An eerie ring, the steady thumping of a heart and the stutter of gunfiremarks the opening of Ellen Kuras’ new biopic LEE. For a moment the fractured sounds of battle suspend us in time, the audience set at a distance from the chaos as we focus in on a figure seeking cover from the explosions; a camera clasped between white knuckled hands.
The owner of this camera is Lee Miller.
Model, surrealist, muse, photographer, WWII correspondent, and culinary genius, Miller was a woman who walked between lifetimes and refashioned herself repeatedly to become perhaps one of the most complicated figures of the twentieth century. Her life was a tapestry of variety right up until her passing in 1977, and yet, many of her accomplishments went unrecognised until after her death.
Born in 1907, Miller’s childhood was characterised by difficulty. She was expelled from multiple schools; suffered sexual abuse from a family friend; and was photographed nude by her father, an amateur artist. While this exposure to photography through her father would teach her the technical minutia of the art form, there is no doubt these experiences stuck with Miller. Indeed, she is now famous for saying that she “would rather take a photo than be one.”
Despite this, on the 1927 cover of British Vogue, the reader is held prisoner by the eyes of an illustrated Miller. Dashes of light summon the viewer to New York, where the emerging glass landscape of the urban world promises opportunities for wealth, social grandeur, and the latest fashions. Clad in a vibrant blue cloche and adorned in pearls, Miller stands at the centre as the incarnation of modernity and 20’s femininity. While literally crafted by another’s hands, Miller’s modelling experiences would aid her as she took up the artist’s brush and reflected for herself on the world and womens’ position within it.
WWII was the morbid catalyst for this artistic reflection, taking the surrealist tendencies of her earlier work and transposing them into striking photos exploring life on the home front. For while the threads of conflict had been weaving themselves for years leading up to 1939, it wasn’t until war was officially declared that the full tapestry of disruption came into view. As such, the bodily and spatial displacement associated with surrealism through composition and juxtaposition was the perfect vehicle for Miller to capture the events unfolding. Her work acts as a journal where fact and emotion seamlessly run alongside each other.
‘Firemasks, Downshire Hill, London, England, 1941’ – Lee Miller Archives
This record was particularly related to the activities of women. Whether as farmers, secretaries, ATS officers or nurses, women were the vital cogs turning the war effort. Miller placed the lives of ordinary people at the centre of her work as she photographed candid moments in their lives, the artificiality of a set lost as the women instead posed as they pleased or not at all. For women, so often the fantasised muses of art, the importance of having photos taken of them in this way cannot be understated. Miller treats them not as passive objects but as voices of interest whose lives deserve to be remembered.
Cast in the watery light of morning, the piece, US Army Nurse’s Billet, is a prime example of this. Ghostlike, laundry and a nurse’s jacket hang next to each other, waiting for their lost owner to return. In the days following my viewing, I found myself returning, in awe of the fragile intimacy of this stolen moment. The soft lines of the fabric alongside the rigidity of the windows and the darkness of the curtains perfectly speak to the contrast of the domestic and the industrial for women. Indeed, the underwear becomes symbolic of the private world, while the jacket is the external cover for the public. Found in the space between is the imprint of this unknown woman, her dual existence immortalised.
‘US Army Nurses’s Billet’ – Lee Miller Archives
This depiction of seemingly unremarkable objects or settings that carry greater symbolism is a common thread across Miller’s work. Take the geometric lines of a harshly clean bathroom ushering the viewer into what is now Miller’s most notorious piece. Serenity relaxes the lines of Miller’s face as she watches over her discarded clothes, the photo every bit the mundane relaxation of a bath. Yet in the shadows of the room, the photo of a single figure shifts the entire meaning of the piece.
This is Hitler’s bathroom.
In it, Miller washes off the dirt of Dachau. Her boots carry ghosts into the room, who rub their mired, broken feet into his bath mat.
Taken on the day of Hitler’s death, this remains a controversial photo, yet its significance cannot be denied. Especially alongside a photo of Sherman, the Jewish collaborator of Miller who also used the bath, Hitler’s shower head raised above his anguished face.
‘In Hitler’s Bathtub’ – Lee Miller Archives
Yet, despite her dedication to capturing the truth, and the trauma she suffered to do so, much of Miller’s work went unpublished. Her record of the concentration camps; of the destruction of Europe; of the lives broken…all of it went untold.
This censorship is discussed beautifully by Kuras when Miller (Kate Winslet) storms into Vogue’s offices and starts destroying the negatives she tirelessly sent over. In this heartbreaking scene, we see Miller on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Winslet’s performance is flawless as she hyperventilates: “Who cares? Nobody saw them. You didn’t print them.” She holds up the image of a girl photographed in Dachau, pleadingly asking “Raped and beaten, how does she move on?”
This question is posed to Audrey Withers (editor of Vogue played by Andrea Riseborough), yet the piercing stare of the little girl challenges the audience: how do victims of war move on if their suffering goes unrecognised?
For the governments at the time, Miller’s photos were too disturbing for a population who had already suffered through the Blitz and the loss of too many families. Their decision to omit the full scope of Nazi occupation, not only denies the public access to truth but also prevents the processing of trauma for victims.
The duty of the bystander to conflict is a complex one; yet war in the Ukraine and Middle East places us in a position where we must rise to it. Our world is a tragic melody of brokenness and the life of Miller, and the biopic that recounts it, challenges us to recognise, in brutal clarity, the reality of global politics.
Her experiences in the war made and unmade Miller. Her work from the period – totalling over 2000 photos, contact sheets and negatives – is nothing short of miraculous in its beautiful artistry and unspeakable poignance.
There is more to her life than I would ever be able to do justice to in this one article. Her experiences in war – while significant – are only one aspect of a woman whose life included travelling around Egypt; a battle with addiction; studying with Man Ray; befriending Picasso; and mothering a child. She is an inspiration, and one I have only grown fonder of even as I squabble with her complicated biography in writing this piece. For the kaleidoscope of Miller is truly never ending, one layer leading to the reveal of another, until all that is left is awe.
This article presents the argument that the Dogme 95 cinema movement can be effectively repurposed to assist in the curation of exhibitions.
(The ideas of Debord apply)
1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).
An exhibition must occur in its most simplistic form, with no information or outside influence on the art exhibited — the art itself must be the information. If an audience cannot extract meaning, then the meaning is not for them.
2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.)
If music is to be used, it must be produced live. To use reproduced music is to allow for consumerism (however little) to infiltrate the exhibition space, which must be free of such. Diegetic sound also allows for a greater meaning to be taken by the audience.
3. The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted.
Art has moved past the point of painting. To paint means to be immobile in a mobile age, and to do this means to be removed from action. Art must be kinetic, and engendering a thereby kinetic relationship with an audience allows for more meaning in art.
4. The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.)
Again we must view painting as an outdated form of expression: in an age when artificial intelligence has overtaken the strength of Degas, we must question the power of even the post-impressionists in creating emotion for an audience. On this point, we must also discuss the role of traditional galleries in this proposed movement.
Art occurs for the enjoyment (or irritation) of the general public – a medium through which they can gain Instagram likes, or gain views on TikTok. The gallery model facilitates this through shameless promotion and capitalist intent. As previously stated, capitalism must be removed from art for true meaning to be created. For example, the Tate Modern is supported by billionaire art collectors who disguise themselves as patrons: its collections are committed to being exhibited at the will of a greed-driven individual. This is not without a resultant damage to the art’s meaning.
5. Optical work and filters are forbidden.
Whilst art can be seen as an escape from the grim reality of life, it must (as this manifesto posits) stay authentic and political to retain meaning in today’s world. Because of this, art must remain as true to real life as possible. Examples like Joseph Beuys’ Blackboards or protest art can be seen as effective pieces that need no augmentation.
6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)
Of all the rules in the Dogme manifesto, this is the only one which can be disagreed with, as art of the modern day can take forms not seen before, and in a weaponised society, weaponised art can (and in some cases must) take place. The Situationist International and its effect on the May ‘68 protests through the form of violent art disprove the argument that art must be void of superficial action. If an artist wishes to sacrifice themselves for art, this must be allowed to happen.
7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.)
Art is current, art is now.
8. Genre movies are not acceptable.
We are at a point at which art has become generalised, and therefore genre must be transcended by art. We have reached a point similar to that of the French New Wave, and it may be perceived that ‘a certain tendency’ of art is being perpetuated once more: a familiar roundabout of mainstream art being produced. In short, it is time for change. The world is generalised, art cannot be too.
9. The director must not be credited.
Consumerism creates celebrity, and celebrity destroys art in its elevation of an individual above their work. The work is paramount as it is the work that carries meaning; the artist is merely a vessel of ideas, and therefore needs no accreditation.
In an exhibition, the viewer must be given the art without distraction: celebrity is a distraction from real life, and a distraction from real life allows for real life to be destroyed by others.
ART > ARTIST
ASIDE: STAR CURATORS
As is the case with celebrity artists, curators must also fall by the wayside when it comes to the importance of art in a modern society.
Whilst it could be argued that some artists exist as art themselves (Gilbert and George etc.), celebrity still undermines art, and to exist as a celebrity is a false existence.
EDIT:
An overarching rule that must apply to all exhibiting of art is that it must be in a constant state of flux, as the past does not exist anymore. Art must now exist in the present and in the future.
Static art does not matter.
Static art is past and not future. By this, we mean that the time in which static art had meaning is in the past.
In a constantly active society (for better or worse) art must be alive.
In a world in which we are condemned to a single model of humanity, we must establish a way of creating separate forms.
Museums are antiquity, galleries are unrelieved, and there must be a change in the established method.
All art must be alive, all art must be in Fluxus, all art must reflect humanity.
The time for oils and paints has passed, the time for action has arrived.
Image Credit: Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys Coyote 2011, Large Glass.
Alan Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell, is unique in his bibliography, qualitatively and, if you like, quantitatively, in some compelling but confusing ways. His novels have tended to be huge six-hundred-or-so page tomes, large-scale state of the nation works which announce themselves formally and sometimes explicitly to be the inheritors of the Jane Austen and Henry James type of social novel. The Spell, on the other hand, barely makes it over the two-hundred page mark, and lacks the expansive social vision and criticism that his other novels are able to offer.
The novel is described on the blurb as a “comedy of sexual manners”, and the placement of those terms is more revealing than it might seem. At points in the novel I wondered if it perhaps could do with being inverted: “a sexual comedy of manners”; I occasionally felt as though the novel represented something that maybe could have been a sexless comedy of manners, but which had had sex smothered onto it, resulting in a sort of neutral, traditional comedy of manners rendered sexual by Hollinghurst’s desire to just do so. But I think the description is in general more accurate, as the “sexual manners” the novel deals with are, themselves, indeed comedic, and a source of comedy. So, in a way it’s the inverse of my first thought: it’s not a comedic novel rendered sexual, but rather a sexual novel that can’t help coming across as comedic.
The Spell is a more or less plotless affair, a pseudo-modernist carousel of narratives which focalise, revolvingly, on the perspectives of each of a set of four gay men, whose sex lives are intertwined beyond belief, twisted into a Gordian knot of desire that binds itself up even across implicit family lines. The sexual extremities on display here, and the neutrality with which they’re described, seem to amount to (to borrow the novel’s term slightly) a transvaluation of all sexual values, and in this regard the novel brings to mind the works of Jean Genet, in particular his Our Lady of the Flowers, to me at least.
And it’s interesting that it does so, seeing as it resembles a piece of Genet-inclining modernist prose fiction. But it does so only in a limited way. I suppose the novel resembles Genet in a world where, instead of spending years in prison for homosexuality, Genet had gone to boarding school and then got two degrees from Oxford. This is a pretty colloquial phrasing of what I do in fact take to be the novel’s problem. In The Spell, Hollinghurst appears to have tried his hand at writing an airy, elusive, plotless circuit of intermingling sexual psychologies; but this kind of narrative can only succeed if the writer is genuinely willing to relinquish an insistence upon facts and details, actual and mental, to allow the novel, which he wants to be evocative, to actually evoke. Let me explain.
*
The kind of novel that Hollinghurst intended to write with The Spell only really works by being slightly elusive and unclear. But Hollinghurst can’t seem to shake off his formal affinity with the Victorian and Edwardian novelists: I mean, he did write his MA thesis on the novels of Forster, Firbank and Hartley. Perhaps this novel would have succeeded more if Hollinghurst were able to stop describing his characters’ every thought with a level of self-evaluation and insight that, if they actually had at the time of the events the novel describes, they may not have acted this way and produced the plot the descriptions are describing.
I mean, just look at the state of this sentence: “Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted.” This is the kind of sentence the modernists with whom The Spell is implying an affinity would never write; can you imagine Jean Genet, Woolf, Mansfield, writing something like that? Sentences like this, which are constant in the novel, imply a razor-sharp awareness and ability to monitor all the thoughts and feelings that stream through a character’s mind – an awareness that people just don’t have in real life, and which, looking at the actual plot of the novel, the characters certainly don’t have, either. Moreover, this kind of penetrative, retroactive psychological insight is not conducive to the success of the kind of novel that The Spell is striving to be. Those kinds of novels work by exploiting the evocative, richly sensual, the whiff of the unconscious occasionally finding its way to the surface, for instance. I guess what I mean is: a novel can’t be this plotless and unbelievable whilst also maintaining an Edwardian, Bennett-esque focus on the details, the events, of real life and the mind.
Here’s a comparison by examples. Consider this extract from Our Lady of the Flowers:
“Now, as there was no bathtub in Darling’s home, he used to be dipped into a wash basin. Today, or some other day, though it seems to me today, while he was sleeping, he dreamed that he was entering a wash basin. He isn’t, of course, able to analyze himself, nor would he dream of trying to, but he is sensitive to the tricks of fate, and to the tricks of the theatre of fear. When Divine answers, “I’m doing the wash basin,” he thinks she is saying it to mean “I’m playing at being the wash basin,” as if she were “doing” a role. (She might have said: “I’m doing a locomotive.”) He suddenly gets an erection from the feeling that he has penetrated Divine in a dream. In his dream he penetrates the Divine of the dream of Divine, and he possesses her, as it were, in a spiritual debauch, And the following phrases come into his mind: “To the heart, to the hilt, right to the balls, right in the throat.””
This is one extract which actually bears some likeness, content-wise, with The Spell, but obviously is different in ways; ways that make it succeed. There is, I admit, a suggestion of genuine self-awareness (“he thinks she is saying it to mean […]”), but it of course ultimately falls, in favour of an obscuring, evocative stream of little psychic convulsions which imply rather than state the psycho-sexual state of affairs. Of course, to be fair, Our Lady of the Flowers is a first-person account, and the minds of the characters it describes obviously can’t reasonably be entirely traced by the limited narrational capacity of Jean; whereas the free-indirect-discourse of The Spell nominally allows for the narrator to know everything about its character’s motivations. But firstly, novels of this sort blur the lines between these distinct modes of narration anyway, and moreover, Hollinghurst actually remains probably just as present in the narration as Jean does in the Genet. And the very fact of that difference is part of The Spell’s unsuccessful attempts to adopt a precise formal mode – one that allows for the plotless narrative circle it wants to be. Here is Hollinghurst in The Spell describing a comparable psychological moment:
“One simple possibility for today was to give Terry a ring, but he [Justin] rejected it with a clear sense of tactics. He mustn’t give Robin any new occasion for his old grievances, and Terry’s discretion was still untested. He took a mug of tea through to the sitting-room and then remembered that there were some photographs of Danny in the little commode. He kept forgetting that he fancied him now as well.”
In both of these extracts, Genet and Hollinghurst are basically attempting to describe men absent-mindedly considering sex. But in the Genet, although the narration is of course much more imprecise, we nonetheless get a much more emphatic understanding of Darling’s character-essence. Whereas in the Hollinghurst, every single quivering of psychological motive is aired by the narrator. And let’s face it. There’s nothing more unsexy than having attention drawn to all your actual thoughts. Simply stated, everything may work in some novels, but not in a novel which strives to be airy and impressionistic, and especially not in one which allies itself with the queerly modernist aesthetic. Not to be basic, but I can’t help recalling these words from Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”:
“I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatsoever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character ? And they said, ” Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe -” But I cried, ” Stop ! Stop !” […]”
Woolf is, unsurprisingly, right; and Hollinghurst, striving to emulate the style of the queer modernists, ought to remember that there was a reason “modernism” felt a need to supplant the Arnold Bennetts of the world in the first place. The extreme nature of the psychological self-awareness in The Spell is completely dissonant with the seemingly unmotivated randomness of the events which form the threadbare plot of the novel. The narration implicitly claims and enjoys a staggering insight into the thoughts and motivations of the characters; and yet if all this was, in fact, actually available to the foursome of characters in the novel, they would, I’m sure, have acted differently. Couple Robin and Justin both independently sleeping with the much younger rent boy lover of Robin’s own son, for instance, was a quasi-incestuous moment that makes one question what the use of these layers and layers of psychological detail exactly is.
Still, to be fair to Hollinghurst, this seems to be the novel that he had to write, quite early in his career, in order to get out of his system everything that would have otherwise stood in the way of the brilliance of his later novels such as The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. And as well, it’s worth putting the novel in its proper context. One of Hollinghurst’s intentions, I think, has always been to properly render gay psychology to make it seem normal to a general reading public. The Spell was released in 1998, and I guess at this time a novel which attends to and presents the psychology of the gays was likely worth having around. So this novel isn’t really as major an outlier amongst Hollinghurst’s bibliography as I had assumed. It’s more like a typical Hollinghurst novel which couldn’t help but fall under the spell of the modernists; and as for the characters, the spell of an attractive external influence can be difficult to resist.
There’s a wonderful quotation I chanced upon recently in George Eliot’s Silas Marner – itself a novel so well informed by superstition and the supernatural. It goes: ‘Before such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more distinctly felt – like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny air.’ It seems to me that this is the force that fills the sails of good horror. Like the small itch of a splinter between your toes, or in film terms, the almost imperceptible cant of a camera lens, there should exist an unease, barely there but present enough to unsettle you gradually. This is the agitated and wrinkled sheet on which the real time body horrors lie.
Susan Hill’s 1983 gothic horror novel, The Woman in Black, has borne two cinematic adaptations. Doubtless, most have heard of James Watkins’ 2012 version (starring Daniel Radcliffe), but I suspect Herbert Wise’s 1989 feature leans lonely against the shaded edge of our film shelves – even so, I must remember that I speak for a certain generation. In broad strokes, the films take markedly different approaches in their realisation of Hill’s novel on the screen. Wise’s Woman in Black is much more faithful to its source text, save his strange alteration of Arthur Kipps’ surname to ‘Kidd’, and the fashion of his family’s death; he leaves the meat of the original plot unspoiled. Watkins instead kills Kipps’ wife before the film has even begun, and donates much more of the film’s minutes to the circumstances of the children’s deaths in Crythin Gifford which are treated in more mysterious terms in Hill’s novel. Though I am very fond of the novel, I won’t pedestal it as some god-breathed scripture that must be followed to a T.
What interests me more are the directors’ treatment of that heap of a house – Eel Marsh House. We must consider not only the fact of the setting, but also the framing of the setting. The Drablow estate, set isolated across a marshy causeway suffocated by ‘sea threats’, is a great invention of horror. In Watkins’ 2012 adaptation, we see it first from high angle shots – it’s a black and brown tangle of trees and rocky outcrops, a kind of unspectacular Mont-Saint-Michel. It’s obscure and dark, very dark. The geography of the ‘island’ I’ve noticed doesn’t actually add up when we arrive at the house on ground level. Whether this is an intentional move from Watkins, I’m not sure. The estate grounds bear all the hallmarks of high gothic horror, with gnarled gravestones, trees antlered with dead branches appearing as grey phantoms, and carpets of smothering moss and ivy covering every unbreathing surface. A bluish grey filter sits on the lens throughout. The gothic catalogue is well read, maybe too well read.
Herbert Wise approaches the site with much more austerity, open space, and bigger skies. Eel Marsh House’s surroundings are unwooded, bare, and unsettlingly unfilled, except for the romantic ruin of a chapel arch which appears also on the cover of the first edition of Hill’s novel. This is the most notable difference in terms of the Eel Marsh grounds. To return to our initial assessment of ‘good horror’ prompted by the Eliot quotation, it’s the 1989 version that best exemplifies this undercurrent of edge. Let it be said, the scenery of the Drablow estate in Watkins’ film is uncomfortable, but it’s comfortably uncomfortable – for me it’s too explicit in its presentation, too direct. Its effects are overground, like a wind slapping against your cheek, whereas with Wise’s Woman in Black we feel more the unsteady shift of soil beneath our feet.
Now to the house itself. In the Radcliffe film, much like it’s outside, the inside of the house is in a state of complete disrepair (seemingly abandoned for decades), with Satis house-esque shivering cobwebs and burnt-down candlesticks. An infinitely long corridor on the first floor is unsurprisingly exploited in several POV push shots. The camera, I should say, behaves unsubtly in Watkins’ Eel Marsh House. It too often frames Radcliffe in the corner of the frame, demanding us to look elsewhere in the shot, and ‘shockingly’ discover the blurred shape of Jennet Humfrye, the woman in black, against a far away wall. The camera also appropriates the perspective of Humfrye too regularly so that the effect is rendered less and less potent in each instance. Here, the camera gymnastics often distract from the subject, creating a self-awareness, reminding us we are watching pixels on a screen in our sitting room.
There’s a theme here, if you hadn’t gathered. In Wise’s adaptation, the interior of Eel Marsh house is intact and lived in (Alice Drablow had only died a week prior to Kidds’ visit). There is even electricity, as in the novel, and few dark corners for phantoms to lurk. The electrical aspect of the house is used brilliantly. In an outhouse, a panting generator eerily sounds out through the house’s tight corridors. One of the most striking moments of the film occurs when the faulty generator is revived, and all the lights of the house are restored. In this exterior shot, the house again becomes uncannily alive. Wise’s film doesn’t rely on dark corners for the dark deeds of his woman in black. The lens, as though afraid, often shrinks back from the Jennet Humfrye rather than possess her.
Herbert Wise’s Woman in Black is the better of the two. For want of more coherent expression, it’s better to have uneasy easiness than easy uneasiness on the screen.
La Baie D’Yffiniac – Saint-Brieuc (George Charles Robin, 1903 - 2003)
By Harry Laventure
Of late (and wherefore I know not), the grand movements of art history have found new determinisms. In this epoch of images, we the pedestrians have more exposure than ever before to any piece of art we desire. The dosage we receive is no longer at the behest or prescription of authenticated scholars, nor does it come with labels attached. Indeed, it is no stretch to say that our eyes can outrun the footfall of any Grand Tourist of old within moments. As such, the established nomenclature for movements of art have lost their gravitas, and we are more often – without further, deliberate investigation – to make our minds of what we see without clues. As such, large strokes of Baroque, Renaissance, and Mannerist art becomes “Italian, religious art”. Post-war abstract expressionists are the “my-children-could-do-thats”. Perhaps the cruellest public treatment has come to the Impressionists and their immediate successors. Victims of their own vanquishing, they are the “chocolate box artists”; the postcard landscapes; the wallpaper poltergeists.
From this clientele, there remains no doubt an ostentation of mellifluously French names in the vocabulary of the everyman: Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh (perhaps less French). Those who made totems of waterlilies, umbrellas, apples, and sunflowers have been rewarded with a lasting fame, fresh to the market and gallery alike. Among these heavyweights, one name you may not be so familiar with is Georges Charles Robin. Having spent a week in the company of his oeuvre, I’d like to present his case.
Georges Charles Robin (“row-ban” rather than the red-breasted variety) was born in Paris, 1903. Although little is known of his early life and artistic education, his natural gift is unmistakable: Robin began as scenery artist for the Charleville Theatre, and the Dinan Casino. In his lifetime as an artist proper, however, his canvas would play host to several locations that were luminaries of his living arrangements. Among them, Rueil Malmaison’s more salubrious panoramas, Morlaix’s summer blooms, and the rivulets that etch the contours of the Loire Valley and the Dordogne region. More often championed for his rural than urban works, there is no pomposity or material opulence to his corpus: it was serenity rather than salon that formed his locus amoenus, and his delicate muses are to be found in the ornately rustic realm. Robin would live to his hundredth year, having become a member of innumerable French artistic societies, officer of the Académie des Beaux Arts, director of the Institute of “Instruction Publique”, and been decorated by the Hors Concours amidst countless other French art awards. In spite of this remarkable bundle of ribbons and statistics, Robin continues to be widely absent from the history books, and by extension the public memory.
It is perhaps, after all, too easy for a man of subtlety to be lost in the parade of caricatures and radicals that preceded him. Indeed, one interesting thing about the repurposing of the Impressionist sunset for the tablecloth is the newfound quietude. Synchronically, we cannot understand the movement as anything less than an artistic equivalent of violent revolution. The late 19th/early 20th century assault in all its anti-classical insouciance was one of style and sentiment. As the art world’s establishments wept for the death of academicism in a few swift splodges of colour against total realism, new precedents were set by artists of immense impact devoid of certification. Principles of belonging as imposters have governed the art world since. And yet, if careless, one can break free from prison to find himself unemployed. Inheriting this debris, the sensible man asks what should be done, rather than what could be done. As one who was forged in this particular bain-marie, that is precisely what Robin did.
And how we may read it on the canvas. Take his Bords du Loir, a delightfully tranquil scene: as we look up from the crystalline, stilled embrace of a river, speckles of figures bumble across an arched stone bridge, towards a cluster of sun-breathed buildings. Cypresses line the riverbank like emerald quills, and a bouquet of soft blues tangle with ivory clouds above. A rowing boat lays matchstick-like at the edge of the water, without an oarsman – perhaps they too have stopped to watch? There is nothing bombastic about the painting. On the contrary, the gentle dynamism of the brushwork makes shimmers of the scene, as if the most delicate of breezes would leave the canvas and its cast tremulous. This is no outlier – the very same is observable in my personal favourite, L’Eglise de Montrozier sur L’Aveyron. An altogether similar arrangement, but an opportunity to note his alacrity for tremors in the dust path we walk along to church, and survey Robin’s capacity for reflection in a stream that is neither too exact as to be false, nor murky to be unfaithful. His Impressionist forefathers found the limits of what could reasonably be done on a canvas in an anti-traditional fashion. Robin, however, refines the achievements of these predecessors rather than continuing their experiments.
In no facet of his work is this more blatant than in his attitudes to palette. Firstly, if one takes numerous Monet or Pissarro works, there is a deliberate lean towards the psychedelic in normal subject matter. Whether in a congregation of flowers from the gardens of Giverny or a nocturnal Parisian street scene, there is a hunt for a kind of pyrotechnics in paint on the canvas. Likewise in Robin’s contemporaries Pierre Montézin and Edouard Cortès, fireworks of pinks and blues pollinate every pore of the picture, resulting in kaleidoscopic spectra in subjects as ostensibly simple as stacks of hay. Contrast this with the restrained palette of Robin’s paintings above, and you gain efficient insight into his mentality. As expert Anthony Fuller of Gladwell & Patterson’s Gallery puts it, ‘the juxtaposition of each colour softens them, and they have a quiet richness’. The precise colours of a moment are each fragmented into shades that differ with such minute playfulness as to leave every atomic subcategory as individual notes within grand chords. The resultant cadence is profound in a way that rewards rather than grapples your focus.
Further still, as a variation on the theme, the likes of Hassam and Suzor-Coté were castigated for their use of colours that had a fidelity to the ‘impression’ of a scene, if not its true likeness. This is most notorious in the manner that indigos and violets cling to their snow scenes: whilst it is perhaps true that the cocktail of sunlight and glacial blue renders a purple sensation for the viewer, this does not change the true colour of each constituent parts. (There is a lingering debate on truth, imitation, and likeness which I do not have room to sink my paws into here, perhaps another time). Robin, on the other hand, does not have to ‘adopt’ colours to fit a scene – they are the shades indigenous to a given subject. Nowhere is this more obvious than in La Seine à Bougival, Le Soir. Bruising is reserved for the sky, and flour white for the snow. All is coherent, none is superimposed. A cunning and useful symbol: amidst all the fog of this wintery nocturne, every vague angle of the composition draws our eyes to the path ahead and the peppery figures opposite who walk towards us, arm in arm. Each Robin requires the sincere attention to surroundings that one enjoys on a nightly stroll. He does not demand your eyes, but a glance is a tip of the hat. To indulge them proper is to participate – that is your choice.
This subtlety, and the humble worship of that nature which has been documented for centuries, devoid of grandiosity or party tricks, is Robin’s greatest success. A rare sincerity reserved for the too oft ignored in the everyday. Alas, it is also probably the reason why you haven’t heard of him.
This week just gone, I had the privilege of helping Gladwell & Patterson set up their new gallery in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Part of this privilege was unadulterated time to chew the cud on all things Robin with Anthony, son of Herbert Fuller, the man who discovered him. Anthony is as joyous as he is erudite on Robin, and he patiently endured a barrage of questions from me – for this I will always be grateful. Moreover, he enjoys a masterfully intimate command of the technicalities involved therein, and can reanimate the artistic mechanics behind each piece with accuracy far beyond these little jottings of mine. Anthony has long insisted that Georges Charles Robin is an artist of tomorrow. I happen to agree.
Since Covid, the art market has seen an unprecedented shift towards Post-War, Modern, and Contemporary movements, which last year accounted for 77% of sales (by value) within auction houses. Beyond the pomp and gimmick of shredding frames and falling buckets of sand, may we hope to relearn the art of looking without the need for active stimulation. When we do, sincerity will await us like a bit of peace and quiet after a tube ride. Free from chocolate box prints, and dusted off for due attention, Georges Charles Robin will be there.
‘I have a horrible feeling that I’m a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.’ – FLEABAG.
“Where’d you just go?” – HOT PRIEST. At the heart of Fleabag’s awkward sex scenes, off-hand quips, and family rifts lies this most important question: “Where” is Fleabag going? Often described as a ‘tour-de-force’, the fever and frenzy of Fleabag lies in the show’s refusal ever to stop. Fleabag narrates her own life whilst the action around her continues, rapidly focusing in and out of these two spaces, hanging between the balance of the two. But this constant momentum never falters or halts, seemingly in perpetual pursuit of whichever destination Fleabag is aiming for, regardless of the chaos surrounding the tracks. The confessions of Fleabag still echo – confessions we have taken to be ‘honest’, ‘feminist’ windows of clarity about ourselves, about womanhood under the strain of the 21st century. But, what if Fleabag never tried to “go” to us in these moments of fourth-wall fragmentation? What if we were not just spectators, but Fleabag’s new best friend, or Fleabag’s psyche? Fleabag doesn’t define our role, our role is irrelevant; our connection to Fleabag is the destination.
Bertold Brecht redefined the role of the audience under his pioneering theory of ‘epic theatre’ isolating the audience and manipulating the tether between audience and actor. There is no set power. No set control. In one scene the audience is held by a leash only to be holding the leash over the actors the next. The audience’s perception and jolting of the stage allows for art to be transformed, making it “not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”. Fleabag’s first televised word is “you”; Fleabag effortlessly seizes you, hurtling you along with her. I have yet to find someone who wants her to let go, who finds her immediate intensity overwhelming. The connection we create with her by becoming “you” is non-confrontational and seemingly natural. We are “you”. But who is “you”? “You” is deictic and cannot exist outside of the context Fleabag has placed it in, thus redefining the audience, not as spectators of her so much, but also spectators of ourselves and how we draw these connections with others. “You” is a role waiting to be filled, reflecting Fleabag’s loneliness, but also the show’s examination of connections. We are an undefined role to her. We don’t exist to her outside the ramblings of her mind. We aren’t her confidants. We aren’t her attempt of rationalising her behaviour through finding a common, shared experience of “you”. We are the glance she gives in the mirror, the raised eyebrows we give when eye contact flits to another. We are figments of her perception and an example of the very extremes of connections.
“I am obsessed with audiences,” confesses Waller-Bridge in her introduction to the play’s script. The audience isn’t trying to be won, bought, or rationalised by Fleabag – our connection with her exists out of a compulsion to distract and input. The original play reads like the fumbling mind palace of post-embarrassment realisation, provoked by flashing a loan manager. Whilst there is no explicit direction to suggest this, the play is split into thirds: meeting the manager, acting as a descent into Fleabag’s mind with the manager just being a voice we hear and process; Fleabag’s inner monologue where time seems to stop as we enter her hysteria; resuming and returning to the manager and the blur between monologue and naturalism. The middle part, which is the main part, is a dialogue with herself where she is frantically self-criticising and searching for the right answer, getting lost in her memories along the way, where she distracts herself from the situation at hand with macabre intrusions.
My attempt at watching Fleabag aged 16 threw me into a spiral of over-analysis. Who was I meant to be connecting with during the dialogue? Where is Fleabag going and where do I break? My countless rewatches of the show couldn’t answer it. With every run I found myself addressing different people and changing the levels of connection I held with the audience, loosening the leash on a line before clinging onto it for dear life the next. There is no clear consistency; you, Fleabag, must decide what information is going to directly connect to the front row. Waller-Bridge wrote a script that rigorously demands you to perceive yourself through connection. The play cannot function without the understanding of it. The realisation is she is not speaking to us, but herself, addressing us as a distraction from the mess and trying to realise which response to her life will make the best connection in order to move forward. In the same way that we can’t make eye contact when stressed, feel the need to fiddle when anxious, or fidget when bored, Fleabag speaks as a way to distract herself. Her mind is boiling over, and we are her thought process and intrusive comments, before choosing to turn the heat off or scream. We are the distraction taking her out of the constant momentum of her life, allowing her to live in her head and her body. We are both being taught by Brechtian whispers about our connections and are being used, obsessionally, by Waller-Bridge’s hunger for extreme connectivity.
“I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it” confesses Fleabag, almost immediately after showing us a racy night of anal sex whilst meeting us for the first time. If Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s intention for Fleabag to explore “power, control, people trying to hold everything together”, is to be realised, this is achieved through Fleabag’s connection with us, and with sex.
FLEABAG -I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.
Her confession epitomises the experience of operating in extremes. Clinging on to sex, people, whatever, obsessively, acts as a way to find a calling. An honest distraction, a pause, in her life. The sex is complicated, hot, raw, confusing, tender, and tangled much like her connection with us. The hunt for sex is often seen as a game, a mission. Take Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. “Let us sport as we may” for the victory of pleasure. Pleasure that is won through an art of persuasion and flirting, a series of steps and follies to achieve, a game we’ve knowingly played for millennia. For Fleabag, sex is the final destination, acting as her “someone to tell me” when she has no one.
Fleabag operates in extremes; extreme honesty, extreme connection, the extremes of sex. Fleabag goes from sex as a constant distraction, to celibacy. After a night that left me a confusion of anger, grief, loneliness and fear, I took the same vow, albeit brief. Abstinence, however, cannot miraculously solve everything, and once sex enters your life, it is difficult to get it to leave; that part of yourself grows into a nagging obsession but in a new unrecognisable form of relationship. Celibacy acts as a stopgap for this higher calling Fleabag craves, as it comes with its own rules, regulations, and restraints. A primal direction, like intrusive thinking to the point of dissociation or mindless shagging, to keep you in line. But, for Fleabag, as for me, this change is still a distraction. She repeatedly turns to us, gushing over “his [HP’s] arms” on the way to a Quaker meeting. We are her distraction, her loophole, so that she can explore a new connection, whilst retaining the habits of old connections. We aren’t the connection with a being outside of herself that can “tell [her] how to live her life”, as we are part of her life.
Despite the distraction of sex, Fleabag continues to talk to us during it. The connection is stifled, unable to reach its full potential causing her to connect elsewhere. When Fleabag finally has sex with Hot Priest she doesn’t want to be distracted. She doesn’t want us, actively pushing us away, shutting the door on us as if we’ve walked in. A new, full connection has been formed. One that she wants to wholly cherish and not leave. One she wants to be completely present for. Slowly, we see her cutaways become less frequent during scenes featuring the two of them. She is letting us go, she is not letting her perception and the intrusions of her mind limit her. The connection with us is re-evaluated towards the end of series two, and we see her relationship and use of us change. She isn’t moving on from hijacking us into being her therapist, because we never were that to her, she is choosing to be present, to make lasting connections, and to stop making the most lasting connection and presence in her life the way she responds to life outside of herself. The context of her “you” has changed; we still exist to observe her, but we are no longer invited into the inner sanctum of her mind. To escape the distraction of self-dependence. To teach us to live presently. To “shape” the way we perceive ourselves and our love.
Image from the National Theatre 2019 production poster at Wyndham’s Theatre, London
The diabolical exploitation of the Menéndez brothers.
Robin Reinders
Lyle Menéndez (left) and Erik Menéndez (right) during their highly publicised trial. / Associated Press
‘Violence is never an answer, never a solution, and is always tragic. As such, I hope it is never forgotten that violence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamour and rarely exposed until tragedy penetrates everyone involved.’ — Erik Menéndez in response to Monsters
If you are not familiar with the Menéndez brothers, I simultaneously feel very sorry for and very envious of you. The 1989 murder case of wealthy entertainment tycoon Jose Menéndez and his wife Kitty, fatally shot in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion, may predate bite-sized TikTok rundowns, long-winded docuseries and ‘white woman true crime podcasts’. But by no means could the trial of the brothers responsible be described as anything other than a media circus—one that dominated the televisions and tabloids of the early nineties and turned suffering into spectacle, their tragedy into tableau. Nearly thirty-five years have passed, though the echoes of that anguish refuse to fade.
The public’s fetish for this case — and discourse surrounding the brothers’ defence that they were sexually abused by their father — are once again brought into controversial conversation with Ryan Murphy’s newest instalment of Monsters. This is not the place for learning about the idiosyncrasies of the Menéndez brothers’ crime; this is a place solely dedicated to the scrutinisation of the heinous and invented story Ryan Murphy so bumptiously tells. It is a place for examining the wounds he has reopened and unpacking why this spurious and irresponsible distortion of the truth matters. In August of 1989, Lyle and Erik Menéndez, twenty-one and eighteen respectively, shot and killed their father and mother. It is crucial before watching and digesting the fiction of this programme you understand why. In 2005, Erik Menéndez would tell People magazine: ‘It’s as if there was kerosene all over the floor that a match could light at any time. And my soul was burnt to death. The way I reacted was so destructive to all. It was the most awful devastation.’
Cooper Koch (left) as Erik Menéndez and Nicholas Alexander Chavez (right) as Lyle Menéndez. / Netflix
I’ll come clean and admit to being borderline ecstatic when I heard there was a new series about the Menéndez brothers coming out. It’s a case that sits very close to my heart, and affects me to a degree no fictional tragedy could ever hope to inspire. But I was less so after seeing it was produced by Netflix, even less upon learning it would be spearheaded by Ryan Murphy and the next instalment in his ‘true crime’ franchise. Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menéndez Story. Shuddersome. I understand the title is meant to be ambiguous, a possible subversion of itself depending on what side of the fence you happen to sit on. The implication is still there; it’s still not right to even suggest these two men could stand on the same level as Jeffrey Dahmer.
And this is where the cruel exploitation of Lyle and Erik Menéndez begins. Murphy takes off running from here and never seems to stop. There are a great many issues I take with this series, but I do believe its mindful and mannerly to mention the brilliant acting by breakout stars Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez, poignant score by Thomas Newman paired with a captivating soundtrack that has reintroduced an entire generation to Milli Vanilli, and outstanding cinematics achieved by a talented team. It is a well-crafted and engrossing show; I will not shy away from admitting to that. Any fond remarks I may have about this series now come to an abrupt halt.
Erik Menéndez takes the stand in 1993. / CourtTV
I boast no behavioural psychology qualification save the common high school course. Nor do I intend to imply that having an interest in true crime—no matter how intense—grants me any authority to make sound claims about the truth of this trauma. Still, I find it impossible not to mention the presence and manner of the Menéndez brothers in court; how their disposition and the details of their demeanour during their testimonies add nuance and colour to the words that come stuttering, hesitant and embarrassed, from behind their teeth. Though the pain and trauma these two men suffered throughout their childhoods is, I do believe it’s fair to say, nearly their entire defence case, there is an astonishing and noticeable lack of self-pity in their statements. The physical and sexual torture they were subjected to is presented to the jury by the defendants with the same straightforward candour a twelve-year-old boy may explain his process of long-division to a tutor. Step-by-step. ‘That’s just the way it goes, see?’ When there are tears, put them under a microscope. You will find no ‘poor me’s, no crocodile victimhood, only their wretched, childlike frustration at not being able to spit out the words they need to say. ‘My dad…my dad…my dad…’ is how Erik Menéndez begins when questioned by his defence attorney Leslie Abramson: ‘What do you believe was the originating cause of you and your brother … shooting your parents?’ It takes him minutes of frustrated brow-furrowing, aborted sentences, hard stares at his lap while he tries to get his tears and his breathing under control. There are shaky sighs and sharp exhalations blown into the microphone—too close, the pops filling the courtroom. He pulls his mouth, desperate to school his expression. This lasts for fifty-five excruciating seconds. ‘It was you telling Lyle what?’ Abramson prompts. He looks physically ill as he finally forces out the full sentence: ‘That my dad had been molesting me.’ The mic captures a sharp inhale as the defendant’s face twists in embarrassed agony. There is no vaunting present. This is not something spoken lightly, with an air of ‘Look, see?’ Erik Menéndez chokes these words out, his voice saturated with defeat and shame. To be eighteen, feeling smaller than nothing as you tell this to your big brother. To be twenty-three, even smaller as you admit this to a courtroom full of strangers, a camera crew, the whole world. Can you imagine?
Lyle Menéndez at trial. / Getty Images
This older brother Erik Menéndez confides in is hardly present in Murphy’s rendering. There are crucial facets of Lyle Menéndez’s personality he miserably fails to show. Take, for instance, his considerable emotional connection to soft toys. Lyle considered them family: ‘They made me feel safer,’ he would go on to testify, ‘Especially early on, but really all the way through my teenage years, sometimes they got me through the day.’ He took them to high school. When Erik would orphan his stuffed animals, having grown out of them, Lyle would take them in. He would impose different traits, roles, temperaments onto them, crafting highly complex hierarchies and social orders. Dr. Jon Conte, a psychologist specialising in child abuse and who worked with Lyle Menéndez during his time in jail, would remark of this behaviour: ‘In a way that I’ve never heard from another victim, he … was doing play therapy. When we see traumatised kids, we often ask them to act out with [toys] their bad experiences. The difference between Lyle’s [playing] and play therapy is that there was no therapist there to help guide the process.’ It is difficult to reconcile this Lyle Menéndez with Murphy’s brash, Janus-faced caricature, prone to violent threats and bratty outbursts.
Emerging talent Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Lyle Menéndez. / Netflix
Chavez’s disarming and ill-tempered Lyle swears at ticket agents, frightens children on Halloween, punctuates his immature shouting with wild gestures, banging on tables and slamming doors. Murphy even goes so far as to imply this awful imitation of Lyle is capable of deceiving the ‘audience’ of the jury, of putting on a performance of pain and misery so as to elicit profound, falsely-rooted sympathy. It is vile. Today, Erik Menéndez continues to fight on behalf of his brother, still defends him. In direct response to Murphy’s loud, violent, near bipolar portrayal of Lyle, he had this to say:
‘I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show. I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.’
A rare and raw moment of brotherhood Murphy delivers. / Netflix
We now arrive at the principal thing I take issue with. The great stain on what I genuinely consider to be an otherwise technical cinematic achievement. Ryan Murphy’s representation of Lyle and Erik Menéndez’s bond is nothing short of repugnant. There are moments where he almost captures it—tender and tearful apology met with easy forgiveness on the bow of a boat, the poignant contrast of Lyle paternally dressing his younger brother for the moment they hear their verdict, still finding ways to take care of him. All things in line with the real, corporal Lyle Menéndez, living and breathing outside of fiction at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. The same Lyle Menéndez who wrote to his brother in 1990 a letter from behind bars, containing the phrase:
‘Never think for a second that I favor someone over my brother.’ / Netflix
But it’s all mangled, distorted, perverted by a sickening, intentional incestuous undertone. Ryan Murphy injects this poison for sheer shock value. This itself existing within the fictive vacuum of the show is nauseating enough to bring up, but when you consider that these are characters born from real people, real brothers, real victims of incestuous abuse still living and suffering today? It is unforgivable, and it inspires true rage.
You see, Lyle Menéndez was out, one could say. He had ended the cycle of sexual abuse between him and his father years prior; he was attending Princeton, he was in a committed relationship, he was on his way to forging a successful, independent life for himself. But when his little brother finally came to him, suicidal and terribly, terribly lost, it all went out the window. And that’s just the way it had to be. Witness of the prosecution and Lyle Menéndez’s former friend Donovan Goodreau would say of Lyle: ‘He takes care of his brother … It’s his biggest concern.’ When questioned by his attorney why he didn’t simply leave his younger brother to handle the situation himself, Lyle responded: ‘I would never say that to him, and he would never expect me to say that.’ When asked for a reason, the answer he provides echoes a sentiment Erik would repeat: ‘Just because we were brothers.’ Erik slept in Lyle’s bedroom that night, eighteen-years-old and terrified. Lyle testified he remained wide awake. He’ll come with me to Princeton, was planned, or I’ll figure out how to transfer to UCLA. There was confidence—misplaced confidence—but to Lyle Menéndez there was only one outcome: Erik would be safe, Erik would feel safe. And this he would make sure of; it didn’t matter how. Before Lyle Menéndez was a student, a partner, a businessman, an athlete and especially a son—before any other label, any other marker of identity, Lyle Menéndez was an older brother.
Erik Menéndez at trial. / Associated Press
And Erik? Well, when asked during trial if he ever considered running away, hiding or fighting extradition in any other manner, Erik Menéndez denied this. When questioned why, the answer was plain: ‘Because I wanted to be back with my brother.’ When presented once more with the question of why that was, he looked baffled, no answer prepared. In what world would any other scenario play out? In what world would any other truth come to pass? In what world would Lyle ever go through this alone? To Erik Menéndez, this question was stupid, undeserving of an answer, undeserving of consideration. This line of questioning was not taken any further.
This is who Erik Menéndez is. As stated by himself, standing behind Lyle was his ‘fixed position’ in life. It’s a core tenant of his identity; a marker of who he is, who he was and who he will always be. If it can be said that above all Lyle Menéndez takes pride and pleasure in his role as a big brother, then Erik Menéndez takes equal honour and comfort in his role as a little brother. ‘Erik Menéndez had always had few friends and fewer confidants, so his brother became, during that stage of his life and thereafter, the one person on earth it felt safe to love’: Leslie Abramson does a marvellous job of communicating to the jury how ardent a bond this is. She delivers its weight, its breadth—the scope and scale of its many nuances and shades of grief. This is a fraternal bond born out of fear and nurtured in an environment of great pain. It is built on a foundation of devotion, loyalty and shared torment. These two men are the only people on earth who will ever be able to entirely grasp what the other languished through. I cannot stress the importance of that enough. At the risk of sounding maudlin, it is the purest form of love I have ever witnessed, even from this great distance.
It is this very reason Ryan Murphy’s abashed exploitation of the Menéndez brothers’ story sends me into potent fury. Murphy sees two attractive young men in close proximity and makes the extraordinarily shallow decision to fetishise it, to suffuse it with surface-level suggestions of underlying brotherly incest, in an attempt to appeal to…whom exactly I can’t even say. If it is not intended to captivate a certain audience, then it must simply exist for equally surface-level shock value. To take a bond such as this and filthily taint it in hopes of a few gasps and shaking heads?
The Menéndez brothers at their preliminary hearing in 1990. / Associated Press
When asked by Barbara Walters on ABC how he would feel should the two be sent to separate prisons, Erik Menéndez responded: ‘There are some things that you cannot take, and there are some things you can endure … With everything taken away, that’s the last thing you can take.’ Following this interview, the two were placed in two separate vans. In Alejandro Hartmann’s documentary The Menéndez Brothers, released earlier this month, Erik reflects on his reaction: ‘I started screaming.’ The brothers spent twenty-two years separated before both were finally placed at Donovan, where they reside today. On being reunited with his brother, Lyle Menéndez would say ‘I felt like it was finally a chance to heal, and I was starting on that day.’
To me and to many, it seemed the situation and circumstance of the Menéndez brothers was utterly, hopelessly lost. The release of this series and the consequences of the case returning to the public mainstream in this fashion only promised devastation. To have the sensationalism and media spectacle that so heavily infringed upon the first trial resurrected? It spelled disaster. To have it centred solely around this new interpretation so far removed from the truth? I couldn’t begin to describe the resentment I felt towards Murphy, Netflix and everyone who sat adjacent to this project. Lyle and Erik Menéndez are still alive and striving for their release; the weight of this programme’s influence cannot be understated.
There is, however, hope to be found in Hartmann’s new documentary The Menéndez Brothers, also bizarrely distributed by Netflix, which worked in direct collaboration with the brothers through extensive audio interviews. It is two hours of accounts, testimony and context; it is verydifficult and very necessary to watch. For it to have been released so soon after Murphy’s farce is vital, ineffably so. I have hope it will instil in this new generation of interested parties a sense of obligation to the truth. I have hope it will counteract any damage Murphy has done to the public’s perception of this case. And I have hope it will prove Erik Menéndez wrong in his sullen belief that he has ‘taken the painful truths several steps backward—back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women.’
