SPOILERS FOR UNBELIEVABLE, DON'T LOOK IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE SHOW
So here's my issue with the last episode of unbelievable which was, overall I think, a really great show: having spent six hours explaining to me how broken and fucked up the system is and how the deck is always stacked in favor of the assaulter and how violent and prone to abuse the cops are, we end on a hour of full catharsis. Marie gets closure with the cop who fucked her over and the police get a complete win with this serial rapist put away for multiple lifetimes. Marie calls Detective Grace from a beach and thanks her for being there, explicitly stating that what made the difference was knowing that someone out there was watching over her, even if she didn't know it... and then she literally drives off into the sunset to her new life.
Now I read the propublica piece (and i recommend everyone after watching this does too! it's astonishing how close the story sticks to the record: https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story ) so i get that they're basically hewing to the actual facts but they certainly do have control over the themes they're touching on. After so much time showing and telling how the system is broken, i couldn't help feeling that the conclusion of the series suggested that what Marie's shitty foster mom hurtfully said ("sometimes the system works") was the moral of the overall story. That left me VERY cold, that they would hint even obliquely, much less openly and blatantly, that though the system is busted it occasionally works and might even be defensible for its occasional wins. Which runs counter to most everything we've been told up until then!
I was really taken with the veracity of the show up until then and the way that it showed rape policing done both as good as it could be and as bad as it could be... but that in both case it amounts to a secondary assault and that no one seems to be addressing how to change that. I thought the acting was outrageously good and that the casting couldn't have been better; as soon as ANY minor character showed up I was jolted with the "ooo they got THEM!" I felt battered after the first two episodes. I appreciated the program's willingness not to give the rapist a voice or any platform whatsoever; the moment of his strip search seemed appropriately cathartic. I just felt cheated that after so much honesty and clarity, we wind up with such an entirely optimistic ending and one that seemed, well, unbelievable. Even if it did happen! There were different and less maintain-the-status-quo endings to be had i think.
Anyways, this is incendiary subject matter and i feel it would be a better conversation than trading of paragraphs but i'm wondering if you had similar feelings.
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, October 17, 2019 10:30 PMSPOILERS CONTINUE DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED UNBELIEVABLE
yeah i had a quite different reaction! i was afraid that Marie was going to toss herself off the cliff after talking with Duvall, but instead she walked back to her car, and she was more or less ok. yeah, she was still alone in the world (which i can relate to) and had some heavy baggage, but she didn't toss herself off the cliff. and her confrontation with the cop who didn't believe her was clearly so shameful for him. i think the thing that struck me was that he, the guy who deeply fucked her life, DID seem to recognize his role in the system. that was actually hugely gratifying for me to see. in a world where we see powerful people sneering and howling to protect the careers and reputations of Their Boys even though Their Boys are rapists, it felt good to see a doubter squirm & repent. i thought he might kill himself too tbh.
haven't read the propublica thing yet -- but what the show illuminated for me personally was the very clear double-assault nature of this type of violent assault. first, you have the actual assault. then you have the assault of no one believing you/DARVO from people defending the assaulter. in this situation, the rapist had no defenders. not even himself. that was powerful and actually made the show easier to watch.
the casting was indeed excellent.
as stated, i thought singing "mack the knife" was quite tasteless under the circumstances but maybe that is dark humor that i don't get or just an oversight.
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, October 17, 2019 11:42 PM
and they did show the other cop that helped push the retraction just kind of blow it all off.
― Yerac, Thursday, October 17, 2019 11:46 PM
WHAT MORE SPOILERS OH MY GOD WHY HAVEN'T YOU STARTED A THREAD WELL I GUESS WE ARE IN A THREAD YOU MAKE A GOOD POINT
Honestly didn't even occur to me that Marie might kill herself on the beach! Obviously your take on he power dynamics is valid and I'm not sure what I wanted or expected... a horrible painful ending where everyone acknowledges that even when the bad guy goes down and justice is in some sense served that the system is equally culpable for generally allowing these sort of assaults to go unreported, uninvestigated and unwitnessed wasn't going to do anybody any good when the actual story does have clearer, less horrendous closure.
I guess I saw an opportunity to use this story to call for change in the way rapes are investigated, reported and in the way police and communities deal with victims and I'm not sure this ending did that at all. My sense was that the directors named the problem but then mostly acted like it was unavoidable. I would've liked more of cri de coeur than a general thumbs up to "good police work". But I can certainly understand how an ending in which repercussions for horrible actions are repaid with imprisonment amidst a great cast of strong, intelligent female leads might trump that concern for you. I guess what offended you about the mack the knife bit was what offended me about the larger, pro-police structure of the whole episode: I don't see how this pertains to the story I've been told up till now and it seems in bad taste.
in the propublica story, i think the other cop is either dead or retired by the time marie comes back so that was probably there to provide some narrative balance.
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, October 17, 2019 11:57 PM
I listened to the This American Life episode they did about the real life case in 2016, and it's pretty stunning that even after everything that happened the foster mom still thinks it's kind of Marie's fault for not acting the way she should have after being raped
― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Friday, October 18, 2019 7:53 PM
ugh, one way to remove her responsibility from what happened to Marie.
― Yerac, Friday, October 18, 2019 8:55 PM
the show writers went out of their way to show the humanity of pretty much all the female characters except for her.
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, October 18, 2019 9:01 PM
i did think the show did an excellent job of illustrating the lifelong reverberations of sexual assault, and that it actually takes a special sort of investigator to interview victims. it highlighted a lot of the failures of the system without being super obvious about it because they were highlighted by the way the two women investigators handled things in contrast to...everyone else.
it did a good job of dismantling elements of rape culture that seem extremely difficult for many people to grasp.
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Friday, October 18, 2019 9:03 PM
including the shitty foster mom
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Friday, October 18, 2019 9:04 PM
perhaps worth adding, shitty foster mom who made it clear that she too had been sexually assaulted
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Friday, October 18, 2019 9:28 PM
IME this is a generational thing.
― akm, Friday, October 18, 2019 9:38 PM
like....I saw my mother recently (she's 72 now) and she laid this bomb on me: that one of her friends had had a child in the late 60's and has maintained that she was raped. She also let it slip that my uncle or someone else may have been the father. and then my mother just said "she says she was raped but I don't believe that." She's still friends with this woman. They're in their 70's. This woman has said she was raped for over 40 years. And my mom still doesn't believe her? Maybe because she implicated her brother? I don't even fucking know. But there is a generation that looks at everything askance if it doesn't fit into their preconceived notions of how people should be.
― akm, Friday, October 18, 2019 9:40 PM
MORE UNBELIEVABLE SPOILERS
Just wanted to chime in that I binged this last night and today, because I wanted so badly to see Marie get some kind of win while she was drowning in a sea of people of couldn't or wouldn't offer the smallest bit of empathy for her.
What else I liked was how the series showed how much backbreaking, beach-combing work the detectives did to find the guy, picking up on the most tenuous threads that led to an enormous pool of suspects and still making sense of all that noise.
But all the same, I kind of agree with Ulysses, that the exceptional case of the system, that's so stacked against women in assault cases, might allow some kind of retroactive justice seems to justify the existence of the same system. OTOH, it does underline how badly the system also depends on empathy for it to have any semblance of serving the public -- in stark distinction of justice being blind. I don't know if it's an optimistic reading or a bittersweet reading, that something abstract like justice depends on people overcoming so many systemic biases, to spend so much time and energy struggling against and through the status quo, when in a better world it should just work.
I'm definitely going to read the PP story at some point, as the miniseries has a few moments that were clearly designed to educate viewers ("this is how Y-STRs work, young intern") and I want to know what's rooted in the actual case.
― HELLA FITZGERALD (Leee), Saturday, October 19, 2019 11:38 PM
ONE MORE SPOILER
One dangling thread is how the guy's encrypted drive remains encrypted, how the prosecutor seems absolutely indifferent about trying to crack that.
Oh and for a family that are both cops, the Duvalls have a hell of a nice spread.
― HELLA FITZGERALD (Leee), Saturday, October 19, 2019 11:58 PM
I kept wondering what happened to the encrypted drive as well. No answers on that was disappointing. Who knows what else that malevolent creep did.
― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Sunday, October 20, 2019 12:02 AM
It's a overused statement at this point but the whole time that Rose McGowan quote played in my head “The only perfect rape victim is a dead rape victim."
― Yerac, Sunday, October 20, 2019 1:36 AM
the ProPublica article that inspired the show was expanded into a book - "A False Report" - if anyone wants more background on the case
― Number None, Sunday, October 20, 2019 9:39 AM
i would actually! will hunt it down. Everyone should read the readily available propublica article; it's stunning how closely they stuck to the facts. Some of the dialogue is lifted verbatim!
and along the same lines RE: that encrypted hard drive via reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnbelievableNetflix/comments/d59o54/encrypted_hard_drive/
From the epilogue of the book:
"John Evans, the computer forensics expert] sent the file to the FBI's geek squad, the Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit of the Operational Technology Division. One of the most secretive branches of the agency, the cryptology unit had helped the National Security Administration comb through millions of emails. And its scientists, agents, and coders had helped numerous local law enforcement agencies with tough computer cases. But even the cryptologists could not break open the Wretch."
"On some days, when he is running a route high in the mountains, Bob Weiner's (the DA) thoughts will unexpectedly drift back to the Wretch. It has been years since O'Leary pleaded guilty. He is in prison for the rest of his life. He has never revealed the password. Weiner wonders what it could contain. 'Maybe there's information in there of a murder. I don't know,' Weiner says. 'My mind, periodically reverts back to 'What's going on, what is in there? I still think about it.'"
― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Sunday, October 20, 2019 8:28 PM