THE GLASS DOME (Netflix) and all thrillers born of the esteemed loins of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS… and why we love to see dead women and girls on screen… please be forewarned, trigger-wise…

So, Virginia Guiffre is dead, a loss made no less sad by the fact it was so very predictable.  She has died by suicide, but if we are to consider the wider context of her death and think beyond the purely practical principles of causation, we know there are a host of of other candidates to shoulder the blame, including ourselves, collectively, as a species and a society, for continuing to fail women.   

Think of the bullet that struck White House press secretary James Brady in 1981 - a bullet intended for President Reagan and fired under the misapprehension it would impress Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed and who he believed was mutually obsessed with him (erotomania… a bit like how I felt when I arrived in Japan and found out Harry Styles was already there to run in the Tokyo Marathon… I mean, you already moved in around the corner from me in London and now you just happen to be in Japan, Harry?!  Gimme some space!  I’m gonna have to put out a statement denying the rumours about us having a torrid affair involving beautiful hotel suites, loadsa sushi and exercise, ffs, Harry!) an act he described as “the greatest love offering in the history of the world” - which left him with brain damage until he died of his injuries in 2014.  John Hinckley Jr (who, incidentally, has been walking the streets, free as a bird, on unconditional release since 2022, a fact I struggle to get my head around given my experience working for Jodie Foster in the 90s and the added security we required to assure her safety, all while Hinckley was confined to St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washing DC, three thousand miles away) murdered James Brady and, I’d aver, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and HRH Prince Andrew are among those responsible for Virginia Guiffre’s death (morally if not literally… although, does anyone know where Prince Andrew was last night?  A Pizza Express in Woking, you say? 🤔).

I take a not entirely popular view of suicide (although I’m not sure there is a popular view, is there?) insofar as I think part of the human condition is our acute awareness of ever encroaching and inevitable death, so contemplating death and considering ways to control it are natural instincts.  I acknowledge suicide as a distinct possibility all the time (no need for a wellness check, folks: I quickly disregard it as an option and recognise, begrudgingly, that facing the fuckery of this world is the better option, plus suicide can get very messy and I couldn’t trust either of my kids to clean up after me…), but I don’t ideate suicide and I don’t put effort into planning mine.  If I were Virginia Guiffre and woke up every morning to the level of fuckery she has faced - sex trafficking, sexual abuse, resultant poor mental health, unfair and intrusive press scrutiny, and a pay-off from the Queen that might have eased the pressure of bills and debts, but will have only done harm to her sense of self-worth - then the delicate balance between suicide and facing another day in this wretched world would have tipped in favour of the former, undoubtedly.

What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, they say, and we do have a terrible habit of referring to outspoken victims of sexual abuse as “strong”.  Some of our current crop of “strong women” includes Giselle Pelicot, Adele Haenel, Judith Godreche and all of those who stood up to Harvey Weinstein.  We praise them for their strength, for their greatness, but in the “some are born great, some achieve greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them”-vein, these women have certainly had it thrust upon them (mostly in the form of ogre-like men wielding flaccid micropenises, from what I understand from the court testimonies) and likely had no interest in being great, nor strong, and would have been happy simply to have been granted sovereignty over their own bodies, requiring not much more from life or the men they met.  And the strength they have shown in the aftermath of sexual assault is the inverse of the weakness, the vulnerability, the predators saw (or caused) in them before it, some because they were children, others because they were drugged, others because the power dynamic in the suite of the Peninsula Hotel rendered them weak.  And yes, we want to think the assaults that did not kill these women (and many do, let’s be crystal clear… more on that in a minute) made them stronger (it’s an awfully convenient conclusion to draw for a society that doesn’t want to be burdened with the seismic impact of sexual assault and the abuse of women and girls… an affordable conclusion, too…), but Virginia Guiffre’s suicide yesterday reminds us that, sometimes, that which does not kill us makes us weaker, and weaker, and weaker until we just can’t summon the strength to face the thundercunts of this world, nor ourselves, for even another minute.  RIP Virginia Guiffre.

After the two categories of women who experience the proverbial “that” and are made (i) stronger or (ii) weaker, as the case may be, we must consider the third category: those who were killed by “that”.  That which kills them, kills them, and “that” is usually men, sadly.  The murders of women and girls is a global preoccupation splashed out across a bazillion films and shows on our screens, some with unequivocal artisty and success (THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) and others… less so (too many to choose from, tbh, but I think MEET (meat?), MARRY, MURDER is a pretty good example of how low our values can go, production-wise and culturally), and everything in between.  We all love a thriller littered with women’s and girls’ dead bodies, eh?  I was once the story editor on a major TV series and, having read all six episodes, had a meeting with the showrunner and execs and said, “You have 52 named characters in the series.  4 are women.  3 of those women end up dead.  2 of those women are shown naked and dead,” and they looked unbelievably pleased with themselves as they realised they had a surefire hit on their hands (and they did… although, to be fair, they made some significant changes to the scripts before going into production).

Netflix’s Swedish limited series THE GLASS DOME is the latest of the dead-girls-and-women-genre to grace our screens and I was swayed to watch it after reading glowing reviews (and also because Scandinavians are very good at throwing in a “strong female lead” in a woolly jumper that makes femicide seem much more palatable, somehow).  And it is very good.  It is so good that I’d put it right up there towards the heady heights of dead-girls-and-women-genre’s top spot occupied by THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.  In fact, it is so good that I start to see many, many, many, many comparisons between THE GLASS DOME and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS….  If these telly-makers didn’t spend weeks dissecting Jonathan Demme’s masterpiece in the pre-production phase, I’ll eat my shoe (although not my new Hermes boots - I’d rather be wrong than have to live a day without them…).

I struggle a bit between how/when we are plagiarising, homaging, referencing or being derivative.  The music industry seems to be very, very clear on when an homage crosses the line into breach of copyright, punishing the purloiners in pecuniary terms and also a kind of “creative shaming” particular to their industry, but we’re a little more loose about the whole theft thing in the film and TV sectors.  If AI can teach us anything, it is that rehashing old ideas should not be upheld as great art: we must find and extol the originals.  But… on the other hand, if you are going to make the next big dead-girls-and-women show, you’re better off pilfering all the best bits from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS than from MEET, MARRY, MURDER, right?  Presumably me saying to the makers of THE GLASS DOME that their show reminds me an awful lot of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is about as big a compliment as I could possibly extend to them? Not unlike when my brother telephoned me early one morning to tell me he had read my book and thought I wrote like William S. Burroughs, but who then admitted he had taken so many drugs overnight as to make Burroughs himself look like a lightweight, drugs-wise, rendering the compliment worthless, sadly…

So, given I am generally a feminist and want to take a Betty Friedan-like stand and stop watching so much of the dead-girls-and-women genre, I have to ask myself what it is about THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (which Betty refused to watch) and THE GLASS DOME that make them both more “acceptable” to my feminist eye?  More specifically, what are the bits from the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS that set the standard which has been so closely and successfully followed by THE GLASS DOME?  Where is the common ground?

I don’t want to ruin THE GLASS DOME, relatively new to Netflix, and so won’t litter this with plot-spoilers, but I think, perhaps, the essential qualifying attribute of the best of the dead-girls-and-women genre is that the dead girls and women it features are not sexualised.  That is, the pathology of the killers we meet in these top tier shows (who admittedly do kill girls and women, yes… it is an essential criteria of the genre, after all…), is not sexual, but is their own uniquely psychotic make-up and fucked-upness, nothing to do with the innocent victim at all.  When men murder women and girls to satisfy their sexual perversions (as in the majority of films and shows in this genre), I think we are left with a subtext of blame that says her death has arisen as a consequence of her own actions or inactions: it was her body, her femaleness, her sexuality and biology that did the attracting.  What’s a guy to do?  This victim-blaming is pernicious in our culture and it is best exemplified cinematically by Jodie Foster’s other Oscar-winning performance in THE ACCUSED, an absolutely brilliant film, well worth a rewatch, yet desperately frustrating insofar as it was made in 1988 and NOTHING HAS CHANGED. Well, very little has changed.  (And we have to take a moment to acknowledge that in the aftermath of a stalking so extreme as to include an assassination attempt on a President, Jodie Foster made both THE ACCUSED and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, winning Academy Awards for both, deservingly so, and giving us two of the most remarkable portraits of strong women with greatness thrust upon them we have - or will, I’m guessing - ever seen.  Amazing, right? #shero).  My point is pretty weak from a feminist perspective, I suppose, but I think the critical shared component of THE SILENCE AND THE LAMBS and THE GLASS DOME is that the victims are not sexually assaulted.  They’re murdered, obvs, and tortured and some of them are fattened up, skinned and made into a lovely outfit for Buffalo Bill, but… the motive is not sexual.  And somehow, that feels like such a relief from the day-to-day experiences we have as women making our ways in the world, it makes the murdering, torturing and impressive tailoring (skin is a bitch to sew, guys) kinda easy (or easier) to take.  I’m not preparing a placard that says “Less rape and sexual assault!  But more torture and murder!” exactly, just making an observation that might get me cancelled, but is my honest response. (And speaking of being cancelled - name drop warning! - I had a fantastic time with Terry Gilliam, 85 years old and raising finance for his next film, amazingly, last night at a somewhat glamorous party and then on a very unglamorous night bus home, and he made a point re the #MeToo movement by saying, “One of the times when I was cancelled…” and made a considered comment re consent and the fact there was a period in Hollywood when many women were willingly sleeping with men who were their bosses or “superiors”.  I agreed with him, in a way, but I think consent is not a bilateral agreement reached in a moment, but something to be understood in contextual terms outside the binary, and can possibly be withdrawn after the fact or post-coitally.  We talked about informed consent and partial or conditional consent and a bit about whether prostitutes can or cannot consent.  He was terrified by the idea consent could be withdrawn post-coitally, but I believe the context could change the position and gave the example of a fully consensual encounter between two adults, inclusive and mutually respectful and possibly even preceded by a nice dinner, but at the end of the night the man throws a couple of hundred dollar bills on the bed, saying, “Thanks, love.”  For my part, I think that entirely changes the context of the encounter and therefore of the issuing or otherwise of consent.  Right?  And what if he didn’t throw money on the bed immediately afterwards, but his elderly and very important mother threw $12M at her several years later?  Hmmmm.  Interesting….)

The other more surface-level “overlaps” between THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and THE GLASS DOME are many, many, many and various and I won’t bore you by setting them out here (you can’t miss them if you watch the show and you’re even vaguely familiar with the film, which I happened to watch in the cinema about ten days ago, unfortunately for these telly-makers…).  And do watch it.  That is, do watch it if you’re in the mood for a dead-girls-and-women drama and prepared to give it six hours of your time.  You can even still call yourself a feminist (maybe?).  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️