Captive Audience • A Very British Scandal
Plus Martha Mitchell and Billy the Kid
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime(s)
Oo-fah, where to start. Well, with a spoiler warning, for starters — the disposition of the cases isn’t a secret, but if the name “Stayner” doesn’t bring up the particulars, you may get more out of Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story if you let the docuseries refresh your memory. I’ll also furnish a content warning for harm to children. To avoid too much information of any sort, skip to my last paragraph.
Still here? On we go, then. The first crime occurs in 1972, when Steven Stayner, 7, is abducted by Kenneth Parnell. Parnell, posing as Stayner’s father, renames Stayner “Dennis” while serially abusing him; Stayner remains under Parnell’s control until Parnell kidnaps another little boy, Timmy White, at which time Stayner decides not to let Parnell do to Timmy what Parnell had done to him for many years. He takes Timmy and hitchhikes to a police station.
Stayner, now 14, is hailed as a hero and reunited with his family after spending half his life away from them. The case is a major media sensation in the late 1970s…and then again in the late 1980s, when legendary two-part TV movie I Know My First Name Is Steven airs on NBC in May of 1989. The film stars (among others, because literally everyone was in this shteez, including Allison Mack) Corin Nemec as teenage Steven Stayner, Frederic Forrest as Parnell, and Todd Eric Andrews as Cary Stayner, Steven’s older brother.
…Yes, “that Cary Stayner.” Stayner murdered four women in and around Yosemite in the late nineties and is currently incarcerated for those killings. It seems evident that Stayner The Elder suffers from serious mental illness, and that certain aspects and symptoms may have gotten passed down from his father, Del — Cary claimed via his own defense-expert psychiatrist that Del molested Cary’s sisters. Whether the family challenged that assertion during Cary’s trial/s, I don’t know.
The story
I do know that Del, who died in 2013, doesn’t figure heavily in Captive Audience, Hulu’s three-part docuseries on the…hydra of tragedy and horror that keeps attacking the Stayner clan, I guess you could say. (Stayner The Younger died in a motorcycle accident at 24, leaving two small children. Timmy White, the child he saved, was fatally stricken by a pulmonary embolism at 35.)
Yes, he’s mentioned, and he’s shown in contemporary news accounts of Steven’s story, but once I learned that he was alleged to have abused his daughters, I felt like spaces opened up around Del in Captive Audience that threw it further off balance — and I say “further” because Captive Audience is good, and watchable, and has a lot of interesting ideas, but at the same time, something about it is…off-kilter. Not quite right.
Or not quite best. As I said, the doc is compelling, and what a pleasure not to have to sit through any re-enactments, either the same-old deep-focus silent-movie shit you get on basic cable, or an MFA-project attempt to re-imagine it.
Director Jessica Dimmock also helmed the “Stolen Kids” episode of the new Unsolved Mysteries, and the production has excellent access to the surviving Stayners — as well as to Nemec and Andrews, who gamely deliver semi-dramatic readings of transcripts of interviews the real brothers did with I Know My First Name script writer J.P. Miller. …You follow all that?
Captive Audience’s first two episodes especially work hard to illustrate the many meta layers of Steven’s story, how they leach into each other, the Heisenberging of the case via non-fiction media coverage and the miniseries and the media coverage of the miniseries and various passing comments from Cary, that in retrospect could make his crimes seem motivated by attention-seeking.
It’s a fascinating question, particularly in a case like this: how much does coverage of true crime influence, or even create, its own narratives? And what about the tension between bringing a story, and awareness of the issues that drive it, to a wider audience — while having to boil off a lot of detail and nuance to make it more digestible? And that’s just the Steven part of the saga.
But it’s only 23 minutes before the end when Captive Audience gets to what I think is the real area of interest here for the filmmakers: storytelling, and the nature of “true” in true crime. The Stayners’ epic exposure in the genre, for lack of a better way to put it, is an irresistible way into that broader conversation, because it spans decades and generations, not to mention a death-penalty case whose “mitigation specialist” spends a handful of talking-heads musing that “it’s the story” that prevails with juries.
To bring Nemec and Andrews, now middle-aged and both seeming to feel a responsibility to their parts in telling the story, back to re-play their roles, in one case to speak for the dead and in another to find an answer that doesn’t exist…it could land really badly. (Particularly for the two other people who remember that Nemec once played Bundy.) But it works, and it’s tremendously thought-provoking, about definitions of genre terms like “documentary” and “evidence,” and about problematic aspects of the genre like “performance” and “selling.”
Alas, its ambition outstrips its allotted runtime. But I suspect that Dimmock and the producers (full disclosure: one of them is my esteemed colleague and Blotter Presents guest Piper Weiss) started with a more avant-garde idea about the American-horror-story part of their chronicle of the Stayners, and Hulu nixed it, so Captive Audience tries to fit everything it’s trying to say into a more traditional limited-series format.
I don’t know that this story, and this doc team, is built for that, though. I think the ideal version of Captive Audience, which put already put me in mind of both Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road and of Casting JonBenét, leans as hard as it can into the meta/second-order stuff — all dramatic re-readings; all funky camera set-ups that show the lights and cables from the side; a full-on Casting JonBenét-style re-conception of what a documentary can do, and how. I think that’s the only way truly to get your narrative arms around a case like the Stayners’, taking a completely different angle and zooming in as far as you can. I think it needed another 90 minutes.
But the three episodes we get, within the parameters true-crime creators have to live with to get anything done before they can Berlinger their own tickets, are quite something. The real-life story is quite something, true — but Captive Audience’s ability not only to tell it very well, but to get me scrawling notes about how it might have been told even better, is what sets it apart. I recommend this one, and I look forward to talking about it. — SDB
Oh yeah: there’s a paperback sale at Exhibit B. through Sunday! Grab the book on Cary’s case — and/or any other paperbacks — for 20% off with code ExrthDay at checkout!
Might I also look forward to talking about Billy the Kid if I hadn’t, you know, just heard about it by accident on Twitter the other day? Maybe! Here’s a trailer if, like me, you had no idea the shteez existed:
Now that we know it exists, let’s move on to the second problem: it’s on Epix. Only so much I can do to move the needle for Epix stuff even when I do get screeners, which I did not; or have heard of…anyone in the cast, which I have not — which is a pity, because I seem to recall enjoying Epix docuseries in the past, and there’s more than enough room in (and viewing-public appetite for) the genre to re-examine the Western outlaw.
I get the feeling this is more of a “let’s turn lead actor Tom Blyth into an Outlander-esque cult star”/full-frontal play, based on the creator’s pedigree (Vikings, The Tudors), but…you know. Epix. We’ll never find out, hee. (If you go through a tesseract and come out in a timeline where you have Epix, BtK premieres April 14 at 10 PM.) — SDB
No need to turn the leads of Gaslit into stars, obvs (hee), but does it seem like nobody’s talking about that series either? Quick refresher if you don’t have a FOBE Michael Dunn texting you about Watergate content: it’s the Martha Mitchell joint starring Julia Roberts as MM, Sean Penn as John Mitchell, and…dang, this is some cast. Granted, this too is in a relatively “boutique” network system, Starz, but it premieres the same day as Billy the Kid, and compared to other upcoming true-crime stories, I haven’t heard much about Gaslit at all. Here’s the trailer:
AV Club’s Manuel Betancourt liked Roberts’s performance a lot but found Gaslit tonally uneven, and it does seem like kind of a dog’s breakfast based on the number of comedic actors in the cast — but this one I’ll try to track down, if only to see Betty Gilpin as Mrs. John Dean. — SDB
Channels like Epix do cost money. …Maybe? We don’t know! Hee. But seriously: we do subscribe to a bunch of mags and streamers so we can (try to) keep track of all the new true-crime content coming at all of us, and a paid subscription from you really helps us pay the Paramount+ piper each month. Just $5/month or $55/year!
There’s lots of extra content behind the paywall, too; if you can help us out with a sub, we’d love it! — SDB
The crime
Intimate-partner violence; manufacturing evidence; breaking and entering; blackmail; toxic midcentury European masculinity…for a backgrounder on the Duke and Duchess of Argyll’s divorce, click here.
The story
A Very British Scandal, which aired on BBC at the end of last year, arrives on Amazon Prime tomorrow, and the thing is gorgeous, of course, all Scottish horror fog and rustling woolens, ominously lit by watery sun. (Oh, and wind-up gold penis toys. Obviously.)
The successor to A Very English Scandal features Claire Foy as the viciously maligned Margaret Whigham and Paul Bettany as Ian Campbell, the Duke of Argyll and her third husband, and though I’ve only seen the first of the three episodes, each of them is tremendous thus far. Foy, whom I’ve missed on The Crown, is so good at shifting the sands of her face to let varying amounts of emotional information be seen, then disappear again; she’s just right at doing enough and no more, letting the viewer fill it in around the edges.
Bettany is also great: gelid, impatient, smugly cruel, but at the same time carrying into each scene the whiff of post-war trauma, the suggestion that the Nazi-POW Ian who came back isn’t the one who left. The exhaustion in his delivery of “Look at us. What…fun we’re having” as he presents a too-much mink to the wife he’s cheating with Margaret on — a mink he knows, and we find out later, he can’t afford — creates the misguided pity that baits the trap with the women in his life, and it’s not that he’s not really tired or traumatized. It’s that he’s also a bastard regardless.
Variety’s Amber Dowling also praises the performances, and the “female-forward handling” of Margaret’s sexual appetites/subsequent shaming, but feels that
there’s a failed opportunity to expand the characters beyond previously spilled ink. Finding room to further explore the central romance post-marriage, Margaret as a parent, Ian’s past as a World War II vet, or either of their feelings toward aging may have been a time-consuming endeavor given the limited episode order (a number previously established by Blueprint’s predecessor, “A Very English Scandal”). Yet without them there’s a sense of glossing over the complex human lives driving the story in the first place.
Dowling’s watched all three, but I’ll still disagree, for two reasons. Firstly, some things can’t be known for sure. It’s part of why we make and remake these stories for ourselves, to try to know and to be definitive; the illusion that we can always, or ever, reach unassailable truths about means and motive drives the entire genre. But sometimes it’s as simple as “a vengeful shitbag burned his estranged wife’s life to the ground, and the misogyny of the culture toasted marshmallows.”
Secondly, even if we can know some things, like about “Ian’s past” or “Margaret as a parent,” it’s all right to be elliptical, and here, I think it’s both indicated and executed successfully. Lean too hard on Ian’s substance misuse as self-medication, and you risk justifying his interpersonal misdeeds. Investigate Margaret’s parenting too closely, and you risk getting sidetracked into an indictment of the landed gentry’s compulsion to atomize the nuclear family.
Not to mention that the shot of Ian’s children in the car, heading to the estate for the first time as Margaret’s stepsons, gets rather a lot accomplished in about five seconds of screentime. These people aren’t “complex human” beings even to each other; they’re deal points. Trying to dimensionalize characters in this particular morality play beyond what they can actually give you is IMO a mistake, and in the early going, AVBS avoids that pitfall.
Could it start to feel in the later eps like a recitative of institutionalized slut-shaming with no heart at the core? Sure. But that’s…what it was, and I don’t know that we ought to have that dish warmed up, if you know what I mean. In any event, AVBS is well acted and a pleasure to look at; I’ll recommend this one too. — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Eve updates your to-listen list.
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