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True crime: Heavenly Creatures
suggested she write down her life history. Albert faxed her work to agents and publishers, and it was of a quality that got her noticed, and promoted, very quickly. It all happened so fast. Celebrities queued up to read out the elusive author’s work. Winona Ryder, Courtney Love, Tom Waits, Bono. After a few years the demands for a public appearance became overwhelming. Step forward Savannah Knoop, half-sister of Albert’s partner Geoff, who was happy to stand in as JT in an unconvincing blonde wig and giant sunglasses. Phone calls for JT (all, it seems, recorded) were taken by Laura, while Savannah would turn up as JT in person. Knoop performed this role for 6 years. It is the sheer amateurishness of it all that must have caused so much fury when the deception was revealed. But back then camera phones barely existed, or were highly rudimentary, and we just didn’t have the microscopic saturation coverage of events and people online that we do now. Such is the contact high brought on by others’ fame, that an Italian director had a fling with JT and made one of the books into a film, to tremendous ovation at Cannes. Who could bear to pull back the curtain on this drama? But the story had ragged edges, and gradually the truth came out. The press dived in for a feast. JT Leroy was unmasked a decade ago, around the same time as a UK author, writing about life in an orphanage run by abusive nuns, was revealed to have put quotations from Graham Greene and Charlotte Bronte in the mouths of her characters. This author had also appeared to use the words of prizewinning writer Hilary Mantel, who acerbically pointed out that although the manuscript had presumably passed through the hands of a number of employees of the publisher, not a single one of them had spotted this. Coincidentally, around the same time, James Frey’s multimillion selling memoir A Million Little Pieces was exposed as fiction. These stories highlight the credulousness in book publishing but, as everywhere else, we see what we want to see. We obsess over authenticity, making huge demands of artistic creators to interpret themselves in ways that can be called “real”. And no one wants to be seen as the suspicious, negative one who asks the difficult questions, particularly if the person under suspicion is oppressed in some way. The trans narrative winds mercurially in and out of the story. Albert has said that she herself doesn’t identify as male
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or female, and the story, with JT as her avatar, feels ahead of its time in this respect. The online virtual world Second Life had only been in existence for a couple of years when JT was unmasked. Nowadays it is far more commonplace and accepted for people to proudly and publicly assert their gender fluidity or non-binary identity. So could you call this a story of gender dysphoria by proxy? Not quite. Nowadays we would probably see this as an art prank and laugh about it, raccoon penis-bone pendants and all. JT claiming to have AIDS puts it in murkier moral territory; however, the books were always declared to be fiction, so can you really call them a hoax? I am reminded of the line from Hole’s song Doll Parts: “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.” And, really, JT’s public presentation was no different from any celebrity with an entourage, who doles out little pieces of themselves carefully choreographed by a small army of press people, which nowadays we take for granted.
Tania Glyde
Movies of the Mind True crime: Heavenly Creatures Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) tells the story of a real murder case. In New Zealand in the 1950s, teenage schoolgirls Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker bludgeoned Pauline’s mother Honoria to death at a Christchurch beauty spot. Lots of articles have been written about the www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 November 2016
case and normally, around now, those articles tell you about the trial; about how the girls were imprisoned; about how they were released on condition they never meet again; about how they built new lives under new names. They typically recount the fact that both women 1027
Miramax
Insight
Heavenly Creatures Directed by Peter Jackson 1994 Running time: 99 min
1028
were unmasked, years later, by investigative journalists, and note that one of them had by that time become a bestselling crime novelist. If you want to know about all this you can, as the singer Nick Cave occasionally likes to advise journalists, Google it. But just this once, let’s leave Parker and Hulme’s assumed names out of this. When the novelist Elena Ferrante was unmasked recently, many were angry on her behalf. Quite right, too. Yet the revelation of her identity reminds us that truth and authenticity are rarely a matter of joining the dots. The connection between authors and their subjects is less direct than we like to imagine. Likewise, perhaps, between children who commit violent crimes and the adults they become. British law recognises this, affording in certain cases (like that of Mary Bell, for example) lifelong anonymity to child murderers who have served their time. Still, our urge to know is strong—Bell has apparently been through several identities since her release from prison in 1980. Newspapers just keep on trying to find her. Peter Jackson and writer Fran Walsh approached Heavenly Creatures with a desire to humanise Parker and Hulme. When the murder happens, sickening as it is, it’s largely off camera. Instead, they focus on the relationship between the two. Like so many teenage friendships, it’s passionate to the point of being toe-curling. The girls lust over tenor Mario Lanza and giggle naively about sex. Dismayed by real life, they invent a world of their own, all the better to enact their daft, Cartlandian, eroto-chivalric capers. It’s in this imaginary realm, which Jackson creates with digital effects and
populates with life-sized walking versions of the plasticine creatures Pauline and Juliet obsessively make, that Heavenly Creatures is at its best. Meanwhile, Pauline’s personal diary, used extensively in evidence against the girls at their trial, finds its way into the film as voiceover. It certainly has things to tell us about why the pair may have acted as they did: the girls seem to have become reliant on each other to the extent that they saw murder as their sole means of protecting the only relationship that made their lives worth living. When the marriage of Juliet’s parents broke down, they planned to send Juliet (who had a history of tuberculosis) to South Africa to live with a relative. Distraught, the girls plotted to run away and live abroad but were scuppered by the fact that they needed Honoria Parker’s permission for Pauline to get a passport. When that permission was predictably refused, the poor woman’s fate was sealed. But just as unmaskings tend to have an anticlimactic rather than a revelatory quality, so Pauline’s diary serves up only limited answers. In the end, it is still beyond most of us to grasp how two human beings could come to murder another, rather slowly, with half bricks stuffed inside stockings. How they lied about what they’d done, went to jail, and spent time in solitary confinement. How they were released and made themselves into different people. For stories like that, it’s imagination, not revelation, that fills the gaps.
Laura Thomas
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 November 2016
Magnolia Pictures
Insight
or female, and the story, with JT as her avatar, feels ahead of its time in this respect. The online virtual world Second Life had only been in existence for a couple of years when JT was unmasked. Nowadays it is far more commonplace and accepted for people to proudly and publicly assert their gender fluidity or non-binary identity. So could you call this a story of gender dysphoria by proxy? Not quite. Nowadays we would probably see this as an art prank and laugh about it, raccoon penis-bone pendants and all. JT claiming to have AIDS puts it in murkier moral territory; however, the books were always declared to be fiction, so can you really call them a hoax? I am reminded of the line from Hole’s song Doll Parts: “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.” And, really, JT’s public presentation was no different from any celebrity with an entourage, who doles out little pieces of themselves carefully choreographed by a small army of press people, which nowadays we take for granted.
Tania Glyde
Movies of the Mind True crime: Heavenly Creatures Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994) tells the story of a real murder case. In New Zealand in the 1950s, teenage schoolgirls Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker bludgeoned Pauline’s mother Honoria to death at a Christchurch beauty spot. Lots of articles have been written about the www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 November 2016
case and normally, around now, those articles tell you about the trial; about how the girls were imprisoned; about how they were released on condition they never meet again; about how they built new lives under new names. They typically recount the fact that both women 1027
Miramax
Insight
Heavenly Creatures Directed by Peter Jackson 1994 Running time: 99 min
1028
were unmasked, years later, by investigative journalists, and note that one of them had by that time become a bestselling crime novelist. If you want to know about all this you can, as the singer Nick Cave occasionally likes to advise journalists, Google it. But just this once, let’s leave Parker and Hulme’s assumed names out of this. When the novelist Elena Ferrante was unmasked recently, many were angry on her behalf. Quite right, too. Yet the revelation of her identity reminds us that truth and authenticity are rarely a matter of joining the dots. The connection between authors and their subjects is less direct than we like to imagine. Likewise, perhaps, between children who commit violent crimes and the adults they become. British law recognises this, affording in certain cases (like that of Mary Bell, for example) lifelong anonymity to child murderers who have served their time. Still, our urge to know is strong—Bell has apparently been through several identities since her release from prison in 1980. Newspapers just keep on trying to find her. Peter Jackson and writer Fran Walsh approached Heavenly Creatures with a desire to humanise Parker and Hulme. When the murder happens, sickening as it is, it’s largely off camera. Instead, they focus on the relationship between the two. Like so many teenage friendships, it’s passionate to the point of being toe-curling. The girls lust over tenor Mario Lanza and giggle naively about sex. Dismayed by real life, they invent a world of their own, all the better to enact their daft, Cartlandian, eroto-chivalric capers. It’s in this imaginary realm, which Jackson creates with digital effects and
populates with life-sized walking versions of the plasticine creatures Pauline and Juliet obsessively make, that Heavenly Creatures is at its best. Meanwhile, Pauline’s personal diary, used extensively in evidence against the girls at their trial, finds its way into the film as voiceover. It certainly has things to tell us about why the pair may have acted as they did: the girls seem to have become reliant on each other to the extent that they saw murder as their sole means of protecting the only relationship that made their lives worth living. When the marriage of Juliet’s parents broke down, they planned to send Juliet (who had a history of tuberculosis) to South Africa to live with a relative. Distraught, the girls plotted to run away and live abroad but were scuppered by the fact that they needed Honoria Parker’s permission for Pauline to get a passport. When that permission was predictably refused, the poor woman’s fate was sealed. But just as unmaskings tend to have an anticlimactic rather than a revelatory quality, so Pauline’s diary serves up only limited answers. In the end, it is still beyond most of us to grasp how two human beings could come to murder another, rather slowly, with half bricks stuffed inside stockings. How they lied about what they’d done, went to jail, and spent time in solitary confinement. How they were released and made themselves into different people. For stories like that, it’s imagination, not revelation, that fills the gaps.
Laura Thomas
www.thelancet.com/psychiatry Vol 3 November 2016