|
TRICKSTERS AND HUCKSTERS: SHOW BIZ ARCHETYPES
by Addison De Witt
“Murder Most Foul”
It’s happening again. The “Breaking News” reports. The daily news network updates. The screaming tabloid headlines. Even the cover of People. No, not Liza’s wedding. Or Britney’s break up with Justin.
Another Hollywood celebrity has been accused of murdering his wife.
(Yawn)
I know the news media want me to care. You can’t sustain a media frenzy unless the public cooperates. And yes, the events were, and are, terribly shocking. And terribly, terribly sad for the child who survives the sordid shenanigans of both her parents. But pardon me if I don’t run out and get TIVO so that I won’t miss a second of the Court TV play-by-play.
Why such indifference from a self-described showbiz junkie like me? The murder happened in my own backyard (well, practically). I used to live just around the corner and up the street of both the Blake residence in Studio City, California (dubbed “Mata Hari’s Ranch” by a sign in front), and the now infamous Vitello’s restaurant. True, I was never particularly a Robert Blake fan; but then I was even less a fan of O.J. Simpson’s, and his travails managed to grab my attention for a couple of years. Even America’s most famous criminal trial reporter admitted the other day that he’d decided not to cover the Blake case, because it’s “too low rent.” Without the elements of race and glamour to lure him, perhaps he simply can't be bothered. I think some of us, at least, may be suffering from celebrity-murder burnout.
In fact, murder may be just another way for celebrity narcissism to rear its ugly head. We’ve read about their affairs, their tantrums, their drug addictions, their spoiled children and mistreated nannies. Famed author Dr. M. Scott Peck, in his book People Of The Lie, a study of the nature of evil in everyday life, points out that for some people who murder, “....Their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims...As it gives them the motive for murder, so it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing. The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend even beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not ‘see’ others at all” (136-137). Peck could have been speaking about any number of Hollywood actors and producers I’ve encountered.
As it happens, I am somewhat of a student of murder. I’ve written three “true crime” movies in the past decade, based on best-selling non-fiction books. All of them were centered on real-life murders commited within families. A teenage son kills his mother and stepfather for the thrill of it A woman kills her mother-in-law, sister-in-law, her own parents, her beloved grandmother and even her own children to punish her ex-husband for divorcing her. A husband kills his wife and causes his brother’s suicide so he can carry on an affair. Fun stuff. But, at the time (before O.J.), true crime was selling like hotcakes. The public’s desire to wallow in the details of murder was seemingly insatiable. It all came to a climax with the Simpson case. After that came a true-crime burnout, and scores of writers and producers who’d been living off this genre found their movies put into the Hollywood junk heap known as “turnaround.”
My first true crime assignment involved a group of college freshmen with a passion for "Dungeons and Dragons." The boys got so obsessed by the game that they decided to play it for real. In thrall to the most charismatic of their bunch, a handsome narcissist, they carefully planned and executed a cold-blooded murder of an insecure, troubled kid’s mother and stepfather as they lay sleeping in their beds. The only hitch was that the mother survived. At first, she refuses to believe her son could possibly have been involved. Later, when faced with irrefutable evidence, she stands by her child, refuses to abandon him in his hour of need, and even blames her own parenting.
When skewed toward the networks’ largely female audience on Sunday nights, the story was irresistible: A mother forgiving her own son for planning her murder (and killing her husband). The biggest challenge was that the character of the woman (which would have to be the starring role) was severely repressed and generally inarticulate. How to convey her feelings when she consistently refused to show or express them? The good dramatic writer always tries to allow action, and what is left unsaid, to lead the way in storytelling, as it does in real life. So the story came to be primarily about this woman’s repression and failure to express her emotions, how that led to her current crisis, and how she’d have to fight against it in order to try to save her son. The other, concurrent story was about how "Dungeons and Dragons," peer pressure and insecurity can lead “normal” kids to perform evil acts. Is it any wonder that our production was competing with another production at another network, based on another writer’s book on the same subject? We managed to get on the air first, as I recall, and with good reviews. But such was the public’s appetite for murder that the other, second version did just as well in the ratings. (Let’s not forget, there were three Amy Fisher movies!)
For my next foray into true crime, I flew to New Mexico and North Carolina to interview the survivors of a murderous rampage that had taken place just a few years earlier. Though some time had passed, the wounds were still fresh, I was to find out. And yet, for a fee, these shell-shocked relatives were willing to have their story dramatized on television. To set the story straight, once and for all, they said. To make it clear who the real guilty part was, they insisted. Here was a woman, another classic narcissist, a society girl and beauty queen, who had been the "celebrity" of her own family, another Trickster, if you will.
I became a kind of tragedy-voyeur as I carefully ingratiated myself with these sad people, asking them the kind of intimate, intrusive questions that even a close friend would not have dared to ask. Once I got them to trust me, it wasn’t long before they were spilling their guts, often crying...and causing me to cry, too. By the time I left most of them, they hated to see me go. I’d become, in some odd way, a part of the family, because they had opened up to me and shared secrets they hadn’t shared before with anyone.
I flew back home, carrying their collective pain with me. I was determined to get the story right, to honor the victims and the survivors, to lay blame where it belonged. But what was the justification for laying bare this private pain – that was not my pain, after all – just to entertain the masses? I needed a purpose, to relieve myself of the guilt of exposing these horrible events for profit. And so, I told myself I was telling a cautionary tale. There was a helpful message: Don’t allow the stigma of mental illness and family pride to keep you from getting treatment for your loved ones. And don’t allow the bitterness of a divorce to cloud your judgment about what’s best for your children.
Ironically, because of the care that went into the script and into the production, it’s one of the films I am most proud of. Though, at the time, TV Guide was repelled by its ending (two children are murdered by their mother), the ratings were terrific. Though nearly nine years have passed since we met, I still exchange Christmas cards with an aunt of those kids. I had been allowed inside that family for a brief time, but its effect on me remains.
I flew to a coal town in Pennsylvania to interview a woman whose life was shattered when her husband commited suicide rather than testify against his brother for the murder of his brother’s wife. The two couples lived across the street from each other on an idyllic tree-lined street, the kind of place where something bad could never happen. The murderer’s mother and sister were now estranged from their daughter-in-law (the movie’s protagonist in female-centered television drama), because she had decided that her brother-in-law was guilty. I arrived in this hotbed of hurt and recrimination with all sides dying to convince me of the alleged-killer’s innocence or guilt. As I had on previous projects, I also spent a lot of time with law enforcement, meeting men who never failed to impress me with their dedication and lack of pretense. Again, the murderer was a handsome, charismatic dentist, a narcissist, a Trickster, who was catnip to the ladies and admired by his buds.
What started out as a four-hour mini-series about adultery, murder and betrayal, sat on a shelf for four years after true crime went out of style, and finally limped to the airwaves as an anemic two-hour, stripped of nuance and logic. By that time, I had determined to get out of true crime and write uplifting stories that might, perhaps, inspire or, God forbid, create some understanding that could contribute to making the world a better place. I wrote a string of movies guaranteed to make people smile and feel better about the world, until those movies went out of style, too.
Now that the world of network movies is in disarray, I’m getting an opportunity to write scripts for cable and for features that neither exploit tragedy nor promise redemption. The scripts I’ve written lately, though on wildly different topics, share in common an attempt to comment on our society, our human foibles, and the quixotic nature of celebrity. My next project, in fact, involves a celebrity murder case. But this time, the true crime story is in the background, and the real story is about society’s reaction to it.
Which brings me back to the Blake case. These days I’m inclined to think what’s more interesting is not the murder itself, or the lives of the accused and the victim, with all of their vulgar details, but what it says about our society that we are so consistently fascinated by it. Real life celebrities are the gods and goddesses of American culture. All of us have a shadow side that represses the literalization of murder. When we say "I'd like to kill you for doing that," we don't really mean it. We are fascinated by people who are taken over by the shadow, and who do act from the shadow side.
Work Cited
Peck, M. Scott, People of the Lie, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1983.
(Back to Columns index)
|
