From the World Cinema Showcase 2004, TIM WONG tackled a pair of topical documentaries: Capturing the Friedmans, where the punishment didn't necessarily match the crime; and Aileen: Life & Death of a Serial Killer, where the crime was the punishment itself.


TO BEGIN WITH a question: in Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans, what exactly is captured? The rabid infatuations of a serial pedophile? The lynch-mobbing of an innocent man and his family? Maybe just another case of suburban dysfunction? All and none of the above, apparently. So rife with ambivalence that it routinely alternates between the sensational and the problematic, here is a documentary that generates as many questions about the arbitration of truth as it does the representation of. There are obvious comparisons to be made with Rashomon, yet Akira Kurosawa's film illustrated the nature of truth through a work of fiction. Jarecki on the other hand is dealing with real people in real situations, and as a filmmaker is immediately implicated in the process of recalling and retelling. It's Kurosawa himself who says, "Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing." The biggest embellishment of which, is perhaps the film itself.

That's not to suggest that Capturing the Friedmans isn't fascinating – it most certainly is – but it is "embellished" with a certain distrust and also distaste. It's the hours of home video shot by the Friedmans that elevates the film beyond mere observation; found footage hardly being a new concept in documentary film, yet the privacy of the content is startling (particularly David Friedman's video diary), and could have only been entrusted to Jarecki on the basis that it would be used in the Friedman's defence. The footage appropriated is actually the most perceptive thing in the film, yet is less evidential than it is intrusive. Mostly, we're just guests in their domestic squabbles, tantrums and occasional happy moments, and feel more than a little uninvited; voyeurs to a nuclear family on the brink of fallout; Elaine Friedman ostracised on one side, Arnold Friedman and his three defiant sons on the other. At least they're divided, unlike Jarecki, who is more than content to sit squarely on the fence, maybe to dodge the stigma of supporting a family of pedophiles, probably to avoid betraying the Friedmans altogether.

Traditionally, the reasoning for an impartial, objective point of view would count here, except that it doesn't. Jarecki might appear to be the mediator in two sides of a debate – one in favour of an innocent Arnold and Jesse Friedman (accused on multiple accounts of child molestation), the other determined to prove both guilty – yet he's apolitical for all the wrong motives. Debbie Nathan makes a convincing argument for the Friedmans and to a point, against Jarecki; Nathan being the investigative journalist in the film who sides with the family as the rest of the community implodes upon them; a by-product of "public hysteria", as she describes. What she also describes, in a subsequent article for The Village Voice, is that during production Jarecki told the Friedmans he believed Father and Son were innocent. The finished product, of course, is not quite as vindicating as Jarecki's "reassurance" suggested it would be. This is, in part, an example of how truths – or versions of – will contradict one another. It's also potentially an instance of documentary as exploitation. We can even read into the film's tacked-on epilogue embracing the "family" (or what's left of it) as a guilty conscience, like Steve James in Stevie, only not as forthcoming. Mostly, it shows a filmmaker who perhaps lacked courage, or just wanted his film to do well (which it has). The Friedmans did too, just not for the same reasons.

Capturing the Friedmans is more interesting as a film that examines the realities of pedophilia and the society of fear it maintains. It's also a work that contributes to the proliferation of the critical "suburban" genre, a sort of ethnographic cinema that dates back to at least Douglas Sirk. This isn't the first film to put pedophilia and suburbia together – Todd Solondz did so in Happiness, Larry Clark does so by nature – yet audiences should respond to it more pensively because it is non-fictional. The closest of all, Michael Cuesta's L.I.E, draws uncanny parallels with the Friedman story; not only is it set in suburban Long Island, but its central character is a flawed father figure, much like Arnold Friedman. Played by Brian Cox, Big John is a respected member of the community, yet his vice is young boys, one 15-year-old Howie in particular. Although it dices with the unthinkable, the transcendent nature of the film is that Big John and Howie become friends, John an almost surrogate father in a time of need, one whom never gives into his temptations, but is genuinely there for Howie. Regardless of what is sustained or overruled in the Friedman's case, Arnold is as exactly as his epitaph states: loving father, devoted teacher, pianist, physicist and beach bum. Like Big John, he also had compulsions, those of which he acknowledged (through pornography) but insisted he never acted upon (when in a rational state of mind, at least). Friedman is certainly guilty of being in possession, but discarding all other allegations for a moment, is he really less of a human being, or just someone who needed help and not mass persecution?


AILEEN WUORNOS needed help too, just not necessarily as a lethal injection. Purported to be America's first female serial killer, her name did not boast the notoriety of Charles Manson or the celebrity of OJ Simpson. But Charlize Theron, makeup and a well-marketed biopic called Monster appears to have changed all that, at least posthumously. The documentary in question here, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, is less heard of, unfairly but plausibly, considering audiences are well known to prefer their doses of reality in representational form. Monster might be accessible through genre, 80's retrospective and an Oscar winning performance, but carries none of the despair, tragedy and politics that this Nick Broomfield/Joan Churchill film does. And compared to that other documentary, it's obvious what isn't being repressed, the filmmaker's own bouts of self-doubt and confusion – especially the is-she-or-isn't-she's – there for all to see, refusing to be swept under the carpet, or as Arnold Friedman preferred, behind the family piano.

What's certain here is that truth is as elusive as in the Friedman film, except having more to do with delirium than contradiction. In that sense, the "getting to the bottom of" is unimportant, Wuornos guilty of killing seven men on concrete evidence alone, followed by a self-defence plea, the implications of which are inevitable. Any truths in this film, or the lies used to conceal them, serve more as an outcome of paranoia, an example of a woman potentially insane. Monster is a considerably difficult film then, even if it only attempts to provide a version of events according to Wuornos, her mindset deteriorating to a point where deriving fact from anything spoken is a wobbly uncertainty. In one instance, the Patty Jenkins film depicts the first killing as described in Wuornos' testimony (shown in the documentary) the sordid details of the bounding and alcohol soaking both in her words and in Jenkins' scene. Wuornos will later admit to Broomfield that she fabricated the entire story, only to again reopen her claims by maintaining she did kill in self-defence, even after relinquishing her original plea for a guilty-as-charged.

It's a carefully guarded about-face, the possibility of which arises only when Wuornos is lead to believe the camera is no longer filming. Ethics aside, at least Broomfield is sincerely concerned for her, his compulsion to extract more from Wuornos even greater at this late stage; a woman he has documented and befriended since the early 90's, now on the verge of an execution he still hopes to prevent. And as underhanded as it is – the non-consensual recording and the refusal to accept Wuornos' own death wish (the reason for abandoning her self-defence plea) – Broomfield's insistence on sharing the frame with his subject literalises for us a documentarian invested in his subject. In the opposite sense, Andrew Jarecki did not impose himself in front of the camera – perhaps wisely – but a decision nonetheless that seems to amplify his distancing and apathy as the maker of that film.

Wuornos' wildly extreme accounts, from the absurd to the terrible to the doubtful, validate her insanity – or a woman on the verge of – the final dilemma seemingly one of fight or mercy. Having witnessed the full extent of this in his last interview – Wuornos provoked to the point of spaceships and delusional conspiracy theories – Broomfield knows she could still be spared from execution if mentally unfit, yet when examined, is passed in a mere 15 minutes. As a final nail in the coffin, it is the 10 year accumulation of bureaucratic forces, tabloid culture and spectacle; on the other hand, it is what Wuornos wanted, the reasons for her aced psych test not necessarily as beyond her control as Broomfield might like to believe. With her death sentence acknowledged as partly self-initiated, the film is smartly balanced between karmic absolution and scathing indictment; the latter an aggressive but not entirely formative lambasting of the criminal justice system, social mores and the death penalty.

The synchronisation of the film's release might be all too obvious, but it is an essential coda to Monster, as it is to Broomfield's previous instalment, Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Apart from verifying the Charlize Theron performance as a virtual reincarnation of the Aileen Wuornos spectre, the documentary proves to have the element of closure that the "fictional" version does not. Monster also comes dangerously close in parts to staple exploitation, Wuornos at times just a stereotype of the avenging lesbian/feminist man-hater that society shat on, only for her to return in a roaring rampage of revenge, like the Baise Moi girls, Ms. 45 or every other suffering protagonist of the female rape-revenge genre. Jenkins' film is so fixated with why Wuornos killed – interpreted first as self-defence, then a combination of necessity, desperation and obligation – that she's made out to be the most rational of anti-heroines. Broomfield knows otherwise, his film subject and friend over the space of a decade ground down to the point of madness – a real-life Shock Corridor – the reasons for her crimes no longer as important as the one's she's been made to endure.