Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.
The real Gadd was disgraced by a child porn bust and his subsequent residency in sex tourist hotspots. After 18 months in a Vietnamese jail on a conviction for child molestation, he was released in 2008 and flown back to the U.K. The tabloids now stalk him and run stories like "Gary Glitter changes the style of his beard."
Execution depicts a different outcome. Arrested hours after landing, he's put on trial to test new legislation that allows capital punishment for crimes committed abroad. He sneers, argues, and wheedles. Talking heads, politicians and members of the public pop up in news-style interviews. Then he is put to death. Channel 4's Hamish Mykura says that "this drama confronts the public with what many say they want."
The documentary style is clever, and Hilton McRae does an excellent job as Glitter. He is alternatively smug, sordid, humane and pathetic. But then there's that whole weird thing about portraying an act of rationalized mob justice on someone who is very much alive and free.
Among the rationales offered is that the movie confronts us with a difficult truth; namely, that Britain needs to see Gary Glitter executed if it is to come to terms with its own moral indecisiveness over capital punishment. But the movie's concept isn't really "Imagine if we made new laws that dealt severely with sex offenders." It is "Imagine if we made new laws that would make Gary Glitter the center of national attention again." His presence is a gimmick. Without him, it would be a dry exploitation flick about no-one in particular—but one that might at least make sense.
The film's legal devices exist only to bring the celebrity to the rope. Hangings within a month of conviction, without any right to a court appeal? The EU not enforcing the Convention of Human Rights just to keep Britain happy? Get real, little Englanders. Besides, Britain has an ample supply of bona-fide child murderers competing for eligibility: I guess Ian Huntley just doesn't look enough like Fu Manchu.
Moreover, if the filmmakers cared about depicting the reality of capital punishment, they could have at least cooked up a more convincing doom. Western executions, where they play, follow years of legal wrangling. They are usually dehumanized clinical events, not pathos-filled remixes of Saddam's last gasp.
In any case, the dramatics fade before the loopyness of the Glitter premise. How did Britain's fixation on sexual stranger danger get this baroque? I'm stumped, frankly. I'm ready to be told the whole thing was some kind of deadpan black comedy. But a few ideas do spring to mind.
My countrymen often complain of the nanny state, but that modern taste for risk-peddling seems an international phenomenon. Throw pedophiles in the mix, however, and the outcomes start getting really weird.
Take, for example, the recent actions of Watford local council, which banned parents from being with their own children in a public play area. Then there's the 82-year-old woman accused of being a possible pedophile after taking photos of a swimming pool. And so on. This suggests confusion over the proper areas of association between kids and adults.
Then there's concern over youngsters' wellbeing in general. Britain's children are supposedly the unhappiest in Europe. Those responsible for their happiness were given a scathing review by UNICEF, which suggested British families are the least nurturing this side of the former Warsaw Pact. Though Britian's schools remain among the world's best, the rankings fell sharply over the last decade, and reports of its state childcare system make for grim reading.
There's also a broader anxiety over childrens' place in society at large. That younger kids are given few of the freedoms and pleasures older generations enjoyed is another problem hardly isolated to the U.K. But our fear of older youths is manifested in the press as a distinctively British moral panic. Tabloids seem to treat the nation's offspring either as hapless victims of predatory adults, or as dangerous, vaguely subhuman livestock.
Perhaps this sort of thing lets us forget that most childrens' problems are the result of familial and institutional neglect, not the likes of Gary Glitter.
Finally, there's the case of the bleeding obvious: media the world over sexualizes children, but Britain's is particularly ready to project its hypocrisy at deserving targets--or anyone who addresses the subject matter without the required solemnity.
Satirist Chris Morris produced the original "Paedogeddon" mockumetary in 2001, ridiculing the media's voyeuristic obsession with the subject. He got pols and celebs to repeat nonsensical urban legends, making fools of the lot. Condemnation of the show was nearly universal, but reinforced his point over and over again. One Daily Star article slamming the show ran next to an item praising a 15-year old singer's breasts. The Daily Mail described Morris as "unspeakably sick"--even as it ran a photo of the bikini-clad royal busts of princesses Beatrice, 13, and Eugenie, 11.
In one of the final scenes of The Execution, the condemned man says "they're not going to execute Paul Gadd." This makes a point about celebrity, about how it trades in mediated personas. The "thought-provoking" question is clear enough--is something other than a man being destroyed?--but it's a thought buried under the batshittedness of Glittergeddon.
If The Execution of Gary Glitter sounds barbaric, rest assured that it was merely inane. He isn't some metempsychotic vessel for the nation's unease over child abuse or the death penalty, after all. He's just a dirty old man, and he gets what he deserves.
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Just when I think the US is winning, the UK outweirds us.
The moral panic over abuse always hews close to the bone for me. I'm a young adult librarian, and I'm 6' 2" and a big guy. I've had people just flat out ask me why " a guy would want to be around kids?" and say things like "Why would a grown man want to be around children who are not his own."
My fellow (female) librarians get and give hugs all the time. I'm really mindful of never being in a closed room or initiating a hug with a kid. It's this weird fear that all it takes is one person even thinking they saw something untoward and your career is over.
And it's rubbish of course. I'm not a pedophile any more than I'm a necrophiliac. By statistics alone the kids I work with every day are safer in the library than, in some cases, their own homes! For every Gary Glitter there are any number of abusers in families.
I see the panicked parents instilling fear in their little ones and then living in fear of "rowdy teenagers" and it just makes me sad. Making kids scared or demonizing them is, in its own way, a very real form of abuse.
I'd never heard of peadogeddon before. Awesome:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9031532194656768989
What's fascinating is that a 2nd rate Glam star would still evoke debate nearly 40 years after his (uh erm...) zenith
Not a librarian, but I see your point. My much smaller run in with this paranoia was a few years back when I was on a kick of performing one random act of kindness a day for a week. It was almost a weird stunt and I can't say why I did it. I happened to have a candy bar (I think it was a Milky Way) in my backpack when I happened upon a kid playing by herself on the sidewalk. I considered briefly bequeathing an unexpected gift of sugar, but thought better of it just as I was about to procure the candy.
Suddenly I felt really creepy and weird and just walked on by. I can only imagine how my act of kindness might have been punished had anyone seen me. What's interesting is that I wouldn't hesitate when visiting my parents overseas. I'm sure that there are more than a few sickos over there, but the fear of stranger-danger is relatively low.
I will say that whatever its strengths this film, like so many of the film industries' offerings these days, doesn't exactly cover new territory. People can see the German film "M" for free at archive.org (link) since it's now in the public domain. It also has its own nifty stylistic elements as well. I highly recommend it.
@mgfarrelly, I'm in library school at the moment and I fully intend to be a youth services librarian (provided I can actually find a job when I'm done). You're right. It's complete rubbish. Male librarians (like male teachers or social workers or whatever) want to work with kids for the same reason that female librarians do: because they feel like they can make a difference in their lives. But still, the paranoia makes me a bit paranoid myself.
I hope I don't give you even one iota of pause in my nattering. For every moment of weird paranoia I've have hours of wonderful experiences with patrons of all ages.
Seriously, having a 15 year old come up to you and hand you a copy of a book you recommended they read and have them say "I finished this, it was cool. What else is like this?" or introducing a bunch of bored tweens to Courtney Crumrin or Polly and the Pirates? Or running an after-school rock-band gaming club where you get to sing "Eye of the Tiger" and be a rock god to a bunch of 6th graders?
Best job in the world man.
Wait, did I go to sleep and wake up to find it's the 18th century all over again? Ya! Cake or Death.
I watched most of this and didn't really see the point. I didn't learn anything that couldn't have been summed up in a few paragraphs and it just felt like a rather grubby, sordid excuse for sensationalism, maybe even mob wish-fulfilment.
It had nothing worthwhile to say other than people die when you put them to death.
The populist right (meaning the UKIP, the BNP, papers such as the Sun and Daily Mail, and parts of the Conservative Party) in the UK is clamouring loudly to leave the EU. The more mainstream parts of it don't mention the reintroduction of capital punishment as a payoff of leaving the EU (the BNP did have some charming stickers with the slogan "Paedophiles: The Only Hope Is The Rope!" a few years ago, though), though if 70% of the British public want the death penalty reintroduced for sex crimes against children, it can't be far from their minds.
It's weird that I was very mindful of what I was just going to write in response to this article, even though it was completely innocent and appropriate.
Western society has really put, in my opinion, the males of our country on Paranoia Street. I have two kids and they are the light of my life. I love kids, and I want to have more. I work with the public and when parents bring in their children it's always fun to talk with them. I'll admit that I've been given sideways glances more than once just because I laughed at what a child said or maybe I spoke to them longer than the parent felt I should have.
As a parent, I find myself falling into the same trap with my children though. I'll find myself warning them about the dangers of even speaking to an adult when we're out. I hate that. I hate that our society has robbed a lot of kid's childhood in the name of our own weird paranoia.
Er, Watford council didn't ban parents from *public* play areas:
http://www.dailyquail.org/2009/10/how-bollocks-spreads-in-world-of-web-20.html
"Execution of Gary Glitter" was just another of Channel 4's ratings-chasing snuff/retribution fantasies, in the same vein as "The Assassination of George W. Bush" or "The Trial of Tony Blair" docu-dramas.
Expected for 2010 from Channel 4: "The Execution of Margaret Thatcher", a leftist alt. history wet dream of the Miner's Strike.
Remember: it's totally okay to make snuff fantasies about living people, just so long as they are wrongbad people.
@mgfarrelly: Nope, no hesitation here. But thanks for the encouragement. That really does sound like the best job in the world to me, which means I'm probably on the right path. Keep on rockin!
Antonius, I might say more "differently weirds" than "out weirds."
I mean, this is the US. Land of Abstinence-only education and the "R for boobies, PG for bloodshed" hypocrisy. Remember we were partially founded by the loonies that thought Britain was "too liberal." Our sex weirdness is a generalized, broad, puritanical horror at anything having to do with naughty bits being discussed in public. If we were a little more open about sex in general (and maybe a little less happy with our violence), I'm sure we'd be weird about pedophiles, too. But we get to kill anyone who makes our kids think about sex before they're married.
"Celebrity sex offender" - thanks for coining the most offensive term of the century. Nice one Rob. Nothing like diluting the severity of a crime and confusing the allegiances of a population.
"Celebrity lynch killer"
"Celebrity parent killer"
"Celebrity liver thief"
ffs. Mind your language.
Daedalus - it's because you don't have separationofchurchandstate. So good luck to you.
"Celebrity lynch killer" (wannabe edition) - Toby Keith
"Celebrity parent killer" - Lyle and Erik Menendez
"Celebrity liver thief" - Goto Tadamasa
mgfarrelly said he runs "an after-school rock-band gaming club where you get to sing "Eye of the Tiger" and be a rock god to a bunch of 6th graders"
So you are abusing them!
It's rather the point of all this that "celebrity sex offender" is an offensive notion. What is he famous for? Who is making sure he stays famous for it?
A little abstruse, but I get it, and I do like it.
I have a similar position on these people as I do on DRM - don't participate! So I agree, the very mention of them raises their status. The earliest example I recall in my lifetime is Mark Chapman; and he wanted to become famous - so he got exactly what he wanted - society gave him the biggest fame orgasm he could ever have attained, if that isn't crude. We lose, twice. Lord only knows why they didn't execute him.
DRM - just don't buy stuff. Don't feed the beast.
The term "celebrity" doesn't mean what it used to; once a celebrity was someone who was regarded with admiration; nowadays, that has turned to a prurient contempt, gawping at every detail of their sex lives and jeering and hooting when they fall short of perfection. The typical celebrity these days exists for the purpose of being disliked, like Paris Hilton or some reality-TV contestant. As such, "celebrity sex offender" is perfectly apposite, IMHO.
@23 please remember the immense amounts of money even minor celebrities make for simple acts like having a picture published. I really don't feel too sorry for them.
I did have a parent recently ask me if there were any "good" songs on Rock Band.
Then came the Beatles, and there was much rejoicing.
Very good article, I agree with the majority of what you say. Gary Glitter was poorly chosen example obviously only chosen to create hype.
The situation described was unrealistic and made no sense. It wouldn't just be our law that had to change international law would have to change too. At least if they had used Huntley or similar it would have been slightly more believable.