FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Paradise by the TV light
Exceptional documentary challenges viewers' prejudices
Reviewed by D. ChristensenParadise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
Directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky
Friday, April 25 - May 1In West Memphis, Arkansas in the summer of 1993, three eight year old boys were found brutally murdered in a wooded ravine known as Robin Hood Hills. Their bodies had been horribly mutilated, leading investigators to conclude that the children were sacrificed by a satanic cult. But as Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky tell it in their latest documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, the crime was followed by an appalling miscarriage of justice when three teenagers were charged with the murders. After extorting a factually inaccurate confession from a boy with an IQ of 72, the police laid charges against two of his friends based on the evidence that they wore black, listened to Metallica and had dabbled in the Wicca religion.
Berlinger and Sinofsky spent the next nine months following the trials. They got to know the accused, their families and the victims' families. What emerges is a portrait of ignorance, stupidity and vilification. Unlike the filmmakers' earlier film, Brother's Keeper, where the community rallied around the accused, here the local people were all too quick to judge by stereotypes and condemn on the flimsiest of evidence.
But judging based on stereotypes is not an attitude limited to the characters; it also informs how you watch the film. If Paradise Lost had been a fiction film, Berlinger and Sinofsky would have been roasted alive for their depiction of the West Memphis community. The "hickness" in the community is at times overwhelming and it's difficult to watch many of the characters without all the familiar stereotypes creeping into your mind. The Southern writer Dorothy Allison has commented that people from a Southern US background are really one of the last groups against whom it is socially acceptable to express prejudice and she's absolutely right. Getting past the good ol' boy accents in the film to the people themselves takes effort, since it's so easy to buy into the Southern stereotype. Paradise Lost works on many levels, but its most subtle machination is how it confronts the audience with their own prejudices. It makes for a disquieting viewing experience.
The film is also uncomfortable for its portrayal of people's insatiable need to be filmed. Joe Berlinger has said in an interview that he would never allow a documentary film to be made about his problems and it's not hard to see why, especially if that film was made by someone like Berlinger and Sinofsky. Here are a couple of filmmakers who have made a name for themselves covering disturbing and complex murder cases in which individuals have been seemingly railroaded by the community and the justice system. By ferreting out motivations amidst murky circumstances, Berlinger and Sinofsky create complex, ambiguous and mostly unappealing character portraits. No wonder Berlinger is reticent to see his foibles on film - he's aware of how uncompromising the media can be. Most of his subjects aren't so enlightened.
But then, to paraphrase Nicole Kidman in To Die For, you're nobody unless you're on TV, especially in the North America of the 1990s. West Memphis is just the microcosm. And while some people in Paradise Lost do not want the attention, those that do have their five minutes of fame stoked not only by the local media but by Berlinger and Sinofsky as well. The filmmakers, though, are wise enough to point out their complicity, whereas the local media, under the guise of something called objectivity, are shown to remain purposefully ignorant. The willingness not only to concede, but to highlight this complicity is what sets the film apart from merely being journalistic. Subjective and proud of it, Paradise Lost is emotionally honest film making at its best.
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