Inside Juliet

This is a re-post of a blog I posted on Saturday 14th of November 2009.  I accidentally deleted it yesterday and the lovely Blogger Team rescued the cached copy for me. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KOvmRvwMiyUJ:sandy-watson.blogspot.com/2009/11/inside-juliet.html&hl=en&gl=us&strip=0&vwsrc=0

INSIDE JULIET

It's difficult, isn't it, to understand why men are so crazy in love with lesbians? Sexually fantasising over them, whilst at the same time seeing them as something dangerous, something 'other'. They are at once desired and derided. Their sexual desire for other women and not men, must mean there’s something wrong with them, right? Sharon Stone's fanny-flashing murderess in Basic Instinct, a notorious and prime example of the stereotype. A beautiful woman (who probably really wants a man) but because she sticks with women, goes a bit bonkers and kills people. In the 1994 Peter Jackson film, Heavenly Creatures, a young Kate Winslet plays the stereotype again. Juliet Hulme, a pretty teenager is sexually 'confused' and by the end of the film, after falling in-love with another girl, becomes psychotic and kills someone (in this case, her girlfriends mother). The chilling factor in all of this, is that in this film, it's all true. Hulme was real, was lesbian, or at least bisexual and was a killer. Or so we were led to believe.

The new documentary film Anne Perry: Interiors is a study of the girl, now a seventy-one-year-old woman, who was at the centre of this horrific tale. A woman, whom after release from prison for the crime, changed her name and became a best-selling author and managed to keep her gruesome past a secret. Jackson's film, however, changed all that. Interest in the real people behind the 'true story' re-emerged. Hulme, now Perry, was sought out and her long kept secret and new identity were uncovered.

What's interesting is that, in the documentary, Perry denies any lesbian relationship with Pauline Parker (the other girl involved in the killing). She claims it as an obsessive friendship, but not a sexual or romantic one. On one level, that's almost a relief. Having another true-life, mad-lesbian-murderess case dug up to support the stereotype, unsettles and bothers me. But then there's a tinge of disappointment that the huge, passionate, other-worldly, love that led to the killing in the film version of the story, was 'made-up'.

The film now works better for me if I just think of it as total fiction. The 'true-story' element that can so often make a film more compelling, now fails in this case. In reality, Juliet and Pauline were just two severely unhinged friends and the obsessive, murderous, love is once more left to fiction... where it so rightly belongs.

Saturday 14th November 2009

Comments:

• sinead 17/11/2009, 22:38
• Heehee you've changed i to "occasional" not "daily"!!!!
• 
  
• PiggBox 19/11/2009, 13:10
• what about the film "Monster" about Arlene (was that her name?) a real life lesbian man killer.
• I am possibly a rare sample of the male species in being neither turned on by nor afraid of lesbians. That could be due to the fact that I have known many of them in my lifetime.
• 
  
• Sandy 19/11/2009, 14:56
• Sinead: Yeah, I changed it to occasional. :o) I'm like the lamps.
• Dido: Close... she was called Aileen Wuornos.
• 
  
• There are many more fictional and 'based-on-a-true-story' films that I could list here, in which the lesbian or bisexual woman is mentally unhinged, psychotic and/or murderous...
• The killers or 'monsters' in many films are gay, lesbian or bisexual.
• 
  
• Butterfly Kiss
• Silence of the Lambs
• Monster
• Heavenly Creatures
• Basic Instinct
• Bound
• Psycho
• Interview with a Vampire
• Wild Things
• My Summer Of Love
• Girlfriends
• Poisoned Ivy
• Fun
• 
  
• ...to name but a few, but I'm sure a little Google search or a gander around wikipedia will garner more realistic lists.
• 
  
• Here's an essay on the subject too:
• http://www.stanford.edu/~njbuff/conference_fall05/papers/brett_hammon1.htm
• 
  
• And, typing the words "lesbian" and "murder" into the IMDB site garners 290 results:
• http://www.imdb.com/keyword/lesbian/murder/?title_type=feature&sort=release_date
• 
  
• sinead 27/11/2009, 16:42
• *drums fingers*
• *hums*
• *looks about*
• 
  
• Maulleigh 30/04/2010, 13:35
• I'm not a lesbian but I've had total "girlcrushes" on women. When girlfriends have stopped calling me, etc., I've been destroyed. It happens! I totally understand having an obsessive relationship with another woman.

Carol

I accidentally came across the novel Carol [Originally titled The Price of Salt] by Patricia Highsmith only a few months ago, not even realising that a film had been made of it, let alone that one was imminently due for release.  Recently [16/11/15], and again quite accidentally, I found myself suddenly in possession of free tickets to a preview of the film.  Carol, it seemed, was quite determined to meet me, in all of her various guises.

I say that, yes, because a novel is always a different experience to a film but also because the two Carol’s I’ve met recently seemed quite different people.  The story and characters in the book and the film are the same, the skeleton of it is all there but the flesh, the body shape of each, give quite a different impression.

I enjoyed the book.  I must say, at this point, as I think it has a bearing on things, that I LISTENED to the book rather than actually read it.  I have a two hour commute to and then from work, five days a week.  Four hours of my day sat on my rapidly fattening bum.  TWENTY HOURS A WEEK.  So… I find it hard to read when being jostled about on a double decker bus.  Additionally, the majority of my commute is through some rather spectacular Northumbrian countryside, hence, I’m often distracted from my Kindle by the daily changes in the landscape as the seasons slowly turn.  Enter Audible.  I’m now an addict.*  I can ‘read’ a book and still watch the changing scenery (which, often actually adds to the listening experience).  The only ‘downfall’, if I can call it that, of an audiobook, is that a narrator can instantly ‘read’ the tone and colour of a novel and it’s characters very differently than you would yourself.**

So, although both Carol’s were beautiful, well-off, society women with a guarded, repressed, nature, the filmic Carol, played by Cate Blanchett, has a warmth I didn't get from the novel.  I still liked the Carol in the book despite this seeming lack of warmth because, in the end, she loves... absolutely.  Still, Blanchett makes her infinitely more likeable than my Audible narrator did.  It’s a subtle but simmering performance.  The beautifully structured dresses almost bursting at their silky, hand-sewn, seams with hemmed-in passion, firmly state her class and social standing from the outset.  Blanchett is elegant, intense and taut.  The chemistry between her and Rooney Mara’s Therese bubbles just under the boil throughout and is utterly believable.

Mara’s performance is a master-class in innocent but confident understatement.  Whilst Blanchett floats around gracefully in her architectural dresses, Mara dashes about in much looser, freer, clothing.  Her youthful sexuality less corseted.  The costume design plays a huge role in the storytelling of this film.  We see Therese blossom from a pretty but dowdy shop-girl into a stunning New York press photographer, modern, independent and sassy in style.  By the end of the film she embodies Audrey Hepburn in all of her most iconic roles.

Todd Haynes’ telling of this story of forbidden love in the 1960’s is just gorgeous.  Every single scene is beautiful and authentic.  His direction of the leads shows a deft lightness of touch, letting what is not said say so much more than what is.  The music and editing seamlessly float us through this story, slipping and sliding us dreamily through this sixties lovescape.

I came out of the cinema longing for that kind of intense, wordless, love.

Carol is just a beautiful, beautiful, film.  See it.

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NB: I have one teeny tiny nit-pick… I just wish we saw a little more fun in lesbian love stories.  That’s it.  That’s the only ‘negative’ I can think of.

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* My faves are autobiographies read by the author’s themselves.  Stephen Fry, Tina Fey, Jennifer Saunders, Clare Balding, Malala Yousafzai, Miranda Hart, Amy Poehler, Celia Imrie,

** I started reading The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed… about a third of the way through I upgraded my Kindle version to an Audible version.  When reading the book myself I kept giggling out loud and thought it had a Wes Anderson sensibility about it.  I could see the quirky film in my head.  Upon changing to the Audible version… the more I listened the less I giggled out loud and the less I liked the book.  The narrator, to me, sounded like a primary school teacher reading a book to a bunch of 7-year-olds.  Patronising.  He made the writing seem childish rather than quirky.  Awful.  I reverted back to my Kindle for the final third of the book.  (Always play a sample on Audible before buying.  A bad narrator can kill a good book dead).