TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
How 'Christine' portrays blood and guts in the newsroom
Based on the real events of perhaps the first-ever on-air TV suicide in history, Christine tells the story of Christine Chubbuck, a female reporter in the 1970s who took her boss’ demand for “blood and guts” journalism all too literally.
Change Size
Rebecca Hall in Christine (2016). (Borderline Films/File)
B
ased on the real events of perhaps the first-ever on-air TV suicide in history, Christine tells the story of Christine Chubbuck, a female reporter in the 1970s who took her boss’ demand for “blood and guts” journalism all too literally. Going into the film knowing this may feel like being equipped with the ultimate spoiler, but the film’s first hour and a half, which details the several unremarkable weeks before Christine’s death, is a lot more interesting to watch knowing where it’s all heading.
Read also: 'Adnan's Story' digs deeper than 'Serial'
Given its premise, screenwriter Craig Shilowich and director Antonio Campos easily could have crafted an exploitative whodunit, or in this case, a who-made-her-do-it. Instead, her story is told with sensitivity, nuance and empathy. Many of these redeeming features are thanks to the performance of Rebecca Hall, who in her portrayal of Christine enthrallingly channels an alien trapped in a human body trying to navigate through a world whose parameters and rules she can’t quite figure out.
While the film details its protagonist’s troubles outside the office – Christine’s inability to connect with her new-age, hippie mother and her new boyfriend, and the discovery of an ovarian cyst – the focus is clearly on her workplace. Here she is subjected to a litany of humiliations, the main one being her harried and uncompromising boss’ order to do less serious, “issues” journalism and dig up sensationalist stories to raise the station’s ratings. “If it bleeds it leads,” he tells his team at one point, echoing the familiar journalistic credo. “Your problem is that you are a feminist,” he informs Christine in a later scene. But ultimately, it is her depression and social awkwardness that grate all of these indignities against each other into the cacophony of shame and neuroticism that pushes the film to its climax.
The period aspects of the film are impeccable: the 1970s newsroom, the fashion, the songs on the radio and the casual chauvinism of the media’s “old boys”. But its message about the difficulties faced by journalists who aspire to meaning and integrity in an industry that survives by pandering to public tastes remains as relevant as ever today.
Read also: Ending fake news, journalism's nemesis
Perhaps even more so now that the drop in newspaper advertising has gutted the business model that previously gave important but non-populist journalism breathing room.
Although Christine shows all of the difficulties its titular character faces in her professional and personal life, it doesn’t feel like an equation of simple emotional arithmetic: “With suffering x plus oppression y times by indignity z, of course she killed herself.”
Thankfully, its creators were aware that no suicide can be explained simply, and because of this it succeeds in humanizing a figure who is only famous for her very public death. Of course, as Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film: “Whether or not it is representative of the real Christine Chubbuck is another question.”
---------------
Interested to write for thejakartapost.com? We are looking for information and opinions from experts in a variety of fields or others with appropriate writing skills. The content must be original on the following topics: lifestyle ( beauty, fashion, food ), entertainment, science & technology, health, parenting, social media, and sports. Send your piece to community@jakpost.com. Click here for more information.
