|
NZ Listener
May 1-7 2004
Vol 193 No 3338 -
Published April 24, 2004
Let us now, inevitably, consider Peter Ellis
by Philip Matthews
Capturing
the Friedmans
Directed by Andrew Jarecki.
Here's one of many questions that Capturing
the Friedmans poses: in this age of instant celebrity and home video, do
we all have a movie in us? The Friedman family of Great Neck, Long Island – a prosperous-yet-creepy suburb,
summarised by such Blue Velvetesque touches as lawn sprinklers and slo-mo
commuters – were early adopters, goofing around in Super 8 home movies and
making the shift to video in the 1980s. The middle-class family's decline and
fall was compulsively recorded for posterity, and is preserved now in the
living eternity of Andrew Jarecki's brilliant, troubling and provocative
documentary.
"My dad was a cool guy … selfless, altruistic," says David
Friedman, the eldest and most hysterical of the three Friedman brothers,
interviewed in the present. David makes a living these days as a children's
party clown, which is where Jarecki came into this story. Cut to 1988, and a
distraught David is confiding in his video diary: "This is private,
between me and me." In that year, the Friedman family was turned inside
out. On Thanksgiving weekend, 1987, the police searched the family home for
child pornography – they found stacks of it, hidden behind the piano – and
then built a case against Arnold Friedman, David's dad, who taught high
school chemistry and gave local boys computer lessons. As this was the 80s,
child sex-abuse hysteria naturally followed: Arnold and Jesse Friedman, the
youngest of the three brothers, were tried and convicted on multiple sodomy
charges. Both did time.
Like a mutant virus, that sex-abuse hysteria travelled. Who in New Zealand
could watch this and not think of the Peter Ellis case? No physical evidence
existed for abuse of neighbourhood boys and no complaints had been made
before the police went trawling for victims. Some, interviewed in the
present, admit to lying to the authorities – while one who still stands by
his story of abuse is framed by Jarecki in such a way that we are encouraged
to doubt his credibility – and the use of hypnosis to "recover"
memory makes its inevitable and bizarre appearance. Crusading journalist
Debbie Nathan makes the equally inevitable comparison with the McMartin case
in California,
where accusations regarding abused pre-schoolers were found to be hollow. If
the Ellis story ever had a prologue, it was that.
But Capturing the Friedmans won't entirely satisfy the pro-Ellis lobby – it's
too ambiguous for that. An already unstable family was brought down by the
scandal, but Arnold
– an increasingly diffident figure withdrawing into the old footage, leaving
the rest to bicker over his sins – was no innocent. Besides his possession of
that porn, he copped to – almost boasted about – his predilections and some
other incidents, while his wife, Elaine, never entirely discounted the
charges. This film muddies an issue that, in New Zealand at least, has become
very black and white.
Call it a grey area, a moral swamp. With its textures of memory and secrecy,
its revelations of control and abuse, Capturing
the Friedmans resembles such weirdly prescient Atom Egoyan downers as
Family Viewing and Exotica. As Egoyan knows, faded home movies have their own
sadness, and there is poignancy around the edges of this story – Elaine has a
tragic subplot, largely to do with her alienation from this world of not
entirely honest men. The larger theme, though, is memory and its
unreliability – not just the "memories" of those kids, prompted and
coerced by cops and lawyers, or all the things that our own memories of
family life conceal, but the way that old photos and videos are now expected
to do our remembering for us, as though memory is malleable and only the
image is real. "I don't really remember it outside of the tape,"
David says at one point. "Like when your parents take pictures of you.
Do you really remember being there or do you just remember the photograph
hanging on the wall?"
Capturing the Friedmans plays in the
World Cinema Showcase, Academy Cinema, Auckland, May 2, 4, 8 and 11.
|
