by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
Last night at 8 p.m. I watched an unusually somber Lifetime movie called A House on Fire, a true-crime story that took place in Kansas City in 1994: a former doctor named Debora Green (Law and Order alumna Stephanie March) set fire to her house and killed her two children in the blaze just after her husband, fellow doctor Mike Farrar (Shaun Benson), tells her he’s leaving her and taking the kids. (I couldn’t help but make the parallel to the Greek myth of Medea, who also killed her children to get back at their father for leaving her for another woman.) It’s one of those movies that’s narrated in flashback by the two leading characters, so we know from the get-go that both husband and wife survived while the children died, and a lot of the heartbreak of watching this movie is seeing those two adorable kids, younger daughter Kelly (Isla Gorton) and older son Tim (Connor Peterson, who turns in a fine, charismatic performance that makes me curious about what he’ll do when he gets older), and knowing they’re not going to be alive at the end.
When we first meet Dr. Green it’s 17 years before the main story and she’s seemingly totally in control of her life: she can breeze into a staff meeting, arrive late and still instantly grasp what needs to be done for the patient they’re discussing. She can take control in an operating room and save the life of a patient jeopardized when a younger male doctor froze. When she’s not working – which isn’t that often – she keeps a scrapbook, mostly documenting her career triumphs, but laments that her life isn’t complete because there isn’t a man in it who can give her a family. The man duly arrives in the person of Dr. Farrar, who’s actually lower in the totem pole than Dr. Green but soon surpasses him in career status because … well, because he’s a man, and even in the late 20th century there was enough ingrained sexism in the medical profession (as in so much else of American life!) that even though she was doing better career-wise than he was when they met, she is expected to step down from her career, if not give it up altogether, in favor of his.
The medical group she’s been working for for years refuses to make her a full partner because … well, because she’s a wife and a mother, and though they have some quasi-legitimate pretexts (like she’s often late for work because she’s so overscheduled) for denying her the partnership it’s clear their real reason is her gender. She has a freak accident at home when she falls in her kitchen and sprains her left wrist. A fellow doctor prescribes painkillers for her, and she becomes addicted to them, obtaining prescriptions under various names and sneaking them into her body while her husband and kids aren’t looking. She starts drinking as well, and the combination eventually erodes her ability to work and provide effective care, to the point where the hospital both she and her husband are affiliated with cancels her privilege to practice there, though once again they give her an excuse: she hasn’t had time to schedule her recertification exam with the Medical Board. Husband Mike seizes on his wife’s expulsion from the hospital to insist that she stay at home and become a full-time mom, but without a professional career or much of anything to do she descends deeper into mental illness.
Meanwhile, her husband starts an affair with the hospital’s psychiatrist, Dr. Celeste Walker (Amy Groening), who like Debora is married to another doctor but the relationship is on the rocks already. (I remembered seeing a woman doctor who told me her husband was also a doctor, and when I thought about that I realized, “Doctors are so busy, when do they have time to meet anyone besides other doctors?”) Mike and Debora start arguing so much that at one point the neighbors call the police on them, and their house mysteriously burns down – which gives Mike the excuse to close the deal on a palatial mansion that had been built for yet another medical couple whose relationship had hit the rocks (before they split up they had personally traveled to Italy to pick out the Carrara marble they were going to use for the kitchen counters and floors!). Only Debora’s mental problems get worse until Mike, after unsuccessfully trying to get her to see a psychiatrist (a bit of a sore point with her since her husband is fucking a psychiatrist!), announces that he’s leaving her and taking the kids with him. This leads Debora to her Medean decision to burn down her house and kill her kids in the fire; when Tim notices smoke coming from under his bedroom door, opens it, sees the hallway engulfed in flames and frantically calls his mom on the house intercom to call for help (making the 1994 date of this story significant; today many kids in their early teens have cell phones and Tim could have called 911 himself). His mom says she’ll run out of the house and get help, but instead she does a zombie-like walk out of the place and watches impassively as the house and her kids burn.
Later she’s told by the two rather ugly police officers investigating the case (the locale is Kansas City, and apparently they hadn’t formed joint police-fire programs to investigate suspected arson cases jointly the way San Diego’s and many other cities’ governments had by then – so the fire department was investigating the fire and the police were interrogating the people involved). In the end Dr. Green pled out the case and got two 40-year prison sentences (one for each victim), which she’s currently serving, and she won’t be eligible for parole until 2035. Lifetime assigned this grim story – a sort of combination of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the 1989 movie The War of the Roses (which tracked a married couple, played by Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, through a vicious divorce battle that literally ended up killing both of them; Danny DeVito played the second lead and also directed, which may explain why his character came off as the voice of reason) – to a woman director, Shamim Sarif (who’s featured in a brief interstitial interview thanking Lifetime for expanding the opportunities for women to tell stories about women), though the script was still written by two men, Conor Allyn (who may have originally been intended for the directorial job since his main credits on imdb.com are as a director) and Benjamin Anderson, though the story source is one of the true-crime compilations by the late Ann Rule and there is at least something of a feminist perspective.
Indeed, the piece largely reminded me of the 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by pioneering American feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a young woman (also married to a doctor!) responds to the total uselessness of the life to which she’s been relegated by taking to her room, acting like a prisoner, and obsessing about the ugliness of the yellow wallpaper until she goes insane. “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage,” Gilman’s narrator says at the story’s beginning. “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” At times A House on Fire seems like a modern-day version of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman systematically stripped of everything that once gave her life meaning and purpose and all too aware that her talents are being neglected because men in general and her high-powered, “practical in the extreme” husband in particular insist on her fulfilling the classic “womanly” role of wife, mother and nada mas.
This made it seem even odder that the way Lifetime framed the movie was as a warning against the dangers of stigmatizing mental illness, since what its message was to me was that if you utterly deny a woman, especially an intelligent, capable woman, any degree of agency over her own life and any hint of independence, you shouldn’t wonder that she snaps and becomes mentally ill the way both the woman of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the real-life Dr. Green did. Shamim Sarif did an excellent job of directing this film, creating a somber, serious mood far from the sensationalism with which most Lifetime movies (even the better ones) tell their stories, and though the grimness of the piece and our foreknowledge that those two nice young kids are going to be victims of their mother’s madness make watching A House on Fire slow and not easy going for much of its length, it’s also a genuinely powerful movie and one of the most expert denunciations of sexism we’ve seen on screen recently.
