August 4, 2022

Murder at the Cottage · Go Ask Alice

Plus, the 19 Crimes Martha wine

the true crime that's worth your time

The crime
French documentarian Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered in the remote Irish town of Schull shortly before Christmas, 1996. The murder remains unsolved, strictly speaking, although a prime suspect, Ian Bailey, was convicted by a French court in absentia in 2019. Ireland has declined to allow Bailey to be extradited.

The story
Last night, as I sat in front of the screeners Topic kindly provided me for Murder at the Cottage, I kept returning in my mind to an exchange in yesterday’s discussion thread.

Cottage, which debuted its first two episodes today on Topic, waits until the very end of Episode 2 to introduce prime suspect Ian Bailey, in a reveal so pleased with itself — despite the fact that anyone who has watched any TV before can see what, or who, is coming — that it’s utter corn on top of punitive pacing, and while I soldiered through another ep after that just for drill, I’m going to leave the last two of the five unwatched, and I’d suggest you do the same.

We’ve mentioned Cottage around here a number of times: that director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) had amassed hundreds of hours of footage for the doc over several years; that Sheridan seemed to have a different opinion than that of conventional wisdom when it came to Bailey’s guilt. I for one looked forward to Sheridan’s take on a docuseries about a disputed case, thinking that a guy whose primary business is scripted stories might set up from a different, more Herzog-ian vantage point.

This does not occur. I have compassion for Sheridan’s preoccupation with the case (this is not the only case-related property on his c.v.), with the sunk time costs, with the fact that content distributors expect and demand certain narrative rhythms from these stories, with Netflix’s Sophie: A Murder in West Cork beating Cottage to the punch by over a year. But Cottage makes a lot of mistakes that, coming this long (for U.S. audiences, anyway) after Sophie and at half again the runtime, it can’t afford — draggy re-enactments, myriad drone shots of the isolated landscape, and a foregrounding of the director in the story from the very first moment of the series (“My name is Jim Sheridan. I’m a storyteller”) that the rest of it fails to examine or pay off as a POV device.

Later, Sheridan delivers a meta monologue about the brutality of the murder, about balancing the knowledge that Sophie’s loved ones will “be looking away” during the autopsy-photo portion with the “necessary” reckoning of the physical damage done. This is a very tricky needle to thread, of which I can recall exactly two successful examples1, and Cottage isn’t one, because Sheridan neither shows the hideous outcome of a beating death by paving stone nor subtracts the ugly means from the middle of the story. He just raises the issue and thinks that’s enough.

And Cottage doesn’t do any better than Sophie did at controlling the amount of square footage (so to speak) that Bailey and his Tom Waits singalongs and fucking bongos take up. I don’t have much of an opinion as to Bailey’s guilt — I’m with Irish prosecutors in that, while he’s “guilty” of being a horse’s ass who put hands on his partner, there isn’t enough direct evidence re: Sophie’s death to try him — but I think the same thing vis-a-vis Bailey the spotlight hog that I thought when I reviewed Sophie last year:

I can see why [Sophie] might have perceived hanging Bailey out to dry as a measure of justice for Toscan du Plantier, but what we end up witnessing instead is what I call The OJ Effect: the notoriety and/or charisma of the accused sucking all the air out of a room ostensibly devoted to remembering or avenging the victim. (Bailey's resemblance to OJ as a defendant doesn't end there, as he unwisely tries to rationalize his assaulting his partner by saying that she had gotten drunk and come at him first.)

This is what the OJs and Baileys of the world do: they leverage their narcissism with self-pitying libel suits and performative griping about "uneducated" small-town police, and I think the docuseries knows that. I also think that you can't have it both ways, and that showing how badly Bailey needs attention means giving him attention — attention that isn't on Sophie, her work, or her family.

Again, I’m not unsympathetic to Sheridan’s creative predicament here, and it’s not an inept piece of work, but it’s not good enough, not from him, not when part of the reason the case is of interest is that Bailey may have gotten railroaded for being an alcoholic aspiring-Beat shitwit with a collection of “clever” hats — and then is being that shitwit for long stretches of the runtime, at the expense of incisive investigation or focus on the actual victim.

Had Sheridan just…scripted the damn thing, cast Julie Delpy as Sophie, and found something to say that way; had he turned over his gazillion feet of footage to a disinterested filmmaker all “I’m too close to this; find the story”…maybe it’s something. And maybe Cottage turns things around in the last two episodes. But I won’t find out unless one of y’all tells me. I wanted this to be worth our time, and it just isn’t. — SDB

The crime
Insider trading.

The bottle
Let me just say before I begin my tasting notes that what I don’t know about good wine is a lot, but I know for sure that I don’t like Chardonnay — and yet for some reason, whenever it’s time for me to review a novelty bottle, it’s always a goddamn Chardo. But for you, I make the tastes-like-treated-wood sacrifice!

And it turns out that, while I have issues with the 19 Crimes brand, and while I have sampled their reds in the past and not enjoyed them, “Martha’s Chard” — the 19 Crimes white “celebrating” Martha Stewart (whose birthday, coincidentally, was yesterday) is…pretty bearable, for a Chardonnay! It isn’t excessively oaky; it drinks like an herb-forward, leafy Sauv Blanc. And it’s priced correctly — $12 — for a product whose primary demographic is “wine-club purchasers looking for an amusing just-in-case bottle.”

As for 19 Crimes more generally…look, I could tell you that I never for a moment considered teaming up with my local liquor store on a bookshop-receipt promotion involving an “on the case” pun, but I’d be lying, and 19 Crimes is, for what it is, relatively thoughtful. It’s educational, sort of; it’s not too reliant on cutesy wordplay, and from what I can tell, it avoids truly grim cases. But should it exist at all? Should it stick to “lighter” crimes like identity fraud or weapons-free heists?

Or should those QR codes lead tipplers to advocacy organizations; longreads on the forensic-testing backlog; or videos that highlight issues like false confessions and bail reform? In other words, much as the Chardonnay itself isn’t as bad as you expect but still isn’t great, is 19 Crimes not as irresponsibly tasteless as it could be — but also not as interesting or activist as it could be? — SDB

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Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries is getting a lot of ink lately. Unmask Alice is Rick Emerson’s exposé on the real author behind the legendary Go Ask Alice — not an anonymous, posthumous adolescent diarist brought low by drugs and the counterculture, but, per Casey Cep’s tart review in The New Yorker, “one huckstering grandmother” who claimed to be a counselor.

Cep talks about the issues with Emerson’s book, furnishes a biography of “Dr.” Beatrice Sparks, and puts Go Ask Alice in context with other turn-of-the-seventies YA classics from Judy Blume. Rebecca Onion at Slate is more interested in how Sparks turned Go Ask Alice into a cottage industry of fabricated rebellious-teen horror:

Sparks’ responsibility for today’s new culture of moral panic around the lives of teenagers and kids isn’t small. The flare-ups of the Satanic Panic era did real damage—say, to Alden Barrett’s family, or to the people accused of molesting kids in tunnels under day cares—and although many now debunk and reject stories from that era, others still seem to harbor a suspicion that some of that might have been real.

And Rich Juzwiak at Jezebel focuses a bit more on the grift, and our responses to it:

As with many modern scammers, there’s a temptation to look beyond [Sparks’s] ethical breaches and the pain she inflicted and just admire her hustle. Emerson doesn’t go that far in Unmask Alice, but he does acknowledge the complexity of the biography at hand: Sparks came from an unstable family background, dug herself out of destitution, and toiled as a writer for years before reaching her goal of hitting it big...with a book that her publisher refused to credit to her.

Go Ask Alice has sold millions of copies in the last five decades — as well as getting banned — and that’s no surprise, once you grok that it was marketed both to adults as “this is what happens if you don’t enforce a curfew” fear-mongering, and to kids as, in theory, a warning about the slippery slope of “taking the pot” (although the unintended effect for many was to glamorize the wild/dangerous aspects of the turned-on life). What is a surprise, to me, is that anyone ever thought it was a legit teenager’s diary and not painfully square, How Do You Do Fellow Kids propaganda written by a committee of middle-aged Women For Nixon/Agnew.

Cep describes the first half of the book as reading “like a collaboration by Dr. Phil, Darren Aronofsky, and McGruff the Crime Dog,” so: we agree, heh. On top of that, the writing is just bad:

One of the mysteries of its wild success is how so many readers could tolerate the book’s excess of adjectives, punctuation, profanity, and slang. The diarist dates a “nice, young, clean-cut gentlemanly young man” and eats fries that are “wonderful, delicious, mouth-watering, delectable, heavenly,” but has to live in a “whoring little spider hole” while “low-class shit eaters” take turns raping her, and later wonders “how much Lane really knows about Rich and me?????” Some readers found the style laughable, and questioned the book’s veracity. But others—including a reviewer for the Times, who called the book “a document of horrifying reality”—saw it as evidence of the diary’s authenticity.

And I can see that argument; I was a teenage girl lo these many years ago, and I also edited my high school’s literary magazine, so artless histrionics are not not evidence of legitimate teen provenance, and let’s just leave it at that. But I was also a very sheltered teenage girl and late bloomer who had not frenched anyone, touched any drugs or booze, or been away from my parents for longer than a week at a time when I read Go Ask Alice at age 15, and it still didn’t pass the sniff test. Was I the only one who just assumed, not because it was sucky writing but because of the “Goofus and Gallant” way it was sucky, that it was functionally a very long So You’re Thinking Of Shrooming pamphlet sponsored by the same people who made Davey & Goliath?

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I can also see an argument to the effect that Sparks’s “embroideries” were themselves criminal, in their way, slandering actual teenagers who died by suicide, secondarily involved in wrongful convictions thanks to baseless accusations of Satanism. I never thought GAA was “real,” but I also find it baffling that testimony about devil worship — which always sounds melodramatically ridic and like a matter of byzantine organization, so either way, if you think about it for five seconds it falls apart — is allowed into evidence, or accepted as fact by juries. But as Cep and other critics note, Sparks’s culturally conservative brand of counterfeit “moral panic” is still a going concern. America: Post-Factual Since 1776. — SDB

The August bonus-review book is Leah Sottile’s When The Moon Turns To Blood: Lori Vallow, Chad Daybell, and a Story of Murder, Wild Faith, and End Times. I’ll also be talking about the book on Toby Ball’s Deep Dive in about a month; if you want to read my review here, you’ll need a paid subscription.

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But there’s years — plural! — of paywalled stuff back there, and it’s just $5 a month. If gas prices allow it, consider a paid sub to Best Evidence; we’d really appreciate it.

(Toby and I talked about Sottile’s Bundyville podcast in TBP 105, and that’s free.) — SDB

Coming up on Best Evidence: The real Tim Kono, Bad City backlash, and more pod plagiarism.

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