the mob. This video essay explores the psychology of the crowd, the responsibilities of the press, "a dim remembering of the time when man was wolf to man," and the film is considered in the terms laid out by Elias Canetti when he wrote that a murder shared among many is irresistible to the majority of men.