“Said Some Things I Definitely (Don’t) Regret:” The Rhetorical Silence of American Vandal’s Criminal Heroine

Abstract

In this chapter, I analyze how the intersections of communication across gender and race foster different considerations of the heroic criminal in American Vandal, the Peabody-winning and Emmy-nominated Netflix satire of true-crime documentaries. American Vandal interacts differently with its male and female “vandals,” almost all of whom, despite varying levels of wickedness, remain heroes to the narrative and the broader cultural conversations prompted. In short, men create assumed and proven guilty by oversharing, but their lovable natures and dim-witted reactions foster a pathos connection in the viewer, making them heroes. Women, in contrast, are suspicious when silent, but remain sympathetic and ethical when their motivations to commit crime come to light.