Was It Good For The Gays: ‘Heavenly Creatures’

If you’re going to make a movie about queer people, you’re likely going to get a divisive response. Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it provide an accurate cross-section of the diverse LGBT community? How many think pieces will it incite? In this regular column, we’ll look at depictions of queers in cinema and ask, Was It Good For The Gays? Today we look at Peter Jackson‘s drama, Heavenly Creatures.

In June 1954, Pauline Yvonne Parker and her best friend, Juliet Hulme, murdered Parker’s mother, Honorah Rieper, in a park in Christchurch, New Zealand. The girls, who were just sixteen at the time, had conspired to murder Rieper after it became clear that the pair’s parents were planning to split the two apart; Hulme, whose British parents were about to divorce, was to be sent to live with a relative in South Africa and Parker, her best friend, was desperate to go with her. When Parker and Hulme knew their friendship could end though a separation, the girls, convinced that Parker’s mother was the conspirator behind their imminent breakup, bludgeoned Rieper repeatedly with a brick.

The girls were arrested for the murder the next day — Parker’s diary revealed that she had planned the crime for weeks. They were found guilty (after their pleas of insanity were rejected by the court) and sentenced “to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure” — effectively an indefinite sentence, as the two were too young for New Zealand’s capital punishment. Five years later, the girls were released under the condition that they never meet again. The two changed their names (Parker became Hilary Nathan, and Hulme took the name Anne Perry and gained fame as a mystery novelist) and distanced themselves from their teenage crime — that is until Heavenly Creatures hit theaters forty years later.

Working with Parker’s diaries, which detailed the girls’ obsessive friendship, Jackson (along with his writing partner, Fran Walsh, with whom he wrote the script) set out to examine how an intense friendship led to disastrous, life-changing events. Starring Melanie Lynskey as Pauline and Kate Winslet as Juliet (both actresses made their film debuts), Heavenly Creatures is rich in tension and visual spectacle, and the film examines Parker and Hulme’s inner and imaginary worlds and attempts to identify the nature of their relationship.

The pair meet when Juliet transfers to Christchurch Girls’ High School in the early ’50s and meets the awkward and quiet Pauline. The two have an instant connection; they share an interest in fantasy and compliment each other in that Pauline is dowdy and shy and Juliet gorgeous and outgoing. They become fast friends, and their shared sensibility manifests itself in a fantasy world known as Borovnia, an imaginary kingdom to which only Pauline and Juliet have access (and where the plasticine figures they sculpt together come to life).

The ferocity of their friendship troubles the girls’ parents, particularly Juliet’s. The Hulmes are worldly, upper middle class academics, whereas the Riepers (it’s eventually revealed that Pauline’s mother, Honorah Parker, was never legally wed to Pauline’s father, Herbert Rieper; in real life, court documents referred to both Pauline and Honorah with the “Parker” surname) are working class. Juliet’s father complains to the Riepers, who take her to see a psychologist. Examining her intense platonic affections toward Juliet, the doctor announces to Pauline’s parents that she is homosexual — a mental illness than can be cured with psychological treatment.

Pauline’s homosexuality is up for debate. The film depicts her sexual experiences with her family’s lodger, a gangly, awkward young man named John, but she is clearly more focused on the Fourth World she has created with Juliet — it is where she escapes to, subconsciously, during sex with John. Her experiences with John, obviously, don’t make her straight, but the film makes the relationship between Juliet and Pauline pretty ambiguous. Once it’s clear that their parents plan to separate them by shipping Juliet off to South Africa, their relationship only intensifies, and in dream-like sequences the two become closer: sharing a bathtub and sleeping together. Considering Pauline’s diary was a source, the pair’s sexual experimentation may have only taken place within Pauline’s imagination.

What Heavenly Creatures does leave unambiguous is how Pauline and Juliet’s emotional connection spun out of control. They were bonded by a feeling of being on the fringe of their small teenage society — which is enough to define them as queer; both were afflicted with illnesses (Pauline with osteomyelitis, Juliet with tuberculosis) and romanticized the struggle of their sickness. And in their fantasy world, they took great pride in casting punishment on those who ostracized and oppressed them, particularly their parents, and even deified celebrities like Mario Lanza (or the opposite: the girls had a specific abhorrence toward Orson Welles, who in their collective imagination is a revolting sexual predator). These emotions, combined with their feared separation, caused a bit of hysteria, which led the girls to committing murder.

As for if the two were lovers, there’s no real proof. After the film premiered in 1994, Anne Perry admitted that her friendship with Pauline Parker was, while intense, just platonic. The film does, however, suggest that queerness is, inherently, equivocal; it’s not a black-or-white, yes-or-no kind of situation. Whether or not the film was a good representation of the queer experience can also be debated at length — although I think it’d take a completely basic person to read this as some artistic examination of how queerness is dangerous, even if the only two queer characters in it express their emotions in a violent manner. Instead, the film serves as a celebration, of sorts, of how queerness requires one to create her own world in order to cope with the one around her, and how that can result in an emotional displacement from which it can be difficult to recover.

Previously in Was It Good For The Gays:
Gayby
Mysterious Skin
The Object of My Affection
But I’m a Cheerleader
Keep the Lights On
Philadelphia
The Birdcage
Brokeback Mountain
The Children’s Hour
In & Out
Cruising

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Photos: Miramax Films