If I were judging this as a public service message, I'd give it a higher grade. As a documentary film, it spends all but the last fifteen minutes of its time on case studies of four or five families convicted of child molestation in Bakersfield, California. There were several dozen convictions, some 35 of which were reversed years later -- and I mean years. One innocent man and wife were excoriated by the judge and received cumulative sentences of more than 500 years. Before finding an organization willing to look closely into their cases, four of the cases we follow served ten or twenty years. (What do you do when you've spent 20 years in jail and are released on your 60th birthday, as one victim was?) And it was hard time, too -- San Quentin, where child molesters must claim they were convicted of owning automatic weapons and possession of marijuana if they want to live.
It's interesting to see the development of the cases, the means by which convictions were brought, and the experiences of the victims, their children, their families and friends.
One weakness -- aside from the unnecessarily lugubrious score -- is that there is really no attempt at an explanation, no attempt that involves any sophistication anyway. One or another of the talking heads attributes the wave of mass hysteria to "political ambition," "zealotry," and what we would call "command pressure." But those explanations don't tell us much. Let me put it this way. Why -- out of all the avenues of advancement -- did the politically ambitious District Attorney (who has been reelected seven times) happen to choose child molestation as his conduit to power? "Zealotry" is a personality trait that explains nothing. It's like saying "greed causes robbery." And "command pressure" -- the sense that those above you must be given the performance that they want from you -- is omnipresent, and constants can't explain variations.
I'd love to have seen the case studies squeezed into one hour and the rest of the time given over to an examination of the causes of this craze at the time it happened in Bakersfield -- or rather the causes of these kinds of crazes as they happen again and again, over generations, over centuries. Because, when you get right down to it, collectively and historically, we've seen all this before in one form or another. Witchcraft, Freemasons, hidden Communists, pre-school porno rings, and Satanism. For the past few years we've been working on "internet predators" that do not exist to any measurable extent, according to the only scientifically respectable study that I'm aware of. (I taught sociology, including classes on social problems that used to be called "mass hysteria.") What started this particular craze in this particular place? And, equally important, what stopped it when it was finally ended? The explanation must lie in the system itself, the entire social system, of which the legal system is only an instrument. You can't really blame it on an ambitious DA.
Is there some reason society NEEDS an internal enemy to hate? Anyway, that's a lot of criticism of a film that desperately needed making and would have been far more useful if it had been made twenty or twenty-five years ago. God, how many lives have been ruined by our righteous wrath?
It's interesting to see the development of the cases, the means by which convictions were brought, and the experiences of the victims, their children, their families and friends.
One weakness -- aside from the unnecessarily lugubrious score -- is that there is really no attempt at an explanation, no attempt that involves any sophistication anyway. One or another of the talking heads attributes the wave of mass hysteria to "political ambition," "zealotry," and what we would call "command pressure." But those explanations don't tell us much. Let me put it this way. Why -- out of all the avenues of advancement -- did the politically ambitious District Attorney (who has been reelected seven times) happen to choose child molestation as his conduit to power? "Zealotry" is a personality trait that explains nothing. It's like saying "greed causes robbery." And "command pressure" -- the sense that those above you must be given the performance that they want from you -- is omnipresent, and constants can't explain variations.
I'd love to have seen the case studies squeezed into one hour and the rest of the time given over to an examination of the causes of this craze at the time it happened in Bakersfield -- or rather the causes of these kinds of crazes as they happen again and again, over generations, over centuries. Because, when you get right down to it, collectively and historically, we've seen all this before in one form or another. Witchcraft, Freemasons, hidden Communists, pre-school porno rings, and Satanism. For the past few years we've been working on "internet predators" that do not exist to any measurable extent, according to the only scientifically respectable study that I'm aware of. (I taught sociology, including classes on social problems that used to be called "mass hysteria.") What started this particular craze in this particular place? And, equally important, what stopped it when it was finally ended? The explanation must lie in the system itself, the entire social system, of which the legal system is only an instrument. You can't really blame it on an ambitious DA.
Is there some reason society NEEDS an internal enemy to hate? Anyway, that's a lot of criticism of a film that desperately needed making and would have been far more useful if it had been made twenty or twenty-five years ago. God, how many lives have been ruined by our righteous wrath?