by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 8 p.m.
Lifetime wrapped up its series of “Ripped from the Headlines!” movies (probably
an especially unfortunate slogan for this particular one), which otherwise
consisted of reruns (though some of them quite good), with the marathon’s one
“premiere,” I Was Lorena Bobbitt. That brought memories of
tabloid scandals past — particularly 1993, when Lorena Gallo Bobbitt of
Manassas, Virginia (known until then almost exclusively as the site of two of
the bloodiest battles of the U.S. Civil War, both of which the South won)
reached her limit with her physically and psychologically abusive husband John
Wayne Bobbitt, an alcoholic, gambler and womanizer, and sliced off his penis
with a kitchen knife after he’d either fallen asleep or passed out in their bed
following his latest rape of her. There have been TV movies, both documentaries
and dramas, about this case before, but what made this one unique is that
Lorena Bobbitt herself was one of the producers and she appears in the film the
way she looks today (heavy-set with long blonde hair), narrating the story and
making it clear that this is going to be the Bobbitt story told entirely from
her point of view. (The fact that the film is called I Was Lorena Bobbitt rather than I Am Lorena Bobbitt reflects her quite understandable decision to
revert to her original last name after she and John Wayne Bobbitt divorced in
1995.)
Though Lorena throughout the movie stresses that she had no frame of
reference for the abuse she suffered at John’s hands during their five-year
marriage, what we see on screen is an all too typical portrait of an abusive
husband terrorizing his wife into virtual submission. When they met John Wayne
Bobbitt (Luke Humphrey) was a hard-drinking Marine stationed near Manassas and
Lorena (Dani Montalvo) was an immigrant from Ecuador (though for some reason the
script for I Was Lorena Bobbitt, by Barbara Nance, moved her country of origin to Venezuela) who had
won a temporary green card to live and work in the U.S. (she was sponsored by
her mother, who appears as an important character in the story) before she married John. Given the circumstances under
which they met — in a bar where he was not only getting plastered but cruising
everyone in the place that was alive, human and female — Lorena should have been warned about what committing to this man
would be like, but she was a naïve little girl from Latin America and the only
model for a relationship she had was her parents, who had been together for
over 30 years (until her dad’s death before the events of this movie begin) and
had never argued or fought, at least not in her presence. So she married John
but also pursued her own career as a beautician and got a job at a salon owned
and run by Teri (Niamh — pronounced “Neve” — Wilson). Lorena has two people in
whom she can confide, Teri and her mom Elvia Gallo (Beatriz Yuste), which is
two more than most battered spouses have (usually their abusers have them cut
themselves off from their jobs and all their previous friends so they will literally have no one to go to for support in breaking out of the
abusive relationship).
When Lorena gets their first paycheck she wants to
treat herself and John to a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant. Instead John
wants to take his Marine buddy Richie Howard (Canadian actor Richard Clarkin) and her to the sleazy bar where they met, blow all
their money on shots, and insist on driving home even though he’s way too plastered to do so. For the next five years
John’s abuse gets worse and worse — as does his temper and the triviality of
the incidents that provoke him to beat her, rape her vaginally and ultimately
rape her anally (which really terrifies her!), including one Christmas when she buys an artificial
tree and he gets incensed that it’s not a real one, and another when he gets
upset when she switches the TV from a football game on Thanksgiving (a game
he’s bet $50 on, which he loses) to the Thanksgiving Day parade because she and
her mom want to watch the balloons. He goes outside and rips out the cable so no one can watch the TV. Though at one point she
complains that when she and John have sex he pulls out immediately after his orgasm and doesn’t allow her
one, later on she catches him watching porn on their TV (which he’s bought with
her money, since he’s been unemployed since he left the Marine Corps — Nance’s
script doesn’t specify but we get the impression that her complaint to his
Marine commander about his abuse got him dishonorably discharged, which if true
would be about the only time in
the entire story a male authority figure took her seriously). He says, “If I
can’t get sex from my wife, I’ll have to find it somewhere else.” She protests
that they do have sex, and he fires
back, “You laying there like a dead fish is not sex,” as the moaning from the
woman in the porn movie illustrates the kind of excitement, even faked, he
would want to see from her.
Nance’s
script, directed mostly effectively by Danishka Esterhazy, is non-linear but
between the titles, which identify every scene as so many months before or
after “The Incident” (as it’s diplomatically called), and the real Lorena
Bobbitt’s narration and interstital appearances we’re never left in doubt of
precisely when we are. After “the
incident” Lorena Bobbitt drives off in her car, taking her husband’s severed
organ with her and throwing it away in some bushes outside a convenience store.
Then she called 911 and turned herself in, though the police who interrogate
her couldn’t be less
interested in her tale of extended domestic abuse. All they’re interested in is
where she disposed of John’s dick, since his doctors want to recover it in time
to be able to reattach it — which they did; eventually, after John and Lorena
finally divorced, he even made two porn movies, John Bobbitt Uncut and Frankenpenis, to make money to cover his medical and legal
bills and also, one suspects, to show the world that it still worked. He was
charged with sexual assault but was acquitted — apparently in the 1990’s
Virginia law still put strict limits on a wife’s ability to accose a husband of
rape, and I still vividly remember my shock in 1975 when I looked up the rape
statutes in California and found that rape was defined as a man forcing a woman
other than his wife to have
sex with him against her will. Until that law was changed in 1977, a marriage
license in California was an open-ended grant of legal permission for a husband
to have sex with his wife any time he wanted to, whether she wanted to or not.
As horrifying as this movie’s
depiction of Lorena’s abuse at John’s hands is, its depiction of the sorry
attitudes of law enforcement and the legal community is almost as scary: the
cops in particular and male authority figures in general are shown as not
taking seriously women’s claims of being abused by their husbands and, if
anything, even taking the husbands’ side, not necessarily openly but in terms
of discounting what women have to say against their husbands as a sort of
“buyer’s remorse.” The authorities charge Lorena with “malicious wounding” —
which sounded to me in 1993 like they really ransacked the statute books looking for something,
anything. to charge her with — but
she, too, is acquitted mainly because the jury buys her attorneys’ contention
that when she did what she did she was temporarily legally insane because she
was under an “irresistible impulse” to fight back against her husband by
attacking the instrument with which he’d waged many of his attacks on her. I
Was Lorena Bobbitt is a quite good Lifetime
movie, well staged and appropriately discreet in showing the central event
(though I could have done without the blood-red tinting of the confrontation
between the two just before Lorena severs John’s member. It doesn’t really tell
us much we didn’t already know (or couldn’t have guessed) about the Bobbitts or
abusive marriages in general, but it’s a finely honed portrait of the sheer
terror suffered day by day by someone who’s the victim of spousal abuse!
