The public lifespan of Antonio Campos’s 2016 film Christine is eerily similar to that of its subject: appearing with a sudden uptick of lurid interest, at least among critics, followed by an equally sharp descent into obscurity. Since then it has taken on an occult quality as opposed to a cult quality. It has not hung around in the mass memory or inspired any kind of collective obsession à la Joker, Midsommar, Promising Young Woman, or even May. If you made a meme out of it few would recognize it, which is probably for the better anyway. In order to qualify for a “cult” following, a film must not only be outré, which is easy enough, but it must have some validating properties for the right audience at the right time. Even the most bizarre and discomfiting film ever made must please.
Christine presents itself as a conventional biopic1 about a woman whose notoriety is derived from a heinous act. It was well-received upon release; it even inspired some Discourse. It currently exists on Netflix where no one watches it. Should you do otherwise, though, you come away with the feeling of being let in on some terrible secret. There are some good contextual reasons for that feeling, but even more generally, Christine is not a film that people are drawn to, feel ennobled by, or are inspired to convene with other viewers in mutual appreciation in the typical sense. You will feel like you are the only one who’s seen it, and you carry the secret with you, and you may be drawn to it again, many times, even if no greater understanding articulates itself.
The bare facts: On July 15, 1974, Christine Chubbuck went live on the Sarasota, FL television station where she worked as a field reporter and talk show host, read some news items, and concluded by putting a .38 revolver behind her right ear and pulling the trigger. She prefaced her act with a statement in her copy: “In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide.” Station management thought she’d pulled a prank. She died later at the hospital.
Ironically, Chubbuck’s death was not rebroadcasted, having been stopped at the source. The footage remains locked away, untouched and unwatched, by the studio owner and Chubbuck’s brother. Though references to Chubbuck appear in media moral tracts, novelty guides to “strange deaths,” and the occasional tabloid TV special. In a cultural atmosphere that finds any reason to drop a female cadaver into the middle of any situation, the Christine Chubbuck incident had been surprisingly stifled since it occurred. Contrast this with R. Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania State Treasurer, who in 1987, having been found guilty of bribery (through perjured testimony), called a press conference, read a much longer statement, and shot himself before live cameras. The footage spread far and wide and made the humble, “too trusting” politician an ironic hero-saint of Gen X. Songs were written about him. T-shirts bare his image. “Tasteless or not, [Dwyer’s suicide] was a dazzling gesture,” Jim Goad wrote in ANSWER Me! magazine in 1993. “Rather than rot away in the pen with fifty dicks up his ass, he went out blazing, theatrically, on his terms.”
Their distinct legacies make more sense when you consider their contexts, which admittedly I didn’t when I originally wrote about this. Dwyer’s dilemma is clear cut. He was a state-level official whose reputation was gutted by public scandal and the unfair trial that followed. Chubbuck was little-known outside of Florida. The only context anyone had to go on was what she provided at the last possible minute, and even that was still rather abstract. But such a self-administered death, more common than that of Dwyer’s, always leaves speculative blank spaces of considerable size. The general consensus has disregarded Chubbuck’s own words in favor of, essentially, boy problems. “[T]he crux of the situation,” WXLT news director Mike Simmons speculated of Chubbuck in 1977, “was that she was a 29-year-old girl who wanted to be married and she wasn’t.” These discrepancies in motive, in addition to the public nature of the act, makes for an enticing subject, which Campos approaches without tilting his material toward either macabre martyr or cautionary tale.
When I say that Christine is “conventional,” I speak in objective rather than critical terms. It does nothing audacious or unexpected. It does not “transgress” form or “subvert” tropes, at least not in any obvious or didactic way that some critics expect or pine for. This textual mode of filmmaking does not interest Campos compared to pure character study. In fact, Christine proves the enduring effectiveness of staying in that well-travelled lane and letting the material dictate the course.
Christine is a character study first of Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), but also of the world around her and its other inhabitants: Chubbuck’s dreamy lead anchor (Michael C. Hall), her codependent mother (J. Smith-Cameron), the hypertensive, chauvinistic station manager (playwright Tracy Letts), and the Watergate-era burnout more generally. In fact, it’s tempting to see it as something like Anchorman if Letts had scripted it, flashing its brutal pathos from underneath its comedic trench coat. The Ron Burgundy swagger is evident in Michael C. Hall’s anchor, but the ludicrous bluster is weighted down with an existential unease that clings to self-help nostrums and fits of introspection. And Rebecca Hall’s reflective Veronica Corningstone has, to say the least, not so uplifting, let alone empowering, an arc.
The film opens with Chubbuck alone in the studio taping herself giving a mock-interview to Richard Nixon. Hall’s Chubbuck is already one of evident intelligence, deep curiosity, and high professional standards. Chubbuck’s stories veer from the lighthearted to the wonkish. They are well liked as “positive” and “think pieces,” but are tacked on at the end of broadcasts in favor of more sensational stories, usually auto wrecks and petty crimes. Her hunger for advancement is entirely in keeping with her colleagues and her generation. But Chubbuck’s uniqueness comes from the teeming contradictions that obstruct the light of any of those attributes.
Her professional life is one of strident self-confidence and destructive self-doubt. She frets over her body language and reverses editorial choices at the literal last minute. Her job is reliant on screen presence even as she possesses remedial social skills. She is aloof with the colleagues who actively befriend her and clumsy with those she wants to befriend. She has next to no journalistic instincts. When she tries to appease her boss’s “if it bleeds it leads” demands, her results show like avant-garde PBS. “It was raw, and the man had an irony to him,” Chubbuck says to Letts of one of her misfired scoops.
Her personal life tugs violently between hyper-competent adulthood and regressive adolescence. She decorates her room like a teenager, with framed posters of Gordon Lightfoot and The Carpenters. She lives with her mother, whom she calls by her first name. Their interactions veer from chattiness to browbeating to petulance. She is painfully shy and romantically inexperienced. Watching Chubbuck faceplant whenever she tries to connect with the wider world is generally disheartening. A self-help exercise turns into a painstaking admission of every setback she’s experienced and every reason why she cannot overcome them. When she finally admits that she is a virgin turning 30, her partner in the exercise stumbles at the admission. When the final advice is to “manage your expectations,” Chubbuck looks somewhere in the realm between perplexed and inconsolable.
“There was a haunting melody in Chris,” Chubbuck’s mother told Sally Quinn for the extensive 1974 Washington Post feature on her daughter that served as the basis for Christine’s narrative and characterization. Christine Chubbuck “had no real friends,” Quinn wrote. “She could seem haughty, distant, standoffish really. Yet when people began to know her she evidenced such a crying need for a completely committed relationship that it drove them away for fear they couldn’t give her what she wanted.”
Footage of the real-life Chubbuck just doing her job is almost nonexistent online2. But there is enough elsewhere—in old TV specials and still photos—to show an elegant, cerebral comportment that earned comparisons to Susan Sontag. Hall’s Chubbuck is headstrong and ambitious, but her grace is largely absent, replaced by a badly postured, perpetual discomfort, like a freshman reliving her first day of school on a loop. Desperation and nervousness take up the most emotional space. It may be an internal rather than strictly literal portrayal, one that may strike at the center of many people who watch the film and feel the same internality, but also one that expands beyond the narrow assumptions that followed Chubbuck in the wake of her death.
The “humanizing” root of Rebecca Hall’s performance of a woman in the final throes of depression is how it simultaneously captures how depressives often see themselves: as sentient corrosives dissolving everyone around them. Among the most wrenching scenes in the film are the three puppet shows she gives to disabled children that visually chart her increasing isolation. They decline from charmingly stilted and didactic, like her broadcasts, to solipsistic, with Hall’s face taking up more and more of the frame with each scene. The audience, in the final moment is clear. In the end, Chubbuck hides her ill-gotten pistol in one of the puppets.
Just as brilliant is the film’s counter-narrative depicting what depressives are often oblivious to: the pervasiveness of misery. Sarasota was a fringe market with a low-rated network affiliate. The studio is drab, the management is frayed, and the staff is mediocre. There’s something about “1974” and “Florida” that gives off an acute psychic toxicity; and to such an extent that the prospect of moving to Baltimore hits every character like a golden ticket in Willy Wonka. So potent is this atmosphere, and so heightened is Chubbuck’s despair within it, that the inevitable recreation of the main event, done in unflinching, matter-of-fact detail, is not as disturbing as the miserable succession of precursors.
There were two ways through which Christine could have gained a wide audience. One was as a dark fable of modern womanhood. The film makes explicit and implicit comment on the limitations imposed upon Chubbuck by gender prejudice. She is haunted throughout by the televisual images of male anchors reporting on Watergate, something she could only pretend to do. She is passed over unthinkingly for the Baltimore job in favor of a “firecracker” sports reporter. Her struggles to gain satisfaction as a romantic partner and potential mother are additionally exacerbated by an ovarian cyst. But even with all these hinderances gone, the reality of Chubbuck’s inability to get out of her own way would persist. No gender has sole dominion over repressing your struggles and lashing out at the people trying to help you, refusing resources for treatment that are well within your reach, or struggling at a job to which you are ill-suited. An additional gut-punch to Chubbuck comes when the exact kind of story Letts has been asking her to do gets filed by her closest friend, a female camera operator. The dark feminist fable is more accurately, and less appealingly, the origin story of Human Resources.
The second way was true crime. Christine was conceived, produced, and released alongside the explosion of podcasts and documentaries that brought mood and nuance to the tabloid fixation on everyday mayhem that Chubbuck deplored. The film theoretically had all the elements to qualify for a humane, elevated dissection of an act of violence. It was beautifully made, and empathetic to its subject without smoothing over her grisly circumstances or the complexities of her character. But like cult films, prestige true crime needs validating properties to draw an audience, even at the expense of the actual crimes and their victims. True crime remains a device for projection of fears, hopes, obsessions, and prejudices rather than revelation of any particular truth. A mystery that is difficult or impossible to solve is a crucial prism of that projection. Christine has no mystery, is too individualized for mass projection, and any unanswered questions it does pose are ones that people would prefer to leave that way.
What these two approaches share is a quest for revisionism. They each seek to upend a constricting worldview enabled through your prejudices. The generic popstar is a revolutionary stifled by a male-dominated music industry. The wrongly convicted murderer is under the thumb of a corrupt, incompetent legal system. For all of its intricate characterization, Christine isn’t actually all that interested in upending anything. You go into the film knowing that it is about a woman who wants to die and who does so in a public and cruel fashion, and it gives you no reason to think any differently upon leaving it. Not that that jeopardizes its merits. “Wanting to die,” as distinct from depression and even suicidality generally, is as a valid but sporadically handled subject for art; a genuine taboo in a society that is in short supply of them. Even there, Christine has no desire for subversion. Its aim is clarity as to what happened, the conditions that led to it, and the consequences that arose from it. The Chubbuck suicide footage may be one of the most sought-after artifacts of any era, but you come away from its recreation knowing it’s right where it belongs. “[Chris’s] last act was the most selfish thing she ever did,” her mother told Quinn, with a disappointment you more or less understand. “She brought her death into other people’s homes.”
I would have thought she would have swam out in the ocean as far as she could go. She was an extraordinarily strong swimmer. She could have gone three or four miles. The water was her friend. It could easily have been her final resting place.
I guess I’m obligated to mention the more experimental twin, also released in 2016, Kate Plays Christine, a meta-documentary about Kate Lyn Sheil’s effort to portray the doomed newscaster. I’ve never seen it in full and it’s never been available whenever I’ve checked. Still, I’ve seen enough to be wary of its self-consciousness; though given that these times are also painfully self-conscious, its arguably more abysmal obscurity is curious.
There are, of course, postings on Archive.org and elsewhere claiming to be the authentic suicide video (or its audio), which I’m obviously not going to share one way or the other.