Chronic Murmuring

Capturing the Friedman's

When I came home today and put Miles down for his nap, I curled up on the couch and watched Capturing the Friedmans. It left me in a deep, dark funk - although I had already been in a mildly dark funk before that, so I doubt that it was really the movie that did it to me. My heart broke several times, though, during the movie. I went from believing, early on, that there was plausible reasons to doubt that Jessie and Arnold Friedman were guilty, to doubting that earlier doubt and realizing that there were strong reasons to believe that, indeed, they were guilty. I also began to suspect that Arnie Friedman had indeed sexually molested his three sons - especially when it came out at the end that he had raped his younger brother when he was, himself, a young man.

This is how I experienced the movie - by moving from certainty to doubt, back and forth. My mind was filled with questions at the end. How is it possible for this kind of satanic, torturous sex ring to exist each day, for so long, and no one tells and no parent ever finds out? One of the alleged victims describes horrific scenes and grotesque games the children were forced to play. The things the now-grown-man said Arnie and Jesse did to them sounded like something from Caligula. How can something like that go on, and the obvious changes your son would go through not become apparent to you as a parent? It just seems too incredible.

Still, as the film progressed, evidence of Arnold's deep perversity is revealed. You learn that Arnold raped his brother as a young man, and of very weird things his mother did to both his brother and himself (having sex with numerous men in the same room with the boys while they slept, for instance). You learn that Arnold admitted to sexually molesting two small boys on at least one occasion, as he admitted to doing so in a memoir. You also know that he was addicted to child pornography. Then you begin to doubt the defiant spirit of the boys who insist their father and brother are innocent. When you see David Friedman, one of the sons, reading a passage from his father's memoir in which his father admitted to sexually abusing two boys, Friedman becomes blindly defensive. He insists that it's impossible to determine what his father meant by that sentence. Impossible? It's as clear as day. He's admitted to pedophilia and sex abuse in those sentences, yet David Friedman has no ability or no desire to see the truth. He struck me as trapped in a web of self-deception, which caused me to wonder just what had happened to those boys growing up in Arnold Friedman's household.

In one of the outtakes, you learn about a third suspect who was tried with the other two, but who turned state witness against Arnold and Jesse. Then you learn that while in prison, Jesse Friedman was interviewed by Geraldo Rivera and admitted to abusing the children, as well as to being abused himself by his father. And the attorney struck me as firmly believing both men were guilty.

Yet, there's still so much strange things which suggest, at the very least, inappropriate investigative practices on the part of the police. For instance, Jesse's attorney reads a transcript from a secretly recorded interrogation of one of the alleged victims, and it's astonishing the things the police said to try and get the boy to admit he was abused. There was no physical evidence; there was only the confessions of numerous kids. Yet, based on the limited (and biased) access the audience has to those confessions, it's suggested repeatedly that these confessiosn are not at all clear. For one, they often seemed to have resulted from zealous police officers coaxing children to confess. It also is shown that confessions came out only after a psychologist used hypnosis.

If Arnold had abused his three boys, then it might explain why they hated their mother so much, and came to his defense with such blind zeal. From what I hear, that is ironically not at all an uncommon reaction among sexually and physically abused children. They often channel their hurt and anger towards the mother, who they believe should've protected them from their father. And then strangely, they'll fight tooth and nail to defend that very same dad. That part, I don't understand, but I hear it's nonetheless common.

Still, the documentary took me on a long journey of empathy and belief towards the Friedmans, to gradually peeling back layer after layer, and causing me to doubt that initial incredulity towards the police's official story. And that was a strange experience. Like Stevie, the documentary caused me to empathize with a child molester, but it could only do that by first bringing me close to them, and causing me to know them. And then when I was left, in the end, believing these two men, father and son, might've actually serially raped all these children, I was speechless. I was left ultimately looking at myself. You cannot watch movies like Stevie or Capturing the Friedmans and not have them expose you in the process. There's a humanizing quality to both movies - they take people we would immediately and without regret label as monsters if we read about them in the paper, and then causes us to see them as genuinely human. Yet, they're still monsters, right? Of course. But they're also still human. I suppose this is exactly the situation God is in when he looks upon each of us.