Carles Porta's drone

TV3 has started a new season of Crims with deception as the new common thread in its promotional trailer. But it is impossible to find a single episode in the six seasons where deception is not present. Through betrayal, lies, or false appearances, deception is endemic to true crime. On Monday, they started with L’assassí de la pandèmia, a serial-killer who killed homeless people during the COVID lockdown. Perhaps because of this element of unpredictability, the program lingered to exhaustion on a resource that is already emblematic of this genre: the drone shot. In forty-three minutes of story, a minimum of twenty-seven overhead shots were inserted –this view of the territory from the sky, a bird's-eye view–. This means that, on average, there was an aerial shot every minute and a half of narrative. With this insistence, it is by no means a simple ornamental matter. It is, without a doubt, a symptom. A visual resource that wants to tell us something.Drone images elevate the gaze, provide perspective, and territorialize the story. The landscape takes on a determining role. In Crims, the opening credits already incorporate this resource in an urban and nocturnal context, which makes everything more mysterious. It is a way of telling us that the city of Barcelona becomes a kind of almost inscrutable anthill. In the case of this new episode, the aerial view also glided, alternating with natural landscapes, which became wilder seen from so high up. Day and night follow each other, playing with the light and dark that are the series' motto. The green of the trees is not a synonym for splendor but a lush blanket that hides what we are looking for. Most images are always crossed by roads, paths, and railway lines. These marks that cross the territory are escape routes. Often a vehicle circulates to reinforce the idea. This overhead shot conveys a sense of dominance, of absolute power. It represents the gaze of a god, of a superior entity that observes and controls, an unknown entity that permanently watches us, that knows what we mortals do not know. It is a vantage point that no one else can access. It can create the false appearance of objective observation, deceptively neutral, supposedly cartographic. But it is an absolutely ideological approach. It is also a dehumanized, amoral, and uncompassionate gaze. It projects an idea of tracking, police inspection, forensic observation. The entire landscape, without exception, becomes suspicious. Because the entire territory becomes a potential crime scene, an area of delinquency and secrecy. The whole map is a hiding place.Drone images are hypnotic. This is contributed to by the movement that glides smoothly through space. Horror, therefore, becomes fascinating, pleasant to observe. And this tension between evil and beauty is morbid and addictive. Ethics disappear in favor of aesthetics. But, above all, it insists to the audience that we are insignificant, tiny, and vulnerable beings. It reminds us that we are nothing.