Peter Jackson | Heavenly Creatures / 1994

enemy of the people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson (screenplay), Peter Jackson (director) Heavenly Creatures / 1994

 

Based on the real-life murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954, in which two girls, aged 16 and 15, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme killed Pauline’s mother by bludgeoning her over the head. The murder was trumpeted in all the papers as the girls were described as ruthless child-villains.

     The truth, which Peter Jackson attempts to portray in his 1994 film, was far more interesting and complex and involves the girl’s relationship beginning in 1952, when the beautiful Juliet transfers from the Bahamas and elsewhere to the Christchurch school where the working class Pauline is enrolled.

     The younger of the girls, Juliet (brilliantly played in this film in her first major movie role by Kate Winslet) just 13 years of age is well-traveled, sophisticated, and knowledgeable, taking out time in her very first class to correct her French teacher’s grammar, immediately catapulting her, as she probably has been throughout her young years, into the domain of the outsider where Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) sits brooding.

     The girls immediately discover that both have had sickly childhoods, Juliet suffering from different lung difficulties and Pauline needing serious operations to her legs, the scars of which impress her new friend. As they sit out gym class, both find they also share an obsession with the then popular movie tenor, Mario Lanza, hot from The Toast of New Orleans (1950), The Great Caruso (1951), Because You’re Mine (1952), and The Student Prince (1954).

      Both girls are highly intelligent and display a dark sense of wit, but Juliet, in particular, pulls  Pauline into her far more well-off world, with educated, open-minded parents—her father Henry (Clive Merrison) is a professor and her mother Hilda (Diana Kent) is a psychiatrist—and into her highly imaginative romantic world in which she argues for “the Fourth World,” a heaven without Christians that celebrates music and art.

      As the girls paint, together write a long romantic novel whose characters they play out in their own lives, and create plasticine figurines of the characters of their imaginary kingdom Borovnia, both girls imagine that they actually are, at moments, in that fourth dimension, a world of such beauty and splendor that it is indescribable to all others.

     At about this same time, Pauline receives a diary book for Christmas from her poor parents and begins to write a series of diaries that expresses their private world and were later used to convict her and Juliet of the murder. All of the spoken narrative and many actual lines in the film were taken from Pauline’s diaries.

      Jackson, as his later Lord of the Rings trilogy makes clear, was the perfect director to create the fantastical worlds of these young “heavenly creatures.” Indeed, their world, as they run endlessly through space both indoors and out, does seem almost heavenly. The talents of both girls are suddenly drawn out by the other as they together fall romantically in love, the beautiful Juliet playing the Princess and Pauline playing her Prince consort.

      At one point, Juliet even gives birth, played out quite convincingly with a pillow, in which she produces a royal son who unfortunately proves his mettle by killing off many in the court in an unpredictable attempt to protect both his mother and father.

       As a year passes, the girls in puberty begin to realize their actions of love in a manner than more closely parallels lesbian love, which disturbs Juliet’s father enough that he pays a visit to Pauline’s mother Honora (Sarah Peirse), who terrified by the news sends her daughter to a physician recommended by Dr. Hulme, who typical of the profession of the day, immediately describes her daughter’s obsessions as an unnormal one (whispering the word homosexual), that perhaps she will grow out of or, if not, must be corrected by other methods.

     The ignorant working woman is worried enough by day to day living to know how to help her daughter escape the strange “affliction.”

      When Juliet is diagnosed with an infection of pneumonia in one lung, both their parents seem to feel that they prayers have been answered as the girls are necessarily separated. But the situation merely intensifies the girls’ love for each other, as they write each other daily in both their own voices and those of their fictional characters. Juliet, moreover, locked away in a clinic with other sick individuals, with her parents choosing this moment to take an extended vacation together, is so totally isolated that her entire attention is now focused on “Paul” and she has long before renamed Pauline.

      During this same period, a male boarder at the Parker home, John (Jed Brophy) is attracted to the chubby teenage girl who made her own bedroom in a family outhouse, and one night sneaks out to snuggle up in her bed, Pauline being so amazed that a boy might be attracted to her that she accepts and even encourages his rape.

     Now Honora and her husband are faced with even further terrors and their newly enforced restrictions only further turn Pauline against them, particularly her mother whom, in comparing her coarse manners with those of Juliet’s mother, she grows to hate.

      When Pauline even describes the boy’s attraction to her, Juliet grows so jealous that she gives up all heterosexual intentions and grows into an even deeper lesbian-like love with Juliet. Whether or not their shared bathing situations, bedtime snuggling, kissing, and perhaps further sexual explorations can truly be described as lesbian is open to question, since both girls also still fantasize about males making love to them, Lanza of course, but even the hideous Orson Welles whose horrific behavior in The Third Man (1949) haunts but also excites their sexual imaginations.

      There is no doubt, like many young girls of their age, they lived a full sexual life, but frankly playing out their Borovnian fantasies with out-sized plasticine figures, as Jackson and his special effects co-workers Richard Taylor and George Port do may result in visual wonderment for some, but for me seemed just to be silly. There is no reason to suspect that the girls imaginatively kept their court in the form of their plastic figurines. Surely they transformed them, through their imaginations into handsome, colorful living figures.

      But if the girls might have remained somewhat innocent about real sexual events, the world around them did not spare them. Even as Juliet’s parents return and any normality, such as it might be, is restored, without them even knowing it the girls’ beloved father and for Pauline fatherly model is fired from his professorship and given until the end of the year to find a new position. Alas, the reasons for this action remain vague, something which I wish the film at looked at more carefully.

     The film does, however, look quite specifically at the behavior of Juliet’s beloved mother, for Pauline the representative of all her own mother can never be, has been leading some of her male psychiatric patients to her own bed, ultimately even suggesting one of them, Bill Perry (Peter Elliott) move into their house for recuperation. When Juliet discovers the two, Bill and her saintly mother, in bed together she threatens to tell her father, only to be told that her father already knows and the two are planning eventually to divorce.

      As if that were not enough, the Hulmes soon reveal to their daughter and her friend that her father is returning to England and the daughter is being sent off to South Africa to lives with a relative.

      In short, both girls’ life and love is simultaneously shattered in numerous ways. And even their plots to escape together before the dreaded day fail when Pauline discovers she cannot obtain a passport so that she might escape with Juliet to Hollywood without her mother’s signature.

    For Pauline in particular, but since the girls now almost share minds, for Juliet as well, Honora becomes the symbol of almost everything that stands in their way. The result is not so much planned but almost inevitable, the reality played out in shocking detail—the first instance in which the camera has taken us out of their perspective—as they hit the mother over the head with a brick enveloped in a woman’s stocking again and again.

      With the proof of Pauline’s diaries, the girls were both tried for murder, but their convictions as minors lasted only 5 years each, released on the condition that they would never see one another again.

      Pauline disappeared from sight and has not been heard from since. Juliet moved to Scotland where she became a murder mystery writer under the pseudonym of Anne Parey. Jackson and Walsh did not attempt to contact Parey nor track down Pauline, choosing to allow them their peace, however they have come to it.

       Heavenly Creatures may not, ultimately, be a tale that reveals much about the so-called lesbian relationship of these two individuals, but it certainly deals with their queerness, representing them as the ultimate outsiders, urban “goths” long before they came into existence.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).