Watched Candy, a true crime inspired drama miniseries on Hulu. Every time I get interested in a true crime story, I always get a bit disappointed. Because, whether fictionalized version or non-fiction reporting, they always seem to err on the side of just kind of depicting or stating the facts absent of making any larger commentary. I remember listening to the Dirty John podcast, and there could have been SO MUCH in there said about how the affected family had a streak of not permitting women to really value themselves. Or The Shrink Next Door, which did so little to really analyze what could lead a person to turn over complete control of their life. Similarly, even though this miniseries was a dramatization, it just didn’t attempt to make much analysis or commentary of the events.
Candy takes place in the late seventies-early eighties in conservative Texas, and there are a lot of the expected tropes about suburban motherhood being stultifying and the press of traditional gender roles. But they don’t seem to say anything LARGER about them. I don’t even think they do enough to really establish who the characters WERE, and what the things they did MEANT.
I know Candy is a real person, and I can imagine a fear of assigning motives and judgment on the complexities of real humans— no individual exists just as an indicator of our context. But this is a narrative, and leaving it so ambiguous made it kind of bereft of meaning. It suggests she was just kind of doing the stuff she wanted to do, or that all her reactions were intensely personal, but they didn’t give us enough of a full character there for that to tell us anything interesting on that level. Mostly she’s depicted as a bored housewife who wanted excitement, and when she was called to bear on it in some way, she lashed out. Or else, if you believe she’s innocent, she made some bad personal choices and then had to scramble to save herself when the consequences escalated to a disproportionate level. They try to personalize the woman she murdered, Betty Gore, but she is just kind of every Sad Neglected Housewife cliche in the book.
If it had been me, I would have tried demonstrate more of the press of Candy’s situation in a larger sense on how she behaved. Used the culture she was in as part of her motivation. Make it clear, with her desire for more excitement and romance, she was finding the social expectations of her life suffocating. But also make her unwilling to give up the social benefits of conforming to the dominant paradigm— that she got to be the queen bee of the community, that everybody saw her as the perfect wife and mother, the financial and material comforts of her marriage, maybe even that it gave her power over others in her world —so she’s desperately motivated to hide the ways she’s violating expectations. Even if it means lying, manipulating, and even murdering. As for Betty, I’d make her the opposite— dying to have what Candy seems to have, like social acceptance, no money worries, a close relationship with her kids, a boring dependable husband who adores her —but stuck on the outside of this community looking in. And so when Candy takes her husband’s attention away from her and then kills her when she threatens to expose things, it’s even crueler.
Maybe that’s what they were trying to do, but I don’t feel like it came through that specifically. The actors were generally very good, but there wasn’t a ton for them to work with. I don’t know, did anybody else watch it? Marybeth, maybe? What do you think?
Also, the seventies were so goddamn ugly.
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