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NEW YORK POST - March 3-7, 2000
FILM REVIEW
The film's executive producer and producer are Amy Sommer Gifford and
Dan Glfford, the team responsible for the most important documentary of
the last decade, Waco: The Rules of Engagement.
The Jaundiced Eye
By Godfrey Cheshire
Directed by Nonny De La Peņa
In the 1980s, the decade that saw the crumbling of the Soviet empire,
the U.S, witnessed an outbreak of persecution that, in terms of pure
delusional zeal, gave the Stalinistas as well as the Salem Witch Trials
a run for their money. I'm speaking of the spate of "child abuse" cases
in which a vast succession of innocent teachers and parents were
demonized, convicted and sent to prison, their lives and careers
effectively ruined - all on the basis of "evidence" manufactured in the
minds of babes by supposed mental health experts and turned into
horrific legal flails by ambitious prosecutors and their dependable
ally, public stupidity.
This barbaric hysteria, which easily qualifies as one of America's
collective crimes of the century, is the subject of Nonny de La Peņa's
The Jaundiced Eye, a documentary opening March 3 at the Screening Room
(54 Varick Street, NYC). Or, rather, the child abuse frenzy is one of
the movie's subjects. Another is a factor that serves as both a
competing and a complicating malignancy: homophobia of the sort that
ignorantly equates homosexuality with pedophilia.
The young man at the film's center, Stephen Matthews, grew up in a
smallish Michigan town and at 17 fathered a child before he started to
face up to his homosexuality. He took little interest in his son and ran
off to California, leaving she boy's care to his mother and his
grandparents, i.e. Stephen's folks, who admit they spoiled the kid
rotten. After the boy's mother and her live-in boyfriend (who apparently
beat the boy) got into an emotional snarl with the grandparents, and
Stephen returned to town, stories began to emerge from the boy's lips,
coaxed of course by a psychiatrist---stories of how this innocent's rear
was was repeatedly sodomized using machetes as well as genitals, by
Stephen and his dad while the child's mother gleefully looked on.
To the belief that one's ultimate legal defense lies in good old,
hardheaded American common sense, a film like The Jaundiced Eye provides
a chilling contradiction. Juries all aver the country believed testimony
so far fetched it might as well have contained leprechauns, werewolves
and magic wands. In the case of the Matthewses, Stephen and his father
Melvin were sentenced to 35 years in prison; both served several years
before new evidence got them sprung. The Jaundiced Eye deals in part
with their time inside and its effects. Stephen was raped; his dad found
God and started pumping iron. After their release, they're bound by an
insoluble bond, yet are so far apart in their understandings that it's
like they speak entirely different languages. Remarkably, Melvin enjoys
a kind of equanimity and Stephen retains a wry, humane sense of humor.
The film's executive producer and producer, respectively, are Amy
Sommer Gifford and Dan Gifford, the team responsible for the most
important documentary of the last decade, Waco: The Rules of
Engagement. That extraordinary film and this one deal with eruptions of
a peculiar American fascism that have some striking things in common. In
both cases, the government ran roughshod over countless legal standards
and restraints in order to identify and prosecute an internal enemy, and
though the damage done easily far exceeded that wreaked by, say, Sen.
Joseph McCarthy in the 50s, the authorities have yet to own up to the
truth or make good.
That's obviously in part because both campaigns - as the Waco film so
dramatically demonstrates - involved a de facto complicity between the
left and the right, leaving no side of the spectrum to cry bloody
murder. In the case of the child-abuse hysterias, the left provided much
of the thought and political muscle that created the 1974 Child Abuse
Prevention and Treatment Act and then allowed its fairly narrow concerns
to spiral outward into a spiders web of potential offenses ideal for use
in all sorts of politicized emotional vendettas and crusades. The right,
meanwhile, supplied a sentimental credulity that tended to believe
everything children said and that held anything sexual, especially
"deviant," in direct suspicion.
If any phenomenon deserves to be termed the devil's work, it's this
unholy collusion of left-wing manipulativeness and right-wing
softheadedness. Certainly, Stephen Matthews' case was only one of too
many real-life horror stories, yet it involved some unusual
complications because he was gay, perhaps the worst being that his own
son continued to hate and disbelieve him. Happily, though, there've been
some developments since the film was completed that aren't noted at its
end. Due to The Jaundiced Eye itself, Stephen's son, now a teenager,
recently realized how he had been manipulated and signed an affidavit
exonerating his father. The boy and Stephen have since been reunited.
Other information pertinent to this important, sobering film is
available on its website, thejaundicedeye.com.
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