In the current climate of media, there has been an astronomical rise in true crime content. Big budget programmes about serial killers that inspire children’s Halloween costumes, podcasts detailing murder investigations that gain the listenership to affect, dozens of documentaries a year about horrific events beamed into our homes through Netflix and other streaming services. These compilations of tragedy and horror often reduce real pain and loss to pure sensation, turning the deplorable into entertainment. In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, he theorises on why so many are drawn to spectacles of tragedy. His thesis is that human beings are so interested in the grotesque manners of death as a way to alleviate their own anxieties about eternal darkness. Death is often so random and meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but in the world of true crime, death is explosive and unforgettable. Death has a meaning in true crime, even if that meaning often boils down to being the unwilling provider of late-night entertainment. Instead of true crime making it hard for people to sleep or go outside, it often seems to act as a calming supplement for its most regular consumers, in the way that car crashes provide stimulation to the characters in DeLillo’s world.
True crime largely oscillates between three major areas. The first is the examination of serial killers, the mindset and deeds of murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy compel a bizarre amount of people. The second is the mystery, where a documentary or a podcast take the audience through the potential outcomes step by step, either revealing the truth by the end or allowing the consumer to theorise their own murderer. In the case of the hit podcast Serial, the outcry of millions of outraged listeners has actually contributed to the overturning of a murder charge. The third is the more bizarre crimes. The kind of crimes that immediately take the observer by surprise, the ones that could be scattered in headlines for decades and still incite shock and awe. One of the most famous shock and awe cases is Lorena Bobbitt cutting her husband’s penis off, which has inspired numerous documentaries examining every detail of their relationship, even 25 years after the dismemberment.
While it’s true that true crime has reached new heights with the rise of podcasting and streaming services, the sensationalist fascination with depravity has been with us as a species for a long time. The case of Amy Fisher and the reaction to it from the television industry are living proof of this. The lurid tale of an underage girl shooting her boyfriend’s wife in the head, Fisher’s case fell firmly into the third designation of true crime media, a crime that was so compelling that three different television networks produced their own version of Fisher’s lustful murder. These three TV movies (The Amy Fisher Story starring Drew Barrymore, Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story starring Alyssa Milano, and Amy Fisher: My Story starring Noelle Parker) and the case itself have been largely forgotten by time, as new scandals and stories have dominated the airwaves.
However, filmmaker Dan Kapelovitz has resurrected these three forgotten artefacts of early ’90s pop culture, forging a singular narrative by splicing footage of the films together. Sometimes Amy Fisher’s face will change halfway through scenes, sometimes her parents will change, and occasionally all three Fishers will converge together in a single frame. The limitations of these films’ portrayal of Fisher and her lover Joey Buttafuoco are evident. Kapelovitz cannot change the intent from all three dramas to demonise Fisher, with at least one of the films depicting her as a crazed sex maniac who has purposefully sabotaged the life of her much older boyfriend. The misogyny is omnipresent in how her relationship with Buttafuoco is framed, and especially in the sequences following her murder of his wife. The frequent transitions between films during the second half amplifies how nasty these pictures were towards Fisher, with her descent into violence and madness being told with a perverted glee from all three initial filmmakers.
The sudden transitions from actress to actress, and most importantly, the quality in video production, take a little while to settle into. Having a shot of a crazed, beaded actor snorting cocaine behind the wheel of his car within the first couple of minutes, before suddenly cutting to another film’s shots of an insane asylum, was a particularly sobering way to start this experiment off. Yet, for decent stretches of the 75-minute runtime, the chopped nature of the presentation becomes almost irrelevant, as the tragedy of Fisher’s story dominates everything. There are moments where the constant switches start to blend together, where Fisher and Buttafuoco and all of the other characters in this story become unified figures, before Kapelovitz performs another trick in the editing booth to keep the distinction in the audience’s mind.
Triple Fisher does not reveal the hidden merits of these three individual films about the murder, in fact, it makes them all look terrible. There is little artistic merit in these pieces on their own, but Kapelovitz has found a way to make them mean something together. It is such a damning showcase of the way that the vultures within true crime media operated around cases of tragedy like this, and makes it clear how little things have changed in the last 30 years. A version of Fisher’s story told today would likely be more sympathetic and introspective about how she was manipulated by Buttafuoco, go further into her being a victimised underage girl instead of a malicious jezebel. But it would still likely end at the same conclusion of exploitative gawking, as most true crime seems to. DeLillo might have been right in 1985 when he wrote that “Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them”. After all, if you’re reading this, you’re interested in the catastrophe too.
Logan Kenny
Triple Fisher: The Lethal Lolitas of Long Island screens at Weird Weekend III, 13:15 on Saturday 29.10.22, with a recorded introduction from director Dan Kapelovitz, part of the Squint: Cinema From Cinema strand. Tickets here.
Logan Kenny is an autistic, bisexual writer from Glasgow, full time student, occasional podcaster. Has written for Cinematary, Little White Lies, The Film Stage and a few other places that you might have heard of. Big fan of Winnie the Pooh