Chubbuck

CW: Suicide

I first read about Christine Chubbuck in a trade of the first three issues of "Answer Me!" back in the '90s.  It was part of the "culture of transgression" of the times.  If They didn't want to talk about it you bet I wanted to hear about it.  I guess I haven't changed that much.

The founding myth of Christine Chubbuck goes back farther than that, though not as far as might be assumed.  What Christine did, live on the air... hardly anyone saw it.  (But everyone who did went on to start their own band.  Deflecting with humour.  Yes.)

The founding myth, rather, was the article that ran a few weeks later in the local paper, the Washington Post.  This was... 1974?  Usually I try to research my posts.  There's a lot of misinformation and disinformation on the net, always has been.  I've contributed my share of the former.  This post, I'm going from memory, because I don't want to know any more about this topic than I already do.  Would, in fact, prefer to know less than I do about it, but it is after all Important.

Not in the way somebody in Philadelphia decided the full tape of Budd Dwyer's last press conference was Important.  Unlike what happened with Chubbuck, that one wasn't live on the air.  It was pre-recorded, and most of the Philly stations, they knew well enough to cut away.  Not this one.  Whoever was responsible for that... well, it is easy to judge in retrospect, but also hard for me to see that as anything better than a monstrous lapse in judgement.

That was around 1987, though.  This was, I've decided to say, 1974, and what happened was "safe", had the _opportunity_ to disappear, the "right to be forgotten" to cite some dodgy European jurisprudence (one of those "rights" like "the right to die", not really something anyone has any choice in is it?), the way things that were broadcast even three years later wouldn't.  A banner year for the Post, the cult of Woodward and Bernstein in full flight, everyone even peripherally involved, Ben Bradlee, Katharine Graham, these were my mom's heroes.  In the film Woodward and Bernstein would be played by Redford and Hoffman.  The year after the film, The Andros Targets would launch as a network show.

I've read the Post article on Chubbuck's death.  I don't remember who wrote it.  Maybe I have a copy somewhere, maybe I don't.  Most newspapers' archives are sealed behind paywalls, in darkness as it were, but due to the extraordinary popular interest around it you can probably find a copy somewhere.

I found it to be one of those forgotten works that provides a fine rebuttal to the popular narrative of media decline, because it was a fucking awful piece of work.  Only Christine Chubbuck can be held responsible for what she did and where she did it, but the writer of that article was, I felt, responsible for defiling her corpse.  If the venue of her death was unusual, it's that article that gave the real impetus for her transformation from a shocking and tragic local death to an internationally notorious fetish object.

The way the author of that article described her is very much congruent with the way whoever wrote Sammy Davis Jr.'s lyrics described Mary Tyler Moore.  A professional, professionally frustrated young journalist - this was glanced at.  The writer went out of their way to talk about how "pretty" Chubbuck was, talked a lot about her unsuccessful dating life, put her memory through the wringer.  She died before I was born and I am still outraged at what that journalist did.

And ever since then, the rumors.  Last I heard there were two films being made about her, one of which sounded theoretically interesting, neither of which I have seen.  The tape was supposed to have been destroyed, but was it _really_, or were they just saying that to keep us from asking?  Et cetera, et cetera.  Here are the darkest corners of the "lost media" hunters, the men (and women?  safest to stick with "men", probably) whose deepest motivation as collectors is the dream of seeing a "pretty young woman" die violently on camera.