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Medicine, Sexuality, and High Anxiety in 1950s New Zealand: Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1994)

James Bennett

Heavenly Creatures is a filmic representation of the 1954 Parker–Hulme murder case. The depth of reaction to the case can be explained both by the rarity of the crime committed—a matricide—and the transgression of normative boundaries of gender and sexuality in the 1950s. It was also New Zealand's most public postwar moment involving the perception of a homosexual relationship. This paper considers how Peter Jackson and his partner/co-screenwriter, Fran Walsh, have presented an alternative history of the case using a visual text. In particular, the paper focuses on anxieties around sexual deviance and the use of medicine and psychiatry to diagnose, control, and remedy its manifestation. Both the sensibilities of Jackson's present—the 1990s—and his filmmaking techniques impact centrally on his portrayal of the case.

On the afternoon of 22 June 1954 two teenage girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, accompanied Pauline's mother on an outing to Victoria Park in the hillside suburb of Cashmere on the fringes of Christchurch. Following a convivial afternoon tea at the local kiosk, all three proceeded for a walk along one of the paths in the park. Nearly half a kilometre along the track, undisturbed by other park visitors, Pauline seized an opportune moment to remove a half brick in a stocking from her school bag and, with Juliet's assistance, bludgeoned her mother repeatedly about the head. The post-mortem examination, conducted on Honora Parker 1 at Christchurch Hospital on the instructions of the coroner, recorded the cause of death as 'shock associated with multiple wounds of the head and fractures of the skull.' 2 Apart from the particularly brutal nature of this act, the rarity of the crime of matricide and the sensational scandals connected with the case horrified and repelled a Christchurch populace. Most would have sooner buried the abhorrent affair for the indelible stain the good burghers felt that it left on their community—a prim and orderly one even by the standards of the day. Moreover, the Hulme family occupied a privileged and socially prominent position in the Christchurch community. Henry Rainsford Hulme was rector of Canterbury College from 1948 to 1954, a position which placed him among the Christchurch establishment. He was also an eminent physicist who was later appointed chief of nuclear research in the British postwar atomic research programme at Aldermaston. 3 Both the murder and the ensuing Supreme Court trial permanently etched themselves into the consciousness of many New Zealanders alive during the 1950s and beyond, particularly those who lived in New Zealand's most English of cities. In that sense, Parker and Hulme have acquired a visibility in New Zealand criminal history comparable to the most infamous murder cases in other western countries during the twentieth century. This is a case that continues to find reverberations in the New Zealand of the early-twenty-first century. 1

 
Figure 1
    Image 1: The sensationalist media frenzy surrounding the murder (NZ Observer, 8 September 1954)
 
2
      Peter Jackson's 1994 feature film Heavenly Creatures has become the most publicised adaptation of the case. Jackson is merely one among a long list of artists, popular crime writers, journalists, scholars, and psychiatrists whose imagination has been captured by the case and whose respective versions have been re-presented in a multitude and diverse range of texts—'factual' and fictional, written and visual, narrative and performative—over the last five decades. 4 For the director himself, Heavenly Creatures was a landmark moment which bestowed on him mainstream credibility after the success of his cult splatter flicks, Bad Taste and Brain Dead. But, more importantly, it was this visually compelling representation of the original case which succeeded in reaching a mass audience, reviving the memory of Parker and Hulme for new generations in New Zealand whilst introducing overseas audiences to the case for the first time. In a number of respects Heavenly Creatures inverts earlier understandings of the case and its key players. In this article I propose to examine the interpretation of this historical event through Jackson's visual text. A detailed investigation of this key moment in postwar New Zealand society reveals a striking resonance with overseas developments. Furthermore, it is my contention that Jackson's interpretation corresponds closely to the new social histories (especially in the United States), which rethink the notion of the 1950s as a period of social tranquillity, domestic calm, and suburban normalcy by interrogating society itself and the mechanisms employed to contain deviance. 5 In particular, I will discuss how Heavenly Creatures exposes psychiatry and medicine not only as tools to contain, control, and remedy deviance, but also as sources of social commentary—all roles which they were given at the time in aiding the interpretation of the murder. 3
   

Representing history through film

  
Scholars in film studies and related disciplines have interrogated Jackson's work as a cinematic text rather than as an alternative history through film. 6 For example, some have documented the significance of the event in the construction of a lesbian identity in New Zealand. 7 While I do not wish to minimise the importance of the issues any of them raise, they are nevertheless moved more by the politics of representation rather than by an interest in the capacity of the film to offer an historical interpretation within the limitations of the filmic medium. 8 These limitations include the need for perpetual motion and a weaker capacity to convey information relative to a written text. 4
      The moving image has long been used by historians as a primary source or cultural artefact of its own era. A more radical conceptualisation of the utility of film is to envision it as a medium to represent or at least point to the past. 9 The American historian Robert Rosenstone has classified history on film broadly into three types: history as document, history as drama, and history as experiment. 10 Traditionally, historians have privileged the documentary form as it most closely resembles history as document and the scholarly apparatus supporting the presentation of historical evidence. But regardless of genre, no film—even the documentary form—can deliver us, the audience, literal truths or 'reality.' Rather, film is an artistic framing of aspects of reality as perceived by a particular film maker for a specific audience. Narrative film also constitutes a discourse distinct from written language, employing its own distinctive conventions and devices. Indeed it is not always easy to reconcile a professional historian's conception of accuracy with visual language and its construction of a narrative. The important point is that images cannot be judged according to the standards of a written text. 5
      In his construction of the Parker–Hulme case, Jackson employs a number of examples of what Rosenstone has classified as 'true invention.' This is a useful concept in thinking through the implications of how history is presented on celluloid. The cinematic image contains great specificity of detail: where sources yield insufficient evidence to fill out the narrative and visual detail the film maker must invent. True invention engages the historical discourse surrounding the context of a given event in contrast with false invention, which distorts and falsifies history. 11 In my judgment, Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh, who cowrote the screenplay, have constructed an understanding of the event which is largely faithful to the Parker–Hulme case while managing to fulfil the imperative of all commercial cinema, that it must entertain its audience. Admittedly, some recontextualisations, omissions, and dramatised scenes have departed from the 'reality' of the case as one would expect in a celluloid dramatisation, however this is not a mere artistic flight of fancy divorced from the details of the historical event. My main reservation concerns aspects of the visualisation of Pauline and Juliet's interior world of make-believe, and the conflation of reality with imagination. This has tended to produce a common audience reading of madness in the actions of the girls even though it appears not to have been the film maker's intention to do so. 12 More importantly, Jackson and Walsh have delivered an interpretation which mercilessly exposes a hidebound 1950s community. Furthermore, ideological norms governing gender and sexuality had changed significantly over the previous forty years, and this shift is embedded in their visual text. 6
      Heavenly Creatures gives particular weight to the social context governing Pauline and Juliet's lives. To explain this stress, it is instructive to explore briefly the personal motivation of Jackson and Walsh in their pursuit of the project. The ready resort by contemporary commentators—notably popular crime writers, journalists, and psychiatrists—to depict the two schoolgirls as monsters, as well as the various 'agendas' behind earlier accounts, functioned as a clarion call to action for Fran Walsh. She first encountered demonising accounts of the girls when she herself was a teenager, and continued to be captivated with the story of Parker and Hulme and who they really were. 13 By degrees, Peter Jackson was persuaded by the significance of the project and both identified and empathised with the two girls, counterbalanced by an abhorrence of their ultimate act. 14 Moreover, when Dawn Lamb, principal of Christchurch Girls' High School (which Pauline and Juliet attended), refused to cooperate when the film maker was researching the project, Jackson became even more determined that it should be completed as a rejoinder to those in Christchurch who, he claimed, were still living in the 1950s. 15 Indeed Jackson is on record as saying that in many respects the two girls appeared to him as figures who belonged more to the 1990s. 16 In an interview, Jackson and Walsh recorded their desire to set the record straight on a case which, to their minds, had become hopelessly distorted and layered in mythology over forty years. This, then, explains the specific viewpoint of the film, which constantly scrutinises the façade of social normality. This viewpoint in the film is evidenced by the demonisation of adult figures of authority whilst 'normalising' Pauline and Juliet. To some extent the demonising is evident in the portrayal of school teachers and the local vicar, but particular attention is reserved for the doctor, who turns out to be a key agent of social normality. In this way, the film makes an important statement about the role of medicine and psychiatry in the 1950s. 7
      Maureen Molloy contends that 'Peter Jackson's film does little to rewrite the 1950s professional and media accounts of the reasons for the murder, except to cast the girls in a more sympathetic light.' 17 There is no doubt that Jackson treats his principal subjects—Pauline and Juliet as well as Honora Rieper, Pauline's mother—with a sympathetic lens. But he does more than that by inverting received understandings of adult-teenager relationships. Narrative film usually presents a specific viewpoint; its very nature makes it intrinsically difficult to accommodate multiple perspectives of a single event. 18 In Jackson's film, the audience is presented with an understanding of events centred on the world of the two protagonists, which intentionally disrupts orthodox understandings of time and place. It privileges Pauline's voice whose diaries were the key exhibit in the court trial. The portrayal of adults in Heavenly Creatures—above all, the vicar and the doctor—in an exaggerated and darkly humorous way is at once a filtering of the world through the lens of the two teenagers—who see adult figures of authority as a central source of their alienation—and is a clue to the screenwriters' empathy with the protagonists. One of the key issues suffusing the Parker–Hulme case in the hands of Peter Jackson was the deep generation gulf between adults with their traditional values on the one hand, and the challenge presented to this authority on the other hand by teenagers, who were defined in postwar New Zealand for the first time as a separate marketing demographic. 19 Pauline and Juliet were ebullient teenagers in each other's company who constantly challenged social boundaries through retreat into their lavish world of game playing and story telling. Narrative film often makes use of a variety of devices designed to elicit viewer emotions. In Jackson's representation, emotions and obsessions are brought out deliberately and sympathetically. 20 Molloy's comment is more persuasive in the sense that Heavenly Creatures does not substantially revise received understandings of bad mothering, a widely-held contemporary belief which constructed a causal link with juvenile delinquency. 8
   

Imaging Christchurch

  
The opening sequence of Heavenly Creatures presents a 1950s travelogue of Christchurch, New Zealand's city of the plains. Jackson draws on a wide range of media to construct his version of the story including surrealism, dream-like sequences in black and white interwoven with the narrative, as well as iconographic plasticine figures in medieval castles to represent a mythologised England. His choice of the documentary form to raise the curtain is an interesting one, but this beginning is a deliberate ideological statement used to draw the viewer into a rustic, contented self-imagining of Christchurch in the 1950s. 21 Bucolic Christchurch is suddenly and violently ruptured by cutting to two blood-splattered girls running and screaming along a tunnel-like path, captured on a hand-held camera. 22 The contrast between these two initial visions of Christchurch, the one measured and genteel, the other frenzied and disturbing, could not be more striking. Such an arresting beginning serves notice that the film maker wants to peel away the surface layers and dig beneath that exterior to deconstruct received ideas about the spatial and temporal context. This shocking and dizzying juxtaposition is also an important element in Jackson's film making techniques. It allows him to first set up and then quickly dash audience expectations. 9
      Jackson's travelogue is a composite using elements from three sources. All of the footage for these frames is drawn from 1950s material. Two of the sources are commemorative documentaries, Christchurch Garden City of New Zealand 23 and Canterbury is a Hundred, 24 both made by film maker Roy Evans. Some footage is also taken from a Pictorial Parade (government newsreel). These films showcase the features of Canterbury province and its capital city Christchurch. They invoke the idea of Christchurch as a genteel Wakefield settlement and model colony (not unlike its companion city Adelaide in the state of South Australia), founded for the Church of England in the mid–nineteenth century. Englishness becomes a leitmotif when measuring the progress of the city (and province), recalling the concept of 'recolonisation' developed by historian James Belich. That is, following initial colonisation, New Zealand, a neo-Britain, consolidated its ties both economically and culturally with the mother country between 1880 and 1900, remaking it as a protein farm for Britain. 25 10
      The 1950s mark a time for New Zealand of a fragile national identity, still tied to the apron strings of Britain and empire (albeit the ebb tide of empire), postwar stability, family values, public morality, cultural homogeneity, assimilation of minorities into the Anglo–Celtic core culture, and adherence to the west's values in the Cold War. The years 1953 and 1954 were also notable for the public adoration of the reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who was touring New Zealand at this time. 26 Jackson's principal intended audience, New Zealanders of the 1990s, would surely be jolted and distanced from the 1950s by such an alien vision which suddenly transmutes into a postmodern frame when the camera cuts to the two girls. Molloy has commented in this regard: 'The voice-over promotes the modernity of a city now patently out of date and old-fashioned to the contemporary film viewer. The bird's eye view, both literal and figurative, poses the viewer as foreign to 1950s Christchurch.' 27 11
   

Class-based anxieties

  
Class is a social category emphasised in Heavenly Creatures, and one that is closely tied to time and place. I have written elsewhere of the propensity for class as a category of analysis to be downplayed or even denied in New Zealand national historiography. 28 This is in sharp contrast with some other national historiographies where class has generally been seen by historians as a central phenomenon in explaining the nature of society. In respect to class, 1950s Christchurch was a highly stratified community where gendered, sexual, and class anxieties intersected. The privileged existence of the Hulmes is established on a number of occasions in Heavenly Creatures, notably in the garden and tennis party scene at Ilam, the residence of the Canterbury College rector, which evokes the image of an English rural élite at play—almost approximating the circumstances of royalty in a New Zealand setting. 29 When Pauline makes her first appearance in the film at Ilam, we see cultural transference as she admiringly takes in the surroundings at the luxuriously-appointed residence. Indeed the disjunction between the lower-middle-class background of Pauline and Juliet's securely upper-middle-class circumstances forms a central part of Pauline's quest to escape from her own monotonous, even hateful, existence at her parents' boarding house to become a surrogate daughter of the Hulmes with all the trappings of a glamorous and idyllic lifestyle in a neo-Britain. 30 This becomes apparent when Honora refers to Pauline as 'Yvonne' (Pauline's middle name), and shows a new boarder through the Parker household one day in Juliet's presence, eliciting a look of extreme embarrassment on Pauline's face as her drab lower-middle-class life is suddenly exposed. 12
      When Dr. Hulme calls at the Parkers one evening to express his anxieties about Pauline and Juliet's friendship and to advise the medicalisation of Pauline's sexuality, he is asserting his upper-middle-class authority over the Parkers with the suggestion that Pauline is 'infecting' his daughter with an unnatural contagion that requires treatment. On several occasions in the film the viewer observes Henry Hulme's conspicuous discomfort at Pauline's physical proximity. Hulme's reaction to Pauline reveals an intersection in anxieties between sexuality and class. His class-based strategy is to intervene using his power and social prestige. The central 'problem' of homosexuality is able to be isolated in the less privileged girl who must be controlled and remedied by referral to the physician—a guardian of social normality. 13
      Hulme's actions resonate with Chris Waters' observation regarding pervasive fears in Britain of the 1950s regarding the 'cross-class homosexual' and the threat this phenomenon posed to 'stable social hierarchies.' Fears in Britain 'about the moral and social chaos that might result from unlicensed homosexuality' were intensified by the claim of Peter Wildeblood—whose name was synonymous with homosexual sex scandals in 1950s Britain—that many homosexuals paid little attention to social boundaries. 31 Class was one of several boundaries that the girls threatened to ignore and one that Jackson is very much alive to in his visualisation of interactions between the Parkers and the Hulmes. 32 14
   

Gendered constructions

  
The key gendered issues which emerge in Heavenly Creatures are teenage sexuality (both heterosexual and homosexual) as well as parenting, which largely denoted motherhood. Pauline becomes the focus of 'dangerous' adolescent sexuality when Herbert Rieper discovers her in bed with John, the boarder. This sparks a major rupture between Pauline and her parents. In a wilful act of rebellion, Pauline cycles off one night to see John, who has since been expelled from the Parker household. A sex scene is depicted with John, intercut with Pauline's make-believe world of Borovnia. Pauline is depicted as uninvolved in, and emotionless about, the physical act of sex with John. She is instead emotionally caught up with the search for Juliet in Borovnia. Compression of the visual text, and the requirement for events to fit a dramatic structure, means that the real Pauline's liaison with a Ceylonese boy is omitted from the film. Jackson's angle emphasises the conformity and moral conservatism of the tight society. He also comments on motherhood by drawing a clear distinction between the two central adult figures in the film, Hilda Hulme and Honora Rieper. Honora is represented as a strict and conventional, but practical and decent woman with her daughter's interests at heart. 33 Hilda, on the other hand, has admitted Pauline into the Hulme family as a surrogate daughter, and she is seen to encourage Juliet's and Pauline's fertile imagination. Hilda (and Henry's) neglect of Juliet is a recurring theme. Moreover, there is a palpable disregard for the feelings and sensitivities of Juliet and Henry Hulme when Hilda consummates an extramarital relationship with Walter Perry at Ilam in the midst of her own nuclear family. 15
      An issue common to postwar western society, including New Zealand, was the striking emphasis given to traditional gender roles, the shoring up of patriarchal authority and consolidation of the nuclear family. 34 Following the murder, it was revealed for the first time that Herbert Rieper's previous marriage was undissolved, and that he and Honora Parker had lived together for over twenty years and raised four illegitimate children. Moreover, Hilda Hulme, while outwardly respectable, successful in her own right professionally 35 , and matriarch of the seemingly ideal family, had been involved in an extra-marital affair with Walter Perry at the time of the murder. In each woman's case this represented a serious transgression of gender ideology for that era. 36 Parental deprivation (which, at the time, almost invariably implied poor mothering) of Juliet including extended periods of separation due to her ill health in childhood, was another issue that fed into media constructions of the Hulme family. These judgments on maternal behaviour were sufficiently potent in the minds of a number of Hilda Hulme's contemporaries for them to aver later that 'the wrong mother had got it.' 37 16
      Individuals who fell outside the boundaries of social normality were labelled deviates and constructed as a threat to the stability of society in a period when there was a deep yearning for the restoration of security and order following the turbulence and social upheaval of World War II. Elaine Tyler May has highlighted the disruption to traditional gender roles in the United States when men of service age left to join the military forces, and their role was filled by women in the labour market. Other opportunities in the public sphere beckoned for women after the war as the economy expanded. The advent of birth control would provide women with further choices, many of whom were unwilling to surrender these gains. This development, in turn, provoked fears that the American family unit was jeopardised, although in reality such fears were misplaced as demographic trends reveal. 38 In public discourse traditional gender roles became tied to national security. 39 The New Zealand scholar Maureen Molloy has followed in the footsteps of May and other social historians who have interpreted the 1950s English-speaking world as a period of 'exaggerated domesticity' in which marriage and motherhood defined the limits of women's identity. A premium was placed on stability in the domestic sphere in the 'posttrauma' period following Depression and world war; a period now haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation as the 1963 Cuban missile crisis would starkly underscore. 40 17
      Some scholars have pointed to the threat posed to patriarchal authority by sexually active female adolescents in a postwar era of stability and certainty. 41 This concern together with good and bad motherhood—a key preoccupation of social ideology of the day—was critical to the moral panic around juvenile delinquency that gripped New Zealand in 1954. It prompted the conservative National government of Sidney Holland to appoint a Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, chaired by Queen's Counsel Oswald Mazengarb. His published report was distributed to every household in the country receiving the family benefit in time for the 1954 general election. Sparked by an outbreak of underage 'sexual delinquency' in Lower Hutt, 42 which remained the central focus of the hearings, the report also noted the activities of 'sex gangs' and the Parker–Hulme matricide in Christchurch. Moreover, about the time the committee met, a juvenile murder case with a homosexual dimension was entering the judicial process in Auckland. 43 While the committee's report recorded in its summary of conclusions that '[s]exual immorality among juveniles has become a worldwide problem of increasing importance,' it also considered 'the great majority of the young people of this Dominion are healthy-minded and well-behaved.' 44 This conclusion was influenced by the committee's palpable anxiety that New Zealand's moral reputation should remain beyond reproach. A close reading of the committee's report and the submissions it received 45 reveals an atmosphere of moral crisis, as evidenced in members' leading line of questioning, their use of emotive language and the response of particular witnesses. 46 Furthermore, the committee was lobbied intensively by religious interests, which were successful in stamping the Mazengarb Report with the imprimatur of Christianity. This would be at the exclusion of reference in the report to recent scientific evidence on sexual behaviour such as the groundbreaking bestseller by Alfred Kinsey. 47 18
      Susan Glazebrook has argued that the report of the 'morals committee' as it became informally known, reflected Victorian ambivalence to female sexuality. Girls and women were constructed on the basis of a binary opposition: as agents of morality or as temptresses of the devil. 48 The committee tended to blame sexually precocious girls (variously dubbed teenage 'temptresses,' 'seductresses,' or 'huntresses') for corrupting boys when accounting for patterns of sexual misbehaviour. That view of teenage female licentiousness was a message conveyed very forcefully to Mazengarb and his colleagues by Petone Senior Sergeant Frank le Fort, who had initiated the investigation into sexual misdemeanours in the Lower Hutt area. 49 The print media recycled this line of argument using emotive and sensational headlines. 50 19

 

The medicalisation of sexuality

  
Another key issue brought to the surface in Heavenly Creatures is sexuality and its contestation. The critical scene in the film dealing with sexuality as social deviance is set in the surgery of Dr. F.O. Bennett, 51 a Christchurch GP to whom Pauline is referred by Dr. Hulme following his fears that the friendship has transgressed normative boundaries and become 'unwholesome.' The medical intervention is set in train during a dramatic sequence of scenes in which Dr. Hulme spies the two girls curled up asleep together in bed at Ilam. Hulme is first alerted to their 'wayward tendencies' when he glances at the rear view mirror in his car, and catches sight of the two girls sitting in the back seat with clasped hands. As he anxiously declares to the Riepers one dark, stormy night, contrived for dramatic effect:

Your daughter appears to have formed a rather unwholesome attachment to Juliet … It's the intensity of the friendship that concerns me … I think we should avert trouble before it starts … If Pauline is indeed developing in a rather wayward fashion, Dr. Bennett is the ideal man to set her back on track. 52 [emphasis added]

20

 
Figure 1
    Image 2: Lieutenant-Colonel Dr. Francis Bennett, OC Troops, NZ Hospital Ship Maunganui. (Oil painting on board ship by nursing sister and artist, Audsley Cullen, 1945).
 
 
The camera then cuts to the surgery in a scene more humorous than disturbing due to Jackson's adroit caricature of the medical man. The Kiwiana in the doctor's surgery, namely, the 'Be a healthy Kiwi' poster on the wall, is used as a device to reinforce the point that the ideology of the contemporary medical profession linked a healthy mind and body. This poster—and others like it—was commonly used in the New Zealand health profession. 53 The linkage between mind and body is significant in relation to the diagnosis, which arises from the one-to-one interview between Pauline and Dr. Bennett. A Foucauldian analysis would theorise this scene as a collapsing of the old religious confessional into a scientific examination. The confessional turns on questions of friendship and the intensity of feelings in friendship, or the risk of homosociality lapsing into homosexual relations. However, as Chris Watson has observed, '[n]othing that Pauline has said leads, of necessity, to this conclusion. Dr. Bennett constructs her deviance.' 54 One of Foucault's most significant case studies involves a shift in the west during the nineteenth century in relation to the regulation of sex. Once located solely as a preserve of religious and legal authorities, regulation became more closely identified within the field of medicine and science. Medical and scientific authorities focused on actions and their categorisation as normal or abnormal, natural or unnatural rather than on the act as virtuous or sinful, lawful or unlawful. 55 21
      Homosexuality is a symptom of Pauline's malaise in the doctor's eyes—albeit one that he feels she will grow out of. This scene simultaneously highlights the medicalisation of her sexuality while downplaying the major reason for the consultation; a medical examination of Pauline to ascertain the cause of her significant weight loss. 56 The mental 'pathology' is then reported to Mrs. Rieper, and at that moment we see the camera zoom in on Dr. Bennett's mouth as he struggles to enunciate the word 'homosexuality,' just as it did when Dr. Hulme expressed his misgivings about the intensity of the friendship to the Riepers. The camera work reinforces the distance felt by the audience between their present, on the one hand, and the values and attitudes of historical Christchurch including the medical profession of the 1950s, on the other, a profession which had reached the zenith of its social status and power in New Zealand by the 1940s. 57 This was especially so for the relationship between male doctors and their female patients. Until the 1960s, medicine, along with church and state, was a key agent in the preservation of what Belich has described as the 'tight society.' 58 22
      Medical and psychiatric responses to homosexuality are spotlighted in Jackson's representation. In the film maker's present—New Zealand of the 1990s—medical, legal, and social responses to homosexuality had undergone a radical change. In 1986, for instance, legislation was passed by the New Zealand Parliament decriminalising private, consenting same-sex relations between males aged over 16, and homosexuality had shifted from a medical condition to a social identity with its own visible and distinctive subcultures. 59 Dr. Bennett stands in as the face of 1950s medicine, a professional body which at that time almost universally viewed the departure from heteronormative patterns as an abnormality, and commonly as a perversion or illness. Pauline's gender, age, and personal interactions also challenged contemporary ideological standards of femininity. We know both from Dr. Bennett's report at the murder trial, and from Pauline's diaries, extracts of which were read out by legal counsel and reported in detail by the media, that the consultation 'did not go well' and this is reflected in the tension onscreen. 60 Jackson has drawn on Bennett's testimony to give an impression of the consultation. Other aspects of his more than five-hour-long testimony, reporting comments made by Juliet in particular, are used liberally and interpolated into various passages of the screenplay. The elaborate and detailed game playing and story telling of Pauline and Juliet described in the diaries in which they invoke 'their own paradise, their own god and religion and their own morality,' 61 coupled with their 'exalted' state in postmurder interviews, led Drs. Bennett and Medlicott into interpreting that behaviour as symptoms of a pathology. This was despite the fact both were aware that the two girls were initially attempting to prove their insanity on pragmatic grounds. 62 Every purported abnormality and dishonest act became evidence for the central theory advanced by the defence, and medical explanations were confined to the psychology of individual personalities rather than exploring the sociological context surrounding them. 63  
      Both doctors observed what they describe as an extreme conceitedness and arrogance in the girls' demeanour, characteristics which were linked to a delusional world of grandeur. A key focus for that statement lay in the content of a poem called 'The Ones that I Worship' at the back of Pauline's diary containing the words heavenly creatures. This poem functions as a site of resistance by Jackson to the mad or bad dichotomy established at the trial. 64 For Dr. Bennett

it was a murder that was bestial and treacherous and filthy. It is outside all the kindly limits of sanity. It is a thousand miles away from sanity. … They are still not sane and in my opinion they never will be sane. 65

In his summing up, the Crown Prosecutor Alan Brown countered with the charge that

[t]his plainly was a coldly, callously planned and premeditated murder committed by two highly intelligent and perfectly sane but precocious and dirty-minded girls. … They are not incurably insane. My submission is they are incurably bad. 66

 
It can, of course, be argued that this dichotomy of legal argument simply reflected the respective objectives of the prosecution and defence counsels. Options for the defence counsel had been severely limited by signed confessions of murder extracted by the police from both girls shortly after the murder. 67 23
      Bennett's correspondence to his wife, Pearl A. Bennett, who was travelling in North America at the time of the Supreme Court trial, reiterates his belief in the defence diagnosis of the two girls. But the prescience of his words in one letter is striking:

The Hulme Parker trial opens in the morning. I am fully booked with cases tomorrow but I'm keeping the next two days clear. I'm very apprehensive about it. I believe there are a number of foreign correspondents coming. The publicity glare will be fierce. The local glare doesn't matter, it's the historical one I fear. What they will go down in Law and Psychiatric journals for later generations to gibe at [sic]. 68

24

 
 
Figure 1
    Image 3: The author and his wife (Source: F.O. Bennett, A Canterbury Tale: The Autobiography of Dr. Francis Bennett (Wellington: Oxford, 1980), 239. Copyright estate of F.O. Bennett).
 

 

  
In one key scene, Jackson appears to be commenting on the pervasive social construction of the girls as alternately mad or bad. 69 Moreover, he is cognisant that Pauline and Juliet's voices are shut down by the legal process as both are excluded from the witness stand for the entirety of the trial. Set in the lavish imaginary world of Borovnia, Pauline and Juliet are depicted, dancing with their plasticine creations to the accompaniment of tenor Mario Lanza singing 'The Loveliest Night of the Year.' The scene is choreographed in a romantic, joyful mode, but continues to intensify, threatening to spiral out of control. Pauline's voice-over is used to reinforce the social point of view, which constructs their deviance as insanity.

We realised why Deborah and I have such extraordinary telepathy and why people treat us and look at us the way they do. It is because we are MAD. We are both stark raving MAD. 70

 
In an earlier scene when Pauline and Juliet lie at opposite ends of a bath immersed in water up to their necks, Pauline despairs, 'I think I'm going crazy.' Juliet responds insistently, 'No, you're not, Gina—it's everybody else who's bonkers!' 71 Jackson thus turns received wisdom on its head, critiquing the stifling conformity and social strictures of the 1950s. Insanity was a more palatable and reassuring conclusion for the community to draw from their behaviour. In that way malevolence could then be attributed to nature rather than the social environment of which they were a part. 72 25
      Although the audience never sees Dr. Reginald Medlicott in the film because his association with the case postdated the murder (the end point of Jackson's film), his influence in the Parker–Hulme case surpassed that of all other medical practitioners and psychiatrists. It was he, as the principal medical witness for the defence, who advanced the theory of paranoia of the exalted type in a setting of folie à deux (joint communicated insanity), supported by Dr. Bennett. Moreover, when he presented as a defence witness at the murder trial, Medlicott raised the possibility of a genetic link to Pauline's criminality:

Her [Pauline's] younger sister is I understand a Mongolian imbecile at Templeton. The first baby died shortly after birth—I was told it was a blue baby and died within 24 hours. I consider that background raises a query as to the stock from which she came. 73

26
Folie à deux was legally rejected at the Supreme Court trial under cross-examination. Although Medlicott later altered his original diagnosis of folie à deux to 'adolescent megalomania,' there was no fundamental change in his perspective on the Parker–Hulme case over the course of several decades. 74 He struggled to process what had happened in his own mind for the rest of his life. 75 In Reginald Medlicott's eyes, homosexuality and paranoia were frequently associated. Dr. Kenneth Stallworthy, one of three psychiatrists appearing for the prosecution, disputed this link, submitting that in the thousands of patients he had seen in Britain and New Zealand, only the repressed homosexual exhibited signs of paranoia. 76 27
   

Sexual contingency: The impact of Kinsey and Wolfenden

  
As a core element in the Parker–Hulme relationship, homosexuality was a contestable proposition. Medical and psychiatric witnesses who gave evidence at the Supreme Court trial of Parker and Hulme were ambivalent as to the intensity of the two girls' 'physical' homosexual relationship. Dr. Kenneth Stallworthy noted the two girls had indicated to him that when their dreams turned to sex they would always relate to the opposite sex. In his experience this was contrary to homosexuals who had physical relationships, leading him to the conclusion that 'the homosexuality in this situation has been rather over stressed.' 77 Jackson's film highlights a physical intimacy between Pauline and Juliet in several scenes. In the first of these scenes centred on escapism, the two girls have cycled to the countryside and end up playfully chasing each other while stripped down to their underwear, momentarily disturbing a farmer as he mends a fence. The first kiss is offered as a titillation for the heterosexual male gaze. 78 28
      Anne Perry (née Juliet Hulme), now a successful writer of Victorian murder mysteries living in Scotland, was outed by a journalist following publicity surrounding the release of Heavenly Creatures. Perry reacted angrily at the time to the construction of a teenage homosexual relationship between herself and Pauline Parker. It is not my purpose here to attempt to either prove or disprove the existence of a homosexual orientation in the case. As Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick have cautioned, '[o]ur understanding of what is sexual, and what different ways of being sexual mean, is always dependent on the kind of discourse about sex that circulates in a given time and place.' 79 For this reason, I would instead emphasise the following point. In 1950s New Zealand there was a wide gulf between homosexual behaviour and identity. 80 That Alfred Kinsey had revealed the results of his groundbreaking survey on human female sexuality in 1953 to a largely hostile and disbelieving American public, reveals the very clear limits to 1950s awareness of same-sex relations (particularly between women) in the western world. In postwar Britain, the struggle for legal emancipation of homosexuals was not only about decriminalisation. It also centred on contested understandings of precisely what homosexuality was. Psychiatry had gained significantly in power and prestige during the war years, and the new scientific medicine with its catalogue of 'cures' presented a challenge to the immutable moral and religious laws about homosexuality. In New Zealand, knowledge of nonnormative sexuality suffered due to the persistence of Victorian sexual values. For example, a prominent member of the Mazengarb Commission needed to ask one of its witnesses, a secondary school principal, if homosexuality and masturbation were interchangeable terms. The witness responded in the negative, indicating that the dictionary definition of the latter term was 'self-abuse.' 81 29
      Two developments in 1950s New Zealand would ultimately have a profound impact on New Zealand thinking, not just on homosexuality, but on human sexuality in general. Laurie Guy has argued that Kinsey's work had an enormous impact on the profession of psychiatry. The prevalence of homosexual activities would make it more difficult to pathologise such behaviour. 82 It is clear from the published work of several New Zealand medical practitioners and psychiatrists in the 1960s that Kinsey's work, and the questionable success of postwar aversion therapy, would underpin this shift in thinking. 83 Kinsey's research, in turn, had a dramatic impact on the views of Britain's Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, more commonly known as the Wolfenden Committee after its chair Sir John Wolfenden. A remarkably considered and carefully researched document, the Wolfenden report rejected the classification of homosexuality as a disease or illness. Kinsey's findings were cited as evidence that human sexuality was complex and defied the simplistic notion of homosexuality as 'otherness.' 84 Jock Phillips has claimed that the Wolfenden Report made no public impact in New Zealand. 85 But the medical profession was a small community internationally, and advances in medical knowledge were soon available through a variety of channels—notably the British Medical Journal—even in a country as remote as New Zealand. Some medical practitioners would soon begin to draw on the Wolfenden report's conclusions, thus invalidating Phillips' generalisation. 86 30
   

International comparisons with New Zealand

 
The 1950s discourse of homosexuality as a sexual and political perversion has been established by many scholars in other Anglophone countries. For instance, George Chauncey, Jr. has highlighted the postwar sex crime panic, which peaked in the United States in early 1950. Although the most publicised target of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt against internal subversion focused on communists, he also played to the anxieties Americans had of sex criminals, reinforced by the extensive publicity given to several notorious cases in the late 1940s. This had particularly negative consequences for the public reception of homosexual men in the sense that consenting adult same-sex relations were frequently aligned with paedophilia and other sex crimes. 87 In Britain the decade from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s witnessed a 'tabloid discourse of homosexuality … dedicated to uncovering, naming, and codifying homosexual lives for public consumption.' 88 The numbers of men hauled before the courts on indecency charges for same sex offences had spiralled by the late-1940s and continued to increase into the 1950s, in turn raising awareness of the anachronism of laws criminalising its practice. 89 A similar trend was observable in New South Wales in Australia where convictions peaked in 1958, reflecting the use of increasingly aggressive policing techniques including entrapment. The superintendent of police in that state, Colin Delaney, notoriously described homosexuality as Australia's 'greatest social menace.' 90 31
      The picture in New Zealand is harder to fill in due largely to the more limited research into the history of a homosexual subculture before 1960. But this international comparison does establish that the moral panic which took hold in the 1950s was consistent with social and political currents in the postwar western world. As argued earlier, World War II had caused enormous social upheaval with significant implications for the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. It also profoundly and permanently altered sexual mores. 91 Nonnormative forms of masculinity and femininity—notably homosexuality—threatened to blur traditional gender boundaries or to confuse the gender script. 92 This occurred at the same historical moment that homosexuality became more visible. 93 A much smaller society than either Britain or the United States, a homosexual subculture in New Zealand cities was far less visible, and therefore less threatening, in the 1950s. New Zealand's moral panic tapped into linkages which had already been made between homosexuality, delinquency, and criminality. Homosexuality was not seen as a discrete phenomenon, rather one that was closely connected to a myriad of social problems arising from modernity. 94 The Mazengarb Report made reference to Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme as 'abnormally homosexual in their behaviour,' and cited this as a cautionary tale for parents whilst noting that it had not specifically investigated the incidence of homosexual practice in New Zealand. 95 32
      The most striking consequence of the Parker–Hulme case has been documented in the book by Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie. They note its contradictory effects. On the one hand, the emotive and sensational depiction of the case through such notorious headlines as 'Dirty-minded girls plotted to kill mother,' had serious repercussions for women with same-sex feelings, a trend that endured until the 1970s. The publicity surrounding the case also caused girls' schools and parents to become very watchful of friendships and the intensity of their expression. On the other hand, Laurie and Glamuzina report accounts from a few New Zealand lesbians who felt there was no other person in the world with feelings like themselves until they met other lesbians or heard about Parker and Hulme notwithstanding the negative associations. 96 33
   

Conclusion

  
This article has examined medical anxieties about gender and sexuality in 1950s New Zealand, and discussed how these anxieties were portrayed in Heavenly Creatures. While no film, including this one, can ever provide us with the equivalent of a written text, a visual text such as this can nevertheless stand as a serious alternative or adjacent interpretation with its own set of limitations and advantages. One can take issue with elements of Jackson's approach to the subject matter, but ultimately his scrutiny of the social context governing Pauline and Juliet's lives through recovery of their voices, offers the viewer some useful ways in which to rethink what was a historically complex case with manifold layers. While it is true that Heavenly Creatures does not revise some received understandings of the context (which may in part reflect some of the limitations of narrative film), the perspective of the film generally works to disrupt orthodox representations in which the burden of explaining this crime has fallen on the deviant individual. Every historical text reflects on the past with the preoccupations of the present. 97 Heavenly Creatures is embedded in important cultural and social ideas about the 1990s which, in turn, filter the past.  34

      There is a clear coincidence between the viewpoint of Jackson's film and the new social histories—particularly in the United States—which examine mechanisms of social containment to control deviance, and explore the broad-based reaction against modernity. Such a compelling retelling of the Parker–Hulme story using sublime imaging and Jackson's trademark special effects, also invites further investigation of the social context in which Pauline and Juliet are located. The medicalisation of Pauline's sexuality opens up a historically specific moment concerning sexual contingency. Whereas Britain, the United States, and other Anglophone countries witnessed some very public postwar scandals around the incidence of homosexuality, they centred mostly on consenting adult male sexual acts in contrast with Parker and Hulme as teenage, female adolescent subjects. This was the most public moment in 1950s New Zealand involving the perception of a homosexual relationship. As this article has argued, there were competing medical and psychiatric understandings of precisely what homosexuality was. Both Kinsey and Wolfenden would gradually exert a major impact on the thinking of both professions in New Zealand. On the other hand, the filtering through of these perspectives was subject to a time lag in other sections of the community. By locating New Zealand within an international discourse on constructions of gender and sexuality, the rigidity of 1950s New Zealand society is rendered more intelligible.

University of Auckland

35
   

Acknowledgements

  
I have many debts to acknowledge. In particular, I would like to thank the University of Newcastle, NSW and the University of Auckland for research grants to support this work. Hans Pols, the two anonymous referees, Jennifer Frost and Chris Brickell all read earlier versions and contributed valuable insights and suggestions. I am also much indebted to my colleagues, Jocelyn McKinnon, Marguerite Johnson and Caroline Webb at the University of Newcastle who contributed some critically important perspectives in thinking through the many layers of this film as a text. Alison Laurie, Lyndall Ryan, Simon Booth, Brian Paltridge, Margaret Scott, Jonathan Bennett, Gerald Bennett, Kathleen Hollobon, John Scott, Derek Dow, James Belich, Barry Reay, Joe Zizek, and others all made useful suggestions or offered valuable references. My appreciation is also extended to the relevant research institutions: Archives New Zealand (Wellington and Christchurch), the Alexander Turnbull Library, the National Library of New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Archive, and the Macmillan Brown Library at the University of Canterbury. 36


Notes

1. Following the revelation by the police that Herbert and Honora Rieper were not legally married, Pauline was charged under the name Pauline Yvonne Parker. Thereafter they became 'Pauline Parker' and 'Mrs. Parker' in media references, but Pauline's mother went by the name of 'Honora Rieper.'

2. Post-mortem examination, Honora Mary Parker 23 June 1954, Regina v Parker & Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH 273, T10/1954, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

3. For further details of Hulme see W.J. Gardner, E.T. Beardsley, and T.E. Carter, A History of the University of Canterbury, 1873–1973 (Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 1973), especially 319–21 and 361–64.

4. Specific examples include: K.R. Hancock, "Christchurch and Chicago. Two Crimes that Shocked the World!," New Zealand Observer, 8 September 1954; R.W. Medlicott, "Paranoia of the Exalted Type in a Setting of Folie à Deux. A Study of Two Adolescent Homicides," British Journal of Medical Psychology 28, no. 4 (1955): 205–23; R. Medlicott, "Some Reflections on the Parker–Hulme, Leopold–Loeb cases with special reference to the concept of omnipotence," New Zealand Law Journal 37 (1961): 345–48; R. Medlicott, "An Examination of the Necessity For a Concept of Evil: Some Aspects of Evil As a Form of Perversion," British Journal of Medical Psychology 43 (1970): 271–80; Tom Gurr and H.H. Cox, Obsession (London: Frederick Muller, 1958); Tom Gurr and H.H. Cox, "Death in a Cathedral City" in their Famous Australasian Crimes (London: Frederick Muller, 1957), chapter 4, 148–66; Rupert Furneaux, Famous Criminal Cases, 2 (London: Allan Wingate, 1955), 33–47; Gerald Sparrow, Queens of Crime (London: Arthur Barker, 1973); Michelanne Forster, Daughters of Heaven (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1992). The continuing capacity of the case to fascinate is evidenced by the announcement in 2004 of a new low-budget film representation directed by German-born academic Peter Falkenberg. Called Remake, this version is set in the present rather than 1954. See Christchurch Star, 23 June 2004. There are also a number of internet sites dealing extensively with aspects of the case. Examples are 4th World: The Heavenly Creatures website by Adam Abrams, based on research by John D. Porter. æhttp://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/studio/2194/ , and detailed resources provided by Christchurch City libraries. See æhttp://www.library.christchurch.org.nz/Heritage/Digitised/

5. I would like to thank Jennifer Frost for drawing this issue to my attention.

6. See, for example, Luisa F. Ribero, "Heavenly Creatures" (film review), Film Quarterly 49, no.1 (1995): 33–8; Patrick Wen, "Dirty Minded Girls Who Wrote Novels Full of Murder: Uncertain Self-Difference and Problematic Representation in the Parker/Hulme Murder Case," Literature Interpretation Theory 15, no. 3 (2004): 241–52; and Jennifer Henderson, "Hose Stalking: Heavenly Creatures as Feminist Horror," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 6, no. 1 (1997): 43–60.

7. Julie Glamuzina and Alison J. Laurie, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View (Auckland: New Women's Press, 1991), especially 65. Glamuzina and Laurie's first edition predated the production of Jackson's film. The U.S. edition of the book was republished in 1995 and contains an introduction by the American film and culture critic, B. Ruby Rich.

8. B. Ruby Rich, Introduction to Julie Glamuzina and Alison J. Laurie, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1995). Alison J. Laurie, "Heavenly Images," Journal of New Zealand Studies 1 (October 2002): 131–50. One of Laurie's central arguments is that Jackson's film is largely predicated on Reginald Medlicott's discredited folie à deux theory (communicated insanity) adopted by defence counsel in the Supreme Court trial. She also finds that the film supports the celluloid stereotype of 'lethal lesbians' and murderous deviance.

9. Some historians continue to contest the notion that narrative film can legitimately represent the past. See, for example, Arthur Marwick, The New Nature of History. Knowledge, Evidence, Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 238–39.

10. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past. The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), especially 50–64.

11. Rosenstone, 64–76.

12. Sara Knox, "Heavenly Games. Retelling the Parker–Hulme Case," Meanjin 54, no. 4 (1995): 677–90. especially 682. Knox finds the film superior to earlier representations of the event, but nevertheless notes its tendency to present the 'adolescent fantasy game playing [as] symptomatic of their pathology' as did doctors, lawyers, and crime writers in earlier decades. While Jackson has strived for authenticity, he has also indicated that he did not want to tie his representation slavishly to factuality. See Todd Lippy's Heavenly Creatures interview with Peter Jackson & Frances Walsh, æwww.tbhl.theonering.net/peter/interviews/walsh_jackson.html (accessed 7 October 2003).

13. See in particular the 'documentary novel' by Gurr and Cox, Obsession; and Medlicott, "An Examination of the Necessity For a Concept of Evil."

14. Todd Lippy's interview with Jackson & Walsh.

15. Ibid. The extremely negative associations of the case are probably a major factor in explaining the hostility by some to its memory being rekindled.

16 Evening Post, 13 October 1994, 25.

17. Maureen Molloy, "Death and the Maiden: The Feminine and the Nation in Recent New Zealand Films," Signs 25, no. 1 (1999): 9.

18. Postmodern or experimental film is able to accommodate multiple perspectives more readily.

19. A striking dimension to the testimony at the court trial was the generation gap that opened up between some of the witnesses and the two girls. The American concept of the teenager was only beginning to impact on local consciousness. For further details, see Redmer Yska, "Checked Your Kids Lately?" (feature story on the Parker–Hulme murder), Sunday Star Times, 1 December 2002.

20. Jim Barr and Mary Barr, "NZFX. The Films of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh," in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996), 157. Also see Russell Baillie, (interview with Peter Jackson), Sunday Star Times, 9 October 1994, D3.

21. Michelle Elleray, "Heavenly Creatures in Godzone," in Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, edited by Ellis Hanson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 226.

22. This scene is a more sensationalised version of the testimony given by Agnes Ritchie, proprietor of the tea kiosk at Victoria Park, who had served Honora and the two girls earlier in the afternoon, and then encountered the latter in a distressed state soon after the murder had been committed.

23. Christchurch Garden City of New Zealand, commemorative documentary, ca. 1950, directed by Roy Evans, Christchurch compilation 3, ref. no. 8953, New Zealand Film Archives, Wellington.

24. New Zealand National Film Unit, Canterbury is a Hundred, commemorative documentary, 1950, directed by Roy Evans, R.V. 779, Archives New Zealand, Wellington. A later film of Evans, being largely a compilation of his previous efforts, was presented to Queen Elizabeth on the Royal Tour of the country in 1953/54. See Christchurch and its Environs, commemorative documentary, 1953, directed by Roy Evans, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington.

25. See James Belich, Paradise Reforged. A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001).

26. Here, again, we see the film maker scrutinising the almost unquestioned acceptance of the role of the royal family when Juliet reads her allegorical parody of royalty in class—to the delight of Pauline.

27. Molloy, "Death and the Maiden," 8.

28. James Bennett, 'Rats and Revolutionaries': The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand, 1890–1940 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2004), especially 21–26.

29. In one sequence at Ilam, centred on escapism, the girls run around like dog fighting aeroplanes accompanied by appropriate sound effects. Double-coded frames throw up imperial symbols such as Biggles (a series the real girls read) and the war symbols of military aircraft. European culture, authority and even make-believe are privileged over their settler counterpart. This idea is also symbolised in Pauline's yearning to attain Englishness in her speech and demeanour. Michelle Elleray's postcolonial analysis of the film posits that Pauline's flight from everyday life, and refuge in the cocoon of Anglophilia, can also be read as a symbolic rejection of her native New Zealand in favour of a mythologised England. See Elleray, 226. The most recent work on the history of Christchurch can be found in John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall, eds., Southern Capital. Towards a City Biography 1850–2000 (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000). Unfortunately the Parker–Hulme case is not even mentioned. Omission of the Hulmes from a chapter discussing the Christchurch élite suggests that the author may need to employ a more flexible definition in discussing this concept as many in Christchurch of the 1950s saw the Hulme family as part of a social élite. It also raises the question of how outsiders to the city should be seen in relation to this élite.

30. Some commentators have maintained that the Rieper family was solidly working class. This argument does not withstand closer scrutiny. The Riepers in fact showed clear evidence of petit bourgeois aspirations. Herbert Rieper was the manager of a fish shop and the Rieper family took in paying boarders. In that sense they were part of the class Marx forgot about—the lower-middle class—rather than his 'wage-slaves.' The working class characterisation has perhaps been made because it brings them into sharper relief with the Hulme family. See, for instance, Chris Watson, "If Michel Foucault Had Seen Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures," New Zealand Journal of Media Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 14–27; and Luisa F, Ribero, "Heavenly Creatures" (movie review), Film Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1995): 33–8.

31. Chris Waters, "Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Social Body: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual" in Moments of Modernity: reconstructing Britain 1945–1964, edited by B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999)," 146–47. Wildeblood was diplomatic correspondent for the Daily Mail newspaper. In 1954 he and his friend Michael Pitt-Rivers were arrested and charged on indecency grounds for sexual relations with two airmen.

32. See Jackson's comments on class issues in the case in Lippy, interview Jackson & Walsh.

33. Jackson has indicated that the final scene of the film depicting Honora Rieper's murder, which embeds a striking religiosity through the use of camera angles, lighting and music, pays homage to Honora. See Lippy, interview Jackson & Walsh.

34. Maureen Molloy, "Science, Myth and the Adolescent Female: The Mazengarb Report, the Parker–Hulme Trial and the Adoption Act of 1955," Women's Studies Journal 9, no. 1 (1993): 1–25, especially 2–3. Also on this point, renowned New Zealand writer A.R.D. Fairburn expresses anxieties at the subversion of traditional gender roles by an 'alliance' of homosexual men and feminist women using the device of 'homosexual-feminist propaganda.' Ironically, Fairburn supported homosexual law reform despite these publicly stated attitudes. See A.R.D. Fairburn, The Woman Problem and Other Prose (Auckland: Blackwood and Janet Paul, 1967).

35. Hilda Hulme was a vice-president of the Christchurch Marriage Guidance Council and had her own programme on a local radio station.

36. For further discussion of this point see Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), especially 177–80.

37. I am indebted to Alison Laurie for bringing this point to my attention. See Glamuzina and Laurie, 57.

38. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound. American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 8–9.

39. Susan M. Hartmann, "Women's Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 84–100 especially 85–6.

40. Molloy, "Science, Myth and the Adolescent Female," 2.

41. See, for example, Molloy, "Science, Myth and the Adolescent Female," especially 20–1.

42. Janet Soler notes that the Hutt Valley was a suburban area of dramatic expansion in the 1950s, giving it particular demographic indices including a high proportion of younger people and housing shortages. The Hutt Valley and central Auckland were urban areas seen to be loci for the manifestation of juvenile delinquency. Hutt Valley milk bars and 'second-rate theatres' were 'invoked as sites of sexual excess.' See Chris Brickell, "The Emergence of a Gay Identity," in Sexualities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, edited by A. Kirkman and P. Moloney (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2005); and Janet Soler, "That 'Incredible Document Commonly Known as the Mazengarb Report'," Sites 19 (Spring 1989): 25.

43. See Janet Soler, review of Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, by Julie Glamuzina and Alison J. Laurie, NZ Sociology 7, no. 1 (1992): 108–11.

44. Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR) H-47 (1954), 63.

45. New Zealand Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, 1953–54, MS-Papers-2384, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (hereafter ATL).

46. On this point, see Soler, "Incredible Document," 23.

47. As some have observed, the Mazengarb conclusions stood in stark contrast to statistical evidence on trends in sexual crime presented to the committee by the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education. Soler, "Incredible Document," 24; and Molloy, "Science, Myth and the Adolescent Female," 6.

48. Susan Glazebrook, "The Mazengarb Report: Impotent Victorianism" (MA research paper, University of Auckland, 1978), 32–3.

49. The origin of the moral panic lay in allegations of a wave of immoral sexual conduct by adolescents made by le Fort to the Lower Hutt Magistrates' Court, which were then reported sensationally in the press—notably in the New Zealand Truth. Le Fort has been described as a 'moral guardian police officer' and 'cold war puritan in the Baden-Powell mould.' He put local teenagers under close surveillance using plainclothes police officers, and 'took a fierce interest in the morals of his local community.' For further details, see Redmer Yska, All Shook Up: The Flash Bodgie and the Rise of the New Zealand Teenager in the Fifties (Auckland: Penguin, 1993), especially 63–5; and Roy Shuker and Roger Openshaw with Janet Soler, Youth, Media and Moral Panic in New Zealand (Palmerston North: Massey University, 1990).

50. Wellington's newspaper, the Dominion, for example, suggested that a departure from traditional gender roles in relations between the sexes was the principal contributing factor. (Dominion, 22 September 1954, press clipping, Folder 13, New Zealand Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, 1953–54, MS-Papers-2384, ATL.) In parliamentary debate on the Child Welfare Amendment Bill, part of the raft of legislation hurriedly pushed through parliament in the wake of the Mazengarb Report, at least one MP, Sydney Jones (Hastings), echoed the view albeit cautiously that sexual precocity in girls was far more pernicious than in boys. (See New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (NZPD) 304 (28 September 1954), 2028.)

51. F.O. Bennett ('Os' to his family) was my grandfather. His involvement frames my interest in the case and in Jackson's filmic representation. For biographical details see the entry on F.O. Bennett in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 5 (Auckland and Wellington: Auckland University Press & Dept. of Internal Affairs, 2000), 54–5; and his autobiography, A Canterbury Tale (Oxford University Press: Wellington, 1980).

52. Heavenly Creatures, motion picture, directed by Peter Jackson (New Zealand: Miramax Films, 1994).

53. I am indebted to Deborah Dunsford for this insight.

54. Watson, 19.

55. Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, Language and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19–20.

56. See the evidence presented by Herbert Rieper. Notes of Evidence, Regina v Parker and Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH273/T10/1954, 18, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

57. I am indebted to Therese Breen for this insight on the use of the camera. Michael Belgrave, "Scientific Medicine and the Welfare State in New Zealand: The Decay of Scientific Confidence in Public Policy, 1938 to 2002," (paper given to 9th Biennial Conference of the Australian Society of the History of Medicine, University of Auckland, 16-19 February 2005).

58. Belich, Paradise Reforged.

59. See Cameron and Kulick, 76; and Justin McNab, "Gay Sub-Culture in New Zealand: A Social and Political Movement," in Community Issues in New Zealand, edited by Claudia Bell (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1997).

60. Evening Post, 26 August 1954, 12; Evening Post, 27 August 1954, 15.

61. Notes of Evidence, Regina v Parker and Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH273/T10/1954, 64, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

62. The defence case in the Supreme Court trial did not succeed. Both girls were found guilty of the murder, and as both were still legally children, they were spared the death sentence and 'Detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure' until their release in late 1959. A condition of their release was that they were never to see each other again.

63. Glamuzina and Laurie, 132.

64. This issue is discussed at length in Glamuzina and Laurie, Parker and Hulme. Their analysis considers other explanations in order to move beyond this model.

65. Notes of Evidence, Regina v Parker and Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH273/T10/1954, 138, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

66. See trial reports, Evening Post, 28 August 1954, 12; and Press, 30 August 1954, 12. Brown's statement in particular was seized on by the media and sensationalised.

67. See Laurie and Glamuzina, Parker and Hulme.

68. F.O. Bennett to Pearl A. Bennett, 22 August 1954, MS 127, Box 6, Folder 1, F.O. Bennett Papers, Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.

69. For a detailed discussion of this point see Laurie and Glamuzina, Parker and Hulme.

70. Heavenly Creatures, motion picture.

71. Ibid.

72. I am indebted to Jennifer Frost for this insight.

73. Templeton Hospital, located on the outskirts of Christchurch, provided for the institutional care of psychopaedic (intellectually disabled) patients—in the main—although it also admitted some people of broadly average intelligence in its early years of operation as a direct result of central government's 1920s eugenics policy, which sought to quarantine the supposedly 'feeble-minded' from the general population lest they breed. When pressed by the Prosecution to explain what he meant by 'defective stock,' Medlicott refused to elaborate. See Notes of Evidence, Regina v Parker and Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH273/T10/1954, 58 and 178, National Archives, NZ (Christchurch Regional Office).

74. Medlicott, "Some Reflections," 346. For a detailed discussion of medical writings on the case, see Glamuzina and Laurie, 120–33.

75. I am indebted to Sir John Scott for this observation.

>76. Testimony of Kenneth Robin Stallworthy, Regina v Parker & Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH 273, T10/1954, 177, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

77.> See Notes of Evidence, Regina v Parker and Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH273/T10/1954, 58 and 178, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

78. Laura Mulvey argued in 1975 that film narrative is sexed. Queer theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis contributed to the refinement of Mulvey's argument by pointing out that film narrative is not merely sexed but 'heterosexed.' Ultimately, film is a commodity produced for a commercial market designed to satisfy audience desire, and the cinematic conventions all play to this gaze even though a few film makers can, and do, consciously work to subvert those conventions. I am indebted to Caroline Webb for this observation. See Robert Stam, Film Theory. An Introduction (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2000), 265.

79. Cameron and Kulick, 10. Similarly, Jeffrey Weeks has argued that '[s]exuality is as much about language as it is about the sexual organs.' Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1991), 3. As Michelle Elleray observes, Pauline and Juliet's layered relationship also can be read as 'parodic romantic friendship, and mateship.' See Elleray, 224. All the medical witnesses who took the stand at the trial, Drs. Medlicott and Bennett for the defence and Drs. Stallworthy, Saville, and Hunter for the prosecution, characterised the relationship as 'homosexual.' Their interpretation of the way in which the relationship manifested itself varied considerably. See Notes of Evidence, Regina v Parker and Hulme, Transcripts of Supreme Court Proceedings, CH273/T10/1954, 58 and 178, Archives New Zealand (Christchurch Regional Office).

80.> Categorisations of sexuality and their traits remained fluid through the postwar period. David Halperin has argued that the key shift in understanding 'homosexuality' occurred when 'homosexual object-choice itself [became] … a marker of sexual and social difference.' (David Halperin, How To Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 131–2.) For a more detailed discussion of this issue in the New Zealand context, see Chris Brickell, "Sex Instruction and the Construction of Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920–1965,' Sex Education 5, no. 2 (2005): 119–36.

81. New Zealand Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, 1953–54, Folder 1: Hearings 3 Aug 1954 to 10 Aug 1954, Part I Parliament Bldgs, Wellington, MS-Papers-2384, ATL.

82. Laurie Guy, Worlds in Collision: The Gay Debate in New Zealand, 1960–1986 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2002), 52–3.

83. See, for example, E. Philipp, "Homosexuality As Seen in a NZ City Practice," NZ Medical Journal 67, no. 430 (1968): 398–405; and H. Jennifer Wily and K.R. Stallworthy, Mental Abnormality and the Law (Christchurch: N.M. Preyer, 1962).

84. Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Cmnd 247, 1957), especially 12–14.

85. Jock Phillips, A Man's Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History, 2nd ed. (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), 281. Phillips' attention to the issue of homosexuality in this significant text on New Zealand masculine identities is superficial.

86. See Wily and Stallworthy, 239, 242; and R.W. Medlicott, "Sociopathic Personality Disturbance," in Mental Health and the Community, edited by P.J. Lawrence (Christchurch: Canterbury Mental Health Council, 1963), 375. Medlicott still considered consenting same-sex sexual acts in private to be sexual offences, but did counsel that New Zealand would do well 'to follow the Wolfenden Report and leave [this] to religious and moral censure only.' Over twenty years later in a keynote address to the 1985 Conference of the New Zealand Society on Sexology, he still believed homosexuality was a deviation from 'biological normality.' See Medlicott, "Concepts of Normality and of Moral Values," New Zealand Sexologist (March 1986): 2–8. The Wolfenden Association was the forerunner of the NZ Homosexual Law Reform Society and commonly made reference to developments in Britain.

87. George Chauncey, Jr., "The Postwar Sex Crime Panic," in True Stories from the American Past, edited by William Graebner (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), especially 170. This slippage in terminology was commonplace with homosexuals ('inverts') referred to as 'perverts' (sex criminals). At a cultural level that view was reinforced. One American film maker, Sid Davis, produced numerous didactic short films in the postwar period, presented as cautionary tales. Titles included The Dangerous Stranger; Teenage Transgression; Domestic Peril; and Boys Beware. In the latter title the narrator warns, 'What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. You see Ralph was a homosexual.' For further details see the Rick Prelinger Collection, Library of Congress, USA.

88. Waters, 139.

89. Waters, 137, 143.

90. Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 10.

91. Chauncey, 175–6. Chris Brickell explores this point in a New Zealand context. Brickell, "Sex instruction," 119–36.

92. David Coad, Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities (Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2002).

93. Martin Francis, "The Labour Party: Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint," in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964, edited by B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999)," 134–51, 153, 159.

94. For a more detailed argument, see Brickell, "Sex instruction," especially 121, 130.

95. Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, AJHR H-47 (1954), 7-8, 20. The phrase 'cautionary tale' in relation to this case was first used by Glamuzina and Laurie. See Glamuzina and Laurie, 111.

96. Glamuzina and Laurie, especially 165, 169, 179.

97. This phrase is borrowed from Gillian Whitlock, "Is History Fiction?" (panel discussion, Australian Historical Association Biennial Conference, The Australian National University, Canberra, 3–7 July 2006).

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