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:
- Heehee you've changed i to "occasional" not "daily"!!!!
- 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.
- 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
- *drums fingers*
- *hums*
- *looks about*
- 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.
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