There is no such thing as Stockholm Syndrome. That phrase was created in a time when society was much more black-and-white in our thinking about good and evil, before the days of CSI and Luther educated the masses about the complex intricacies of man's inhumanity to man. People develop relationships with their longtime captors because we are human beings and we make connections with other human beings, no matter the circumstances. I first learned this when I wrote a story about the infamous child abductor and rapist Kenneth Parnell, who snatched Steven Staynor from a street corner and kept him for many horrible years. The TV show I Know My First Name Is Steven was based on that case.
Parnell's lawyer told me that after he was arrested, one of the first things Staynor wanted to know was how Parnell was doing. I was dumbfounded. But when I finally met and got to know Parnell, who was living freely in North Berkeley, I too began a connection with him that was at first fueled by my total curious repulsion and then something strangely more tender. This was a pathetic, sad old bastard with no friends. He liked to watch the military procedural Jag, (which I did too, albeit out of some highfalutin lefty-hipster irony. His reasons were much more rooted in his love of star David James Elliot, whose character was nicknamed "Harm." What a great fucking metaphor.)
I wanted a good story to file, no doubt about that — "Inside the Monster," it was to be called — but at Christmastime I also wanted to make him some gingerbread men in the shape of Navy Seals.
So when I finally watched Aquarius, the new show starring David Duchovny on NBC, them old-tyme feelins began creeping up. The show seems to take place where Mad Men left off, just at that precipice between the three-martini-lunch automatons and the brown-acid gobblers tuning in, turning on, and dropping out bifurcated into two Americas. The show works wonderfully overall, despite the obligatory shots of chicks in halter tops and headbands dancing ethereally with their hands twisting imaginary macramé soul sculptures to the strains of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."
The plot of Aquarius revolves around a 16-year-old ingénue named Emma who's disaffected by her upper-middle-class home life and gets caught up with Charles Manson when he was still a crap musician in L.A., wholly focused on becoming "bigger than the Beatles."
He chooses to court her into his cult because once upon a time, her dad was his "failure" lawyer. (One thing Manson can hold is a grudge. The Tate murders happened in the house that was once owned by Terry Melcher, the producer who told Charlie his music sucked.) Duchovny's cop character is given the task of finding her and extracting her from the Manson Family. We see her as basically a child being taken in by Manson's trippy guru talk, the same BS that all cults offer, which is the idea that "you aren't the problem, it's society, man." She's brainwashed, or Stockholmed, or, if you buy my theory, simply connecting, prima-to-primate. No one wants to be alone.
This connection on the show is especially poignant to me because I have been following the life of ex-Family member and murderer Leslie Van Houten for years. Her parole hearings are regularly aired whenever they occur. She's now 65, with gentle eyes and the aura of a woman who would probably be an SPCA volunteer if she were not incarcerated. She'd be the woman behind you at Bi-Rite, stocking up on organic kale and Humboldt Fog cheese, smiling at your toddler. She sits at her hearings, slightly hunched and rueful — the model prisoner. Her sadness permeates whatever essential self she once had before she was taken in by Charlie Manson.
To me, she is Emma. I want David Duchovny to come and take her away. I want this show, through the power of television, to perhaps let the world see her as a victim, too.
But mostly, I want to bake her gingerbread cookies.
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