My TV “feature” last night was Lifetime’s premiere showing of a film called Conrad and Michelle: If Words Could Kill, which was based on a true story and therefore had a lot more interest — and a lot more complexity and ambiguity — than most of Lifetime’s fare. The basic facts are that in 2012, a couple of teenagers from Massachusetts named Conrad Roy III (Austin P. McKenzie, who also appeared as himself in interstital segments urging young people contemplating suicide to call for help and giving them national suicide-prevention numbers — he said you could text “CONRAD” to 741741 and get referrals to therapists and counselors) and Michelle Carter (Bella Thorne) met when their families were both on vacation in Florida. They dated briefly when they got home, but for a year after that carried on a relationship exclusively by phone calls and texts even though they lived only 35 miles away from each other. The script by writer-director Stephen Tolkin attributes this mainly to Michelle’s reluctance to let Conrad have sex with her, and his finding a more, shall we say, accommodating girlfriend named Lisa Myerson (Nicolette Goetz). Nonetheless, Conrad and Michelle kept their relationship going via text messages, in a number of which Conrad expressed his frequent bouts with depression and his wish to commit suicide. At first Michelle said the right things — that he should realize life was worth living, that he had wonderful prospects ahead of him (not only college but a place in his dad’s marine salvage business — at 18 Conrad had already got a license to captain his own tugboat), that he would make some girl very happy and be a good husband and father, and if he were suffering from depression he should seek clinical help — but after a while her messages turned darker and took on a tone of if-you’re-going-to-kill-yourself-then-do-it-already. It’s not all that clear, either in Tolkin’s script or in real life, what changed Michelle’s attitude from helper to enabler, but it is clear that Michelle had her own issues: she’s described in the script as both anorexic and bulimic (indeed, she drives some of her female friends away when she tries to get them to help her police her diet and they get bored when she keeps asking their advice as to what and how much she should eat when and then ignores it), and though this isn’t in Tolkin’s script she also apparently had a history of cutting herself from age nine. In some ways Tolkin portrays the relationship between Conrad and Michelle as a folie à deux, two broken people coming together and indulging each other’s brokenness rather than helping each other overcome it — at one point Conrad and Michelle even compares them to Romeo and Juliet, which Michelle recoils from because that would mean she would have to kill herself, too.
The real-life basis of the story means
that Tolkin can’t wrap up the characters into little moral boxes the way he
could have in a story of his invention; he’s not all that clear about What
Makes Conrad Run (frankly, his script makes Michelle seem even crazier than
Conrad is!), though he manages to portray Conrad as outwardly totally normal, a
fun-loving kid who’s become a bit discombobulated by his parents’ divorce but
still has good relationships with both of them, and likes to horseplay with his
two sisters and do perfectly normal, fun “kid things” when he isn’t exploring
his dark side and telling Michelle via text that he still wants to die. The
show also takes a fascinating attitude towards religion, expressing that one of
the reasons Michelle isn’t bothered by Conrad’s suicidal ideation is that she’s
bought into the whole Judeo-Christian notion of heaven and she literally believes that even if Conrad kills himself in this
world, he’ll instantly be beamed up to heaven and become an angel in the next
one, where he’ll wait for Michelle to die too so they can be reunited. Conrad
makes a series of unsuccessful suicide attempts — he finally fixes that the way
he shall die is he’ll buy a generator, lock himself in his pickup truck (this
is set in one of those affluent suburban communities where all the kids have
their own cars), seal the windows and start the generator, thereby asphyxiating
himself with carbon monoxide without running the truck’s own engine, which
might get noticed and lead someone to rescue him. He’s literally on the phone
to Michelle as he does this, and their final conversation — in which Conrad
opens the door to the truck and Michelle urges him to get back in — is the
subject of a police investigation. In the best tradition of Dick Wolf’s writers
on Law and Order, the police
arrest Michelle in the most embarrassingly public way imaginable — right when
she’s officiating a baseball fundraiser called “Homers for Conrad” to use his
memory to raise money for suicide prevention — and she’s put on trial for
manslaughter and faces a potential sentence of 20 years. Michelle waives a jury
trial and her case is heard by Judge Lawrence Moniz (Alpha Trivette), who
ironically is the only performer
in the film who speaks with a discernible Massachusetts accent. Judge Moniz
convicts Michelle but sentences her to just 2 ½ years, suspending most of it on
the condition that she endure supervised probation.
A more recent dispatch on
the case from a local Massachusetts TV station, https://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/09/aclu_and_public_defender_group.html,
indicates that the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) is joining an agency called the Youth Advocacy Division of the Committee
for Public Counsel Services to appeal the conviction as a violation of Michelle
Carter’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech that could potentially have
a chilling effect on other people dealing with friends who are threatening
suicide. They also cite Michelle Carter’s original attorney’s claim that she
was suffering from “involuntary intoxication” from the anti-depressant
medications she was on to deal with her own mental issues — dramatized in
Tolkin’s script in a scene in which the prosecutor gets the psychologist who’s
the defense’s mental-health expert that “involuntary intoxication” is not
listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition (commonly referred to as “DSM-IV”),
which is the psychology industry’s standard text of just what constitutes a
mental illness.[1] (The very
existence of the DSM and the fact that members of the American Psychiatric
Association vote on what should
be included as a mental illness and what shouldn’t shows the overall wooliness
of the whole concept of mental illness and how difficult it is to define, even
though some mental conditions,
like schizophrenia, have the uniformity of symptoms characteristic of physical
illnesses as well; the ur-example
for me as a Gay man is that the first two editions of the DSM defined
homosexuality as a mental illness until the original Queer activists lobbied
the American Psychiatric Association and got them to vote to remove it!) Conrad
and Michelle: If Words Could Kill is one of
the most finely honed films I’ve seen on Lifetime, and as I noted earlier the
roughness and ambiguity of a true story seems to have brought out the best in
Stephen Tolkin: we come away from this film with little awareness of What Made
Conrad Run or what made him so determined to knock himself off, though Austin
McKenzie’s acting is chillingly effective in presenting the character as a seemingly
normal teenage boy and convincing us that his family and friends (other than
Michelle) have no idea he’s really suicidal. (One bit of irony I liked is that
Conrad kills himself while wearing one of the “Boston Strong” T-shirts put out
after the 2013 terror bombing of the Boston Marathon to express the city’s
resilience and determination to survive.)
It’s nice, for once, to see a movie on Lifetime that doesn’t
tie the characters into little knots and make it obvious who are the “good
guys” and who are the “bad guys.” One can identify with Michelle (especially
given the almost bland affect with which Bella Thorne plays her) in her
frustration and confusion over how to handle the suicidal ideation of her
friend — especially since we know she’s contemplated suicide herself: there’s
one chilling scene in which she ties a noose (from instructions she got on the
Internet, which seems to have quite a few pages explaining to would-be suicides
just how to kill themselves in the most effective and least painful ways) and
puts it around her neck before she thinks better of it and steps down from the
chair from which she was going to hang herself. It’s a movie that’s difficult
to watch because we ask ourselves what we would do in Michelle’s situation —
and her dilemma is oddly different because as a religious believer she doesn’t
believe Conrad is “really” going to die forever even if he kills himself in
this world (the dilemma would be quite a bit different for me, a non-believer
who doesn’t think there is a life
after death in this world), and though the self-destructive man in my life (my
late partner, John Gabrish) was doing himself in through alcohol rather than
intentional suicide, some of the same issues got raised: how do you deal with
someone you love who’s determined to destroy himself and resists all your
efforts to get them to stop? At the same time the real tragedy of Conrad
and Michelle: If Words Could Kill is that
our wish and hope for them would have been that they could have mutually
supported each other to get over
their mental issues instead of reinforcing each other’s sicknesses: they were
two profoundly sick people who could
have helped each other get better but instead just made each other worse and
led one to an early grave and the other to a manslaughter conviction.
