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Baby Ruby (2022)
Why "horror" and "thriller"? Postpartum depression as a "chilling enterntainment" wtf?
It is so sad and painful to see that they frame this movie as a HORROR and THRILLER, only becasue we see a woman struggling with an early childhood trauma and postpartum depression. This is a cool, realistic movie (with good actors), which makes critical comments on the lack of proper/woman-friendly (mental) healthecare services in the USA, and the lack of societal support to mothers with newborn babies. Even though the protagonist is a high class person seemingly supported by a network of people, the movie shows that despite this newtork there is a lot to do for society to understand and support mothers. But why is this a horror? Even if it is a "horror" for the woman to get through this period, I don't get the concept. Only because the mother has a serious early childhood trauma (her mom died when she was a baby) - why there is a need to make a dangerous madwoman out of her and frame the movie as "horror"?
Crime Scene Berlin: Nightlife Killer (2024)
There was a "motive" - or at least a possible explanation
I don't understand why the makers ignored the testimony of a close relative (aunt) of the killer. She goes in detail about how she noticed once that his own grandmother most likeliy terrorized and sexually abused him from an early age. They were living together for a long time. Then, later on, as a nurse, he probably killed the grandmother, too. Is it not strange to ignore these events - even if they are just possibilities - as a forensic psychiatrist, as a detective and a prosecutor...? Which does not mean they should not sentence him - but they could have given this information to the victims' families. This is a very serious childhood trauma of captivity and abuse at your home, which can absolutely result in being a serial killer. Why ignore it like this?
Outreau: Un cauchemar français (2024)
The oliphant in the room
In this documentary - which is a missed opportunity on a very important topic - there is an oliphant in the room. It is called trauma. In this case, as the documentary shows, everything is about the unability of the juridical narrative to describe/grasp the nature of trauma.
Trauma stirres society and confuses things. The presented juridical narrative desperately tries to rationalize something that is not possible to explain in the given framework of the justice system. The problem is that the documentary doesn't even try to step out of this framework. The regisseurs don't even try to experiment with a different one, which is counscious of the nature of trauma.
When Sigmund Freud discovered in the end of he 19th century how many children - mostly women - were sexually abused in their childhood by their fathers and other male family members, he published his findings as a huge scientific discovery. Hysteria - as they called a certain group of psychosomatic symptons before - was a result of past traumatic events that affected probably thousands of children, and not only in low class families.
Freud was shocked by the idea that this can happen in many families, and shortly after he took his claims back about the nature of hysteria being rooted in sexual abuse. As Judith Herman writes in her excellent book Trauma and healing, besides the personal aspects, it was historically not the right moment for him to undertake this revolutionary unveiling of the nature of structural intrafamilial sexual abuse.
But intrafamilial sexual abuse has remained there with us, it has not disappeared - even if nobody talked about it for a while, except only during the world wars, regarding veterans' mental health. There has been a new (neuro)scientific evolution in trauma-research sinds the 90s. Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman and others explain us how exactly the body keeps the score, containing all the memories of trauma and violence, especially those of early childhood.
They describe how we take the unspeakable with us as a 'parallel' system of memories - part of us being frozen in the past, while our other self constantly suffering in the present. Traumatic memories are not the same like 'normal' ones: they are pictures, sounds, smells - pieces of mozaik which only can be put together by working on it with a good therapist and having a supportive social network.
The documentary just doesn't analyze the meaning of trauma and traumatic rememberance or traumatic memories, the fact that traumas structure the way people are able to remember/recall things, that certain things are broken and lost, while deeply engraved in the mind and the body of someone. They should have taken the fact that trauma structures the memories of the victims, as the starting point. Why didn't they ask a trauma specialist to give the explanation of many things in this case?
All the (elite) people - prosecutors, judges, lawyers, even psychologists! - working in the justice system who were interviewd for this film don't seem to understand the nature of trauma. They are clearly not able to interpret the events in a trauma-conscious way. Without knowing and analysing the nature of trauma it is not possible to understand what happened here.
That is why all the people are not able to tell the 'story' in a meaningful way, they are blind for the fact that remembering or recalling traumatic events is not 'lying' or 'manipulating' but it is a hard and difficult process, which can take long years. The judge Burgeaud even makes a comment on this at a certain point where he refers to the fact that there are certain things that cannot be expressed through language, 'you can't say anything more about this'.
The makers also didn't try to understand the other childrens' way of thinking and acting, besides the Delay-children who were clearly victims. Even if not all children were traumatized, the way they acted had many reasons. How was their life? Why did they want attention? In which way were they pressured by their environment? They tried to get answers for this at a certain point by deconstructing how foster parents contacted each other and kept in touch, checking their information, but you only tried to show their attitudes and motives via the narratives of these lawyers and judges. This just does not seem to be sufficient.
There are many sociological reasons why these children behaved like this. Their environment, networks, social status is all important. This would be a key to understand this story.
The viewer would need much more explanation on the nature of these mechanisms, instead we can only get the narratives of the people of the establishment, who declare that the 'story of the children didn't add up', so 'the juridical system failed'.
All you can think while watching is: when will they ask a psychologist or a trauma therapist about what happened here? But this never happens and this is a huge missed opportunity. Becasue there is another way of explaining these events in a much more critical and socially sensitive narrative. Showing the unspeakable by not questioning the way we think and talk about it - does it lead us anywhere?