Television
Fly on the lens
Martyn Harris
The fly-on-the-wall documentary, the drama-doc and the docu-fiction are all rou- tine stuff these days, but The Selling of a Serial Killer (Channel 4, Thursday, 9.30 p.m.) brought a new twist, which we shall call the fly-on-the-lens technique.
One small pleasure of TV reviewing is to spot sound-booms as they swing across the picture, or the technician in headphones crouched beside the newsreader's desk. For this programme, however, which was about Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute who shot dead seven men in Florida, the TV tech- nology was all up front. In a way it was the programme, since the story turned on the way media pressure had turned murders into a circus.
Nick Broomfield, the producer-director, in Sony earphones, with a ponderous tape machine swinging from his waist, was sel- dom off-camera. All the squalid, untidy business of haggling over interview fees, of handing over the cash, of meetings that fail to happen and phone calls that are never answered was there on film. It was a TV version of what 1970s magazines called 'New Journalism', and though it can be self-indulgent and cumbersome there are stories, like this one, where it works well.
The premise of New Journalism is that you can sometimes bring the reader closer to an event by abandoning the formal objectivity of the traditional news reporter and making the writer part of the story, recording his or her sensations, emotions and confusions. 'Objectivity' in news after all is largely a sham. The 'straight news story' in the Guardian is very different from a straight news story in the Telegraph. It can be more honest to let the reader adjust for the limitations and prejudices of the reporter by placing him 'in the frame'.
As his own fly-on-the-lens Broomfield did not grandstand, and kept an admirably level tone through his interviews with assorted low-lifers, murderers and born- again basket-cases. Aileen Wuornos herself was abandoned by her mother as a child, and abused by her father who, when Aileen was 13, was sent to prison for sodomising a seven-year old. Aileen became a prostitute at 14, and began murdering her clients in her thirties, when she was living with her lesbian lover Tyrea Moore. This last was a tough-faced old bull-dyke who encouraged Aileen to go out hooking for strangers on the Florida highways. She knew about the murders and was a joint suspect with Aileen, but got herself off the hook by grassing on her lover.
Aileen herself claimed the murders were all in self-defence, though seven does seem to be pushing it a bit. 'Self-defence is self- defence,' she told a deadpan Broomfield. 'I don't care if it was a hundred I killed.' Cer- tainly her first victim was a convicted rapist — a fact which her incompetent lawyer did not point out in court, which omission led directly to her death sentence. She was then befriended by a born-again Christian wolf-breeder, Arlene Pralle, who legally adopted her and supplied her with a wacko lawyer called Steve Glazer who kept a life- like stuffed psychopath on his porch to scare away the drug fiends.
In an interesting variation on the usual roles of mother and lawyer, Pralle and Glazer persuaded Aileen to plead guilty in her next three murder trials. `Ga-ad has forgiven her for what she has done,' explained Pralle. 'Our state has the death penalty, so why not GO FOR IT? I mean, WOW! She could be home with Jesus in a couple years.' Glazer screwed $10,000 out of Broomfield for an interview with Pralle which never happened, while bent cops did deals with Hollywood studios over the film rights. Wuornos herself, said Broomfield later, 'was the sanest, most responsible per- son we met.' It was half a dozen Elmore Leonard novels rolled into one, and I loved it.
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