When the ‘corpus juris’ meets a corpus delicti: The appearance

Conclusion: “Tragic if not Ridiculous”

Nigel Andrews insightfully described Heavenly Creatures as “about panic in New Zealand’s answer to Metroland” generating the death-blow which was really “aimed at grown-up totems and taboos.”[138] In the words of Gurr and Cox, “the crime of the Murdering Girls struck Christchurch with cataclysmic force”.[139] Gurr and Cox’s rhetoric is revealing of then-current attitudes, being produced three years after the trial. Their chapter on the case is redolent with sneaking prejudice with regard to factors presumed relevant to the girls’ quasi-madness: it is noted that the Rieper-Parker menage produced a blue baby with a heart defect and “a mongoloid, a flat-faced, drooling imbecile, who had been placed in an institution”, and Juliet is described as having been “bomb-shocked in the blitz at the age of two.”[140] Other film critics have explored how Heavenly Creatures partakes to some extent in purveying the girls’ dizzying madness: Chris Watson has drawn attention to the ‘hysterisation’ of Juliet and Pauline’s behaviour in the film, noting Jackson’s recurrent use of “a swirling camera technique to suggest the transports of hysteria” which they undergo, and counterpointed “by incorporating romantic opera music.”[141] Watson shares Nicholas Reid’s belief that Heavenly Creatures pruriently constructs the girls as lesbians, arguing that the film concentrates “on the characters’ sexual behaviour as catalyst for, and cause of the murder”[142], possibly including Hilda Hulme’s liaison with Bill Perry as a criminogenic factor.
Jackson has been criticized for his use of mock-Gothic/serio-comic fantasy episodes (e.g. Diello executing Dr Bennett and the Anglican Vicar when visiting the Cashmere Sanitorium, and the scene in which Pauline’s parents die very mock-dramatically at their dining table) and for the richly-fantastic clay-mation Borovnian scenes which punctuate the film at several critical junctures. This criticism seems to me seriously misguided if we can view Heavenly Creatures as a broadly naturalistic exercise in exploring the Gothic imagination, so that the latter narrative pericopes stress Juliet and Pauline’s Fourth World envisionings, and the other sequences serve also as filmic alienation devices deployed to emphasize to cinemagoers just how intense and febrile their fantasies were. Such viewer alienation-awareness commenced towards the end of the Easter 1953 Port Levy episode after Juliet learned that her parents were about to abandon her again for four months. Juliet runs off hysterically up a nearby hill and when Pauline locates her crying friend there is lightning followed by bursts of bright sunshine and then a Monty Pythonesque cloud-parting (cf. Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail [1975]) which is succeeded by the wholesale transformation of the quotidian Banks Peninsula landscape into a humanized Northern Hemisphere world of English lawns, garden statuary, formal flower beds, a grazing unicorn and several fantastically large Monarch butterflies arching and swooping around them. This visually impossible moment – which unfolds as the girls cling together in their dowdy print-smocks and 50s cardies – is Peter Jackson’s very potent means of informing and instructing viewers that Pauline and Juliet are henceforth in the grip of a folie à deux/simultanee mindset. After this clever sequence, Jackson piles on an impressive array of images which amount to an adroit handling of their shared imaginal world (e.g. the dissolve between Juliet and Pauline standing on the Ilam balcony and their digital transformation into plasticine figures holding Borovnian goblets, or in the visual linkage made between the ring and the fantasy execution of John the boarder on the Borovnian drawbridge and that of the pink stone and the real and very untidy execution of Honora in Victoria Park on the Cashmere Hills). Another vivid instance of the slippage (or loose boundaries) between a heightened and darkly romantic imagination and reality emerges when Bill Perry arrives at Ilam, via the clever juxtaposition (through quick dissolves) of Juliet’s fantasy of a terminally ill man on an ambulance stretcher with the boring ordinariness of the hearty man’s real arrival in a stylish car. Expressly Gothic tropes are employed, one might wickedly suggest in an ironic counterpoint to the gothic nature of the impending arrest and trial process (e.g. the night of storm and thunder when Dr Hulme visits Mrs Rieper and the flash of lightning which plays across Henry Hulme’s face as he nervously adverts to Pauline’s “unwholesome attachment” to his daughter). Jackson proffers a deeply sensitive portrayal of the girls’ joint trauma, their excitability and despair, as in the scenes when they run at high pitch from a screening of The Third Man and are later shown bathing, tearfully discussing how Pauline can join Juliet in South Africa, or when Jackson cross-cuts between Pauline’s monochrome dream of ecstatically running onto an ocean liner with Juliet to join the Hulmes and Juliet’s powerful singing of Puccini’s ‘Sono Andati’(La Bohème) on the balcony at Ilam in images tinted with a rich red hue (powerfully suggestive both of their attachment and of the blood about to be spilled to secure it). Both of these linked events occur on the night of 21 June 1954 , their last night of innocence and freedom before they succumbed, with infinitely tragic results, to acting on their joint compulsion psychosis the next day. As Colin Wilson has pointed out, a study of most crimes
gives the impression that the ‘values’ that led the murderer to make his act of choice were based upon absurd miscalculation. The murderer is usually absurdly confused about the pressures of life in society, about the meaning of his own life and in general. He is probably more confused than most of us; but it should be recognized that he only suffers from a more acute form of the bewilderment that we all feel in the face of existence.[143]
It should be obvious from the foregoing that Heavenly Creatures is a bold and brave cinematic incursion into the realms of existential psychology (with its finessed probing into the pathos of life for Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker from 1952-54) and a robust interrogation of the meta-narratives of Western parenthood and filiation as well as a superb cinematic evocation of Wilson’s profound point that the M’Naghten Rules take insufficient cognisance of human mental complexity – that if we broaden our perceptions to admit our “total ignorance” of human nature, the line blurs so that this ignorance “does not constitute insanity; but insanity is only an extreme and distorted form of this ignorance.”[144] Jackson depicts Hulme and Parker as daughters of wrath whose orgè , or loss of self-command, led to the painful and joint lesson that parenthood casts an irredeemable spell upon its offspring. But, beyond his film’s extraordinarily empathic presentation of Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme’s shared existential dilemma in 1954, it was Jackson’s genius to have elided the legal process from his moving portrait, thereby maintaining our focus upon the girls’ (and Mrs Parker’s) tragic plight, which serves ,radically, to query the conduct, field assumptions and outcome of the legal process which they underwent. But, perhaps most usefully, Heavenly Creatures highlights, and implicitly indicts, the unsettling counter-violence of that legal system and what Peter Goodrich has termed “the indicative silence of the legal text as to its role as discourse, as intervention into the order of discourse and the hierarchy of social meanings”[145] which it upholds. In Dr Medlicott’s all-too-adequate words, “Comments [about the trial] from throughout New Zealand and overseas almost unanimously found the normalising of two very abnormal girls tragic if not ridiculous.” [146]