Winslet is great. But Lynskey is immediately astonishing, communicating everything about her secretive, alienated misfit persona without saying a single word. Her face is a picture of internal mischief and eternal discomfort, like a neurotic Denise The Menace. If she was a 21st-century teen she’d be studying emo and considering options in death metal, suicide and automatic weaponry.
We know, immediately, that she thinks she is as above her surroundings as Juliet. They’ve come at the same conclusion from different perspectives; one from beauty, breeding and entitlement; the other from somewhere private, dark, amused and smelly. When Ms Hulme corrects and humiliates the French teacher with immaculate superciliousness, it’s love at first sight for the misanthropic Ms Parker.
The pair bond through their eroticised desire for escape from reality into fevered fantasy. Juliet’s parents – her mother is a marriage guidance counsellor whose technique for keeping couples spliced involves shagging the better-looking husbands – leave her alone to go travelling at every available opportunity, even when she is hospitalised with tuberculosis (the film occasionally implies that they murdered the wrong mother). Both girls suffered from life-threatening childhood diseases that have left scars, physical and otherwise. And Pauline, like any normal teen, is just hideously embarrassed by her normal parents, poor enough to have to take in lodgers to get by, but not poor enough to be exciting.
Their escape from the repressed confines of a New Zealand childhood involve fantasising about podgy pre-rock popera legend Mario Lanza, movie stars including James Mason, Mel Ferrer and Orson Welles, and the creation of entire parallel universes called Borovnia and The Fourth World. The greatest moment in the picture comes immediately after Juliet learns that her parents are leaving her again. Bereft, Juliet begins to escape to her safe place. But, by sheer effort of will and telepathic bond, she takes Pauline with her. The girls’ faces glow, the sun opens up a wound in the sky, and a magical land of ornate gardens, unicorns and supersized butterflies literally erupts from the rugged New Zealand landscape, and if you don’t well up at the sheer beauty and virtuosity of this image, then you should probably stick with your Guy Ritchie flicks and give up on life’s wonders entirely.
It’s the enforced separation caused by Juliet’s TB that spins the girls’ world into madness. The pair write to each other as imaginary prince and princess Charles and Deborah, and fantasise about having a son who is a serial killer. Honora’s fate is sealed when she slaps Pauline and call her a tart after one of the male boarders sneaks into her bed. Again, the normality hits you . . . murdered for being a typical, decent mother. Pauline loses her virginity to the boarder, still aged just 14, and hates it so much she slips off to the altogether sexier Borovnia, with its constant Lanza soundtrack and man-sized plasticine-sculpture people who look and sound a bit like James Mason. Juliet’s fantasy has become Pauline’s has become Juliet’s. The real consequences of actions have begun to cease to matter.
Finally, both sets of parents panic about teen lesbianism and force Pauline to go into therapy. The shrink is ridiculous and grotesque, like all the adults here . . . except Honora Parker, significantly and respectfully. He assures her that there’s an answer coming from ‘medical science’ for Pauline’s disease of homosexuality any second now. Suddenly, Pauline is out of school and into the typing pool.
Each part of the tale – Dr Hulme’s sacking from his college, the infidelity of Mrs Hulme and the resulting divorce, the heartless decision to send Juliet to South Africa with an aunt – leads inexorably to the inexorable. Heavenly Creatures wears its class war lightly, but it’s impossible to avoid seeing that each amoral act of the upper-class Hulmes hammers another nail in the coffin of the petit bourgeois Honora Parker. Pauline Parker is the sicker girl and she falls in love with the Hulmes, for their class, their worldliness, their touch of bohemian glamour. They can have extraordinary fantasies projected upon them. Poor Mother simply can’t.
So it is that Mrs Hulme comes up with the wizard wheeze of allowing Pauline and Juliet to spend three weeks together before Juliet leaves, and that the intimidated and battered Parkers can’t assert common sense. Just enough time for two lost girls to plan a killing.
The murder is one of the most horrible of all cinematic crime scenes. The banal conversation in the build-up, the familiarity of the walk in the woods, the brutality of the deed, how much you want to warn the victim, the plain injustice of it all . . . and the bravura contrast with a monochrome depiction of what their crime means to the lives and futures of the girls, shot in the style of the movie melodrama they’ve been living in for too long. It breaks your heart.
Jackson really did justice to the truth here, which is, no matter how visually sumptuous or dramatically entertaining you make a killer’s story . . . killing itself is just ugly and barbaric. I don’t really want to describe it: if you’ve seen Heavenly Creatures you’ll know exactly what I mean, and if you haven’t . . . well . . . it’s pretty weird to say that I don’t want to spoil it. What I mean is . . . the shock should stand. That’s what Jackson wanted you to feel – shock – and therefore, in this case, I reckon you should. It’s up there with the murders in Man Bites Dog and A Short Film About Killing, in the forcing-you-to-face-your-own-love-of-screen-death department, if that’s any help.
Back to the film’s minor but important pleasures. There is a tiny Hitchcockian cameo from Jackson as the wino Winslet kisses after seeing Mario Lanza on the big screen. And big-ups and shout-outs to the reliably marvellous comedy actor Clive Merrison as Juliet’s submissive father Dr Henry Hulme, suffering a life of being routinely humiliated by two spoiled princesses in typically quiet English desperation. In real life, Dr Hulme apparently went on to head Britain’s hydrogen bomb programme. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
I had a vaguely prepared thing in my head about an impassioned rant on behalf of Ms Lynskey, and how she’s much better than Ms Winslet here, and how their different career trajectories are entirely about Ms Winslet’s looks, and how this is another terrible example of the patriarchy at work, blahblahblah. But, after watching Heavenly Creatures for the third time, I’ve binned it. Simply because Ms Winslet is every bit as extraordinary and convincing here as Ms Lynskey, and is also luminously charismatic, which is what makes film stars film stars, when all is said and done. What I will say is that Lynskey’s performance is generous as well as memorable, because, as the girls head towards the murder, Juliet, who is emotional and extrovert, is made even more beautiful by her extremes of feeling, while Pauline, who is insular and sociopathic, becomes increasingly like a screen killer: dead of eye, broody of brow, sallow, sickly pale and devoid of feeling, frightening and ugly in her single-minded pursuit of an irrational solution. The pair’s performances represent the real girls’ telepathy so chillingly that it should, in fact, be seen as one performance with two heads. That good.
But the major thing about Heavenly Creatures is its surgical examination of what I think is a secret universal fear: that there is something too intense, too potentially dangerous, too just plain fucking weird, about one-to-one friendships between teenage girls. We’ve all been on the receiving end of the manic laughter at some private joke, the shared language no one seems to understand, and the sexual threat of teen girls high on hormones and moments without consequences. It’s a powerful, threatening, intimidating connection that Julie Burchill has written about so well, particularly in Sugar Rush. And, in Heavenly Creatures, it is taken, by Winslet and Lynskey and Jackson and Walsh, to its (il)logical extreme, until you are willing to believe that the crime is not some act of madness but the inevitable outcome of any teen female friendship that manages to successfully exclude the outside world. It is this, even more than the horror of the murder, that stays with you long after the credits roll.
And now, the creepy postscript. Both girls only spent five years in prison before making a life in Britain. When the crime was being investigated, one of the side-effect revelations was that Honora had never
married Pauline’s father Herbert Rieper. Which is why the film refers to both women as Rieper, but Pauline was tried under her mother’s maiden name of Parker. Pauline Parker later ran a children’s riding school in Kent, and was last heard of living in the Orkney Islands, off the coast of Scotland.
When the film was released the intrepid New Zealand media took it upon themselves to track down the real Juliet Hulme. She is now Anne Perry, a successful writer of crime fiction, also living in Scotland. When tracked down and questioned she said she had no opinion of Winslet’s portrayal of her, because she would never watch the film.
Bizarrely, she appeared on British television in 2005, talking about the murder on daytime talk show Trisha. She denied that she and Pauline were ever lesbians. So that’s all right, then.
But it’s been 17 years since Heavenly Creatures was made. Has Anne Perry really not watched it at all? If she has, what did she make of being portrayed for all time as an insane, obnoxious princess who goaded a weaker person into killing her own mother? Did she and Pauline really never make contact after prison, as the courts ordered as a condition of their release, despite living in the same part of the world? What would two women who had done this as children . . . I mean . . . what would they . . . what could you . . . say to each other?
I suppose Heavenly Creatures, like most fiction, does raise more questions than it answers. But what an amazing, amazing puzzle.
SPANKING THE MONKEY
1994
Starring: Jeremy Davies, Alberta Watson, Benjamin Hendrickson, Carla Gallo
Dir.: David O. Russell
Plot: The parentified teen’s worst nightmare.
Key line: ‘I can never get your father to do these things for me any more.’
One Christmas my mother fell down the stairs and broke her arm. I was 18 and working in my first job at a record shop, but I still lived at home. She was single and I was an only child so I had to look after her because there was no one else. I lost a job opportunity and a girlfriend. She even had a massively annoying dog that I had to walk. And, like every teenage boy, I liked to wank a lot. So there is no character anywhere in this book whose situation I relate to as easily that of Raymond Aibelli, the teen protagonist of the debut feature film by David O. Russell, master writer-director of Three Kings and The Fighter.
But, thankfully, I never had to carry my mum to the toilet. And – let me make this clear – I didn’t do the thing that provides this movie’s major plot-point and controversy. Let me make that very, very clear.
Made in low-budget, none-more-indie style with unknown actors, Spanking The Monkey follows the tale of Raymond (Davies) who, a couple of days before taking a prestigious pre-med internship in Washington, is called home by his obnoxious father (Hendrickson) to look after his mother (Watson), who has broken her leg, while he heads off on a sales trip. Dad has put his career before his son’s future and expects Raymond to miss out on his internship to do what his father should be staying at home to do. Susan Aibelli is a needy depressive who resolutely refuses to be independent, pokes around in Raymond’s private life and undermines his academic talents. The family dog intervenes every time he wants to masturbate. With his balls rapidly turning a nasty shade of angry blue, Raymond starts a relationship with a neighbouring high school girl Toni (Gallo), but is blowing it because he’s taking his repressed rage at his parents out on her. Meanwhile, all this physical contact with domineering Mom is leading him directly into Le Souffle Au Coeur (see here) territory. None of the cast plays this as a comedy, yet, somehow, Russell makes a film about boredom, the parentified child, lost opportunities, raging hormones and incest funny, as well as frightening and sad.
Russell’s scenario is driven by a bracing cynicism about people and the nuclear family. Hendrickson’s Tom is a memorably boo-worthy Bad Dad, the kind of guy who rings his son up to nag him about responsibilities and boast about his sales figures while ignoring the naked woman preparing herself for imminent shag action in his tacky hotel room.
But Tom has nothing on Susan in the nightmare-parent stakes. Castrating, controlling, inappropriate, nagging and in constant need of attention, she pushes every button that her son possesses and makes the viewer cover their eyes and hide behind the sofa as readily as if they were watching Paranormal Activity alone, in the dark, with a device that goes ‘BONK!!!’ at irregular intervals and a neighbour in a Michael Myers mask hammering at the window and cackling. She is an Oedipal nightmare, and enables Davies to find a performance that embodies every child who is driven to unbearable rage by their parents but can’t bring themselves to say what needs to be said and break the pattern. The three are so seethingly real that you can feel years of familial tension oozing out of every pore of their suburban home.
The film’s comedy comes out of that, because Russell knows exactly how uncomfortable we feel when a visibly aroused Raymond slips his oily hand underneath Mom’s cast to massage her smooth, soft, tanned thighs. We can’t help but get into the spirit, shouting, ‘NOOOO!!! DON’T DO IT!!! RUN AWAY!!!’ at the screen, enjoying our own squirming embarrassment. And we know where Raymond’s going when he scuttles out of the room. And we know that the dog will find a way to stop it.
Except that it’s not the dog this time. It’s Raymond’s old party-hearty friend Nicky (Matthew Puckett) who wants him to come out to play. By this time, Raymond sure could do with some healthy company his own age. ‘I’m kinda busy,’ Raymond explains. ‘Busy?’ Nicky responds. ‘Doing what? Spanking the monkey?’Well, now that you mention it . . .
So Raymond skips out with the boys. But the reason that poor Raymond wasn’t keen to get the old gang together is that they are old-fashioned rough ’n’ tumble boys who prefer pussy, drugs and risky outdoor pursuits to studying, and, despite Nicky’s protests, some of the other lads in the gang have a bitter anti-Raymond bug up their ass of the ‘You think you’re too good for us? Or are you a fag?’ variety. Somebody mentions Raymond’s yummy mummy and the night ends in disaster, and our flawed hero is even more alienated from everything than before.
And Mommie Dearest just won’t let up. Soon she’s making him wash her back in the shower and banging on about the erections he used to get as they played with a boat in the bath when he was a toddler: ‘We called it the boner boat,’ she cajoles, before she slips, and he catches her, and she giggles flirtily. Call social services! I don’t care if he’s 18!
But Susan is not a clichéd villain. She’s a miserable woman whose marriage is a disaster and who is incredibly lonely, and loneliness makes more people do more terrible things than anything. And Watson is good enough to make you feel the truth of that, too.
Meanwhile, Raymond is so disconnected that a tryst with young Toni goes from so tentative she asks if he’s gay to near-rape within seconds. Russell cuts between Toni’s distress and the dog ravaging the picnic food. This disaster is used by Susan to move things a little closer to the inevitable.
The incest scene is suffused with discomfort and all sorts of creepy wrong. Russell’s camera is suddenly tilting at queasy angles as two drunk and unhappy people slowly replace bonding by throwing food at the TV with tense touching. Russell shoots Raymond as if he was a killer, his face pale, sweaty and kind of angry, looking down at us, up to no good. The responsibility is very deliberately taken away from Susan and placed on Raymond’s already overburdened shoulders, although Susan eventually meets him all the way. The scene has none of the easy pleasure of Malle’s mother–son incest in Le Souffle Au Coeur, but Russell does replicate Malle’s sparing of our blushes, and cuts away to black screen, and then to the following morning and two eggs boiling in a pan.
But, unlike Malle’s jaunty memoir, Spanking The Monkey holds the incestuous act as the beginning of the drama, rather than the end. The film becomes a tense arm-wrestle between tragic farce and a dark study of a family where everyone is too royally screwed up to do or say the right thing, and whose dysfunction either abuses or manipulates everyone who touches them.
I said that Spanking The Monkey is funny. You must be wondering exactly where the joke is in all this. But Russell’s expertise lies in his ability to show us terrible things without ever completely destroying the comic tone. He is laughing at the underlying darkness at the heart of the family unit, and encouraging us to laugh at the less bearable facts about our own.
Spanking The Monkey ends with a symbolic act of cleansing. But we never learn if the Aibelli family wash away their sins. This is as it should be. Families can’t make the past go away. We just have to live with it.
BEFORE SUNRISE
1995
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Dir.: Richard Linklater
Plot: We’ll always have Paris. Except it was Vienna.
Key line: ‘Love is a complex issue, you know?’
When Dazed And Confused director Linklater and co-writer Kim Krizan conceived a teenage Brief Encounter, they set out to write a teen movie as unconventional, in its understated way, as Dogtooth (see here) or Le Souffle Au Coeur (here). Before Sunrise flies in the face of everything we know about teensploitation. There is no plot. There is no action. The protagonists are not gender stereotypes. People talk a lot instead of doing stuff. There is little conflict. Pop music is replaced by highbrow classical music and the teen lovers discourse like self-consciously intellectual student travellers rather than kids because that is what they are. If your idea of screen teens is the oafish laddishness of The Inbetweeners, then Before Sunrise might make you feel physically ill, so concerned is it with politically correct maturity and comparing itself to the European tradition of intellectually charged romance exemplified by the films of Eric Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman and every acclaimed French director that isn’t Jean-Luc Godard. Add earnest Ethan Hawke to the equation and Before Sunrise should be so suffocated by its own Guardian reader moral superiority and good taste that you want to slap it around and force-feed it Big Macs and alcopops until it pukes. But you don’t because it is, against all odds, mesmerising, dramatic and entirely beautiful. It’s less explicable than a busload of David Blaines catching bullets in their teeth.
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