A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story
When I heard they were making a miniseries about the last woman executed in England I decided then and there that there would be no way I would watch this series. It would be too depressing. And then I decided to drop my BritBox subscription. I will never let a single day go to waste with a streaming subscription so I started to look for short shows to fill in this two week gap. After exhausting all the Agatha Christie I hadn't yet watched and hearing rave reviews about A Cruel Love, I caved. I blame Bessie Carter. I can do four episodes of about anything so I should have been able to handle this. Well, I should have stuck to my gut instincts. This was beyond depressing. A sort of fever dream of domestic abuse filmed with an almost Lynchian glamour of a woman battered and bloody and bruised. Yet there felt like there wasn't any grounding in reality. They just showed little vignettes of Ruth's life and her love affair with her "victim" David Blakely. Though I think "love" is a stretch. There was no love, cruel or otherwise here, it was people colliding into, using, and destroying each other in whatever way they could. The show seems to be wanting to say that it was the unspoken rules of society that Ruth dared to breach by aiming to better her life that lead to her death, which, while partially true, in that it lead to her being railroaded at trial, doesn't take into account her upbringing at all. She was raised to believe that all she deserved from life was abuse. She suffered at the hands of her father and then all her lovers, even the one "good guy" who basically turned this broken woman into a killer. And yet this is all told elliptically. In little flashes. The horrors of her childhood are mentioned in a throwaway line from her sister, who it should be noted was another victim of men having been raped and impregnated by their father. I just felt like this REAL LIFE STORY has something so important to say. It changed the law, as she was the last woman executed, and within a decade the death penalty was abolished. And yet the weight isn't there. It's more snippets of her degradation while still looking glamorous. There's no real history, what history I read about was thanks to the internet, and seriously, someone has to get onto how Ruth's mother was connected to the Cambridge Five. Now that's a true crime show I do want to watch. But this. This was a woman whose life was destroyed by men and her story is told and controlled by men. She doesn't really factor in until the end. She's about an eye for an eye and a stiff upper lip and not showing how her repeated abuse, her trauma, is what led her to this desperate act. She doesn't want to be seen as a victim and that is exactly how abusers get away with their crimes. They make their victims carry the blame and shame. Only at the end does she realize that she was sticking to a morality the others weren't playing by and by then it's too late to save herself. But maybe that's what makes this work, on some level, at least in the eyes of the reviewers who raved, because it was men who controlled, ruined, and then ended her life, and therefore, it's not really about her, it's about the patriarchy. Personally, I think it should have been about Ruth. But maybe I'm alone in this assessment.
Post a Comment