Is James Bul­ger film right to human­ise killers?

A new film about the mur­der of James Bul­ger has drawn con­tro­ver­sy for its sup­pos­ed­ly sym­pa­thet­ic depic­tion of the infant’s killers, Jon Ven­ables and Robert Thomp­son. Bulger’s par­ents have called for the 30-minute short to be removed from this year’s Oscars short­list on the grounds that its cre­ator, the Irish film­mak­er Vin­cent Lambe, has exploit­ed their grief for his own finan­cial gain.

Lambe has sub­se­quent­ly apol­o­gised to Bulger’s moth­er, Denise Fer­gus, for not con­tact­ing her pri­or to mak­ing the film, and moved to clar­i­fy his inten­tions in a state­ment released on Twit­ter: ​“Rep­re­sent­ing the boys as human beings is a true reflec­tion of what hap­pened at the time […] and must remain a legit­i­mate sub­ject for dis­cus­sion in a grown up soci­ety that wants to pre­vent crime and under­stand how trau­ma and trou­bled child­hoods can lead to seri­ous crimes being com­mit­ted by chil­dren, young peo­ple and adults.”

Does the direc­tor have a point? What struck me most when watch­ing the film is that – con­trary to recent tabloid spec­u­la­tion – it does not ask the view­er to empathise with Ven­ables and Thomp­son, played by new­com­ers Ely Solan and Leon Hugh­es respec­tive­ly. Rather, Detain­ment uses inter­view tran­scripts and records – which have been in the pub­lic domain for 20 years – to recount this shock­ing case sole­ly from the per­spec­tive of the per­pe­tra­tors and the offi­cers who ques­tioned them.

The film por­trays Ven­ables and Thomp­son as con­fused, con­fronta­tion­al and, above all, child­like; capa­ble of lying to the police and their par­ents and chill­ing­ly aware of the sever­i­ty and con­se­quences of their actions. It does not make for easy view­ing. But cru­cial­ly it feels nei­ther exploita­tive nor tawdry, con­tain­ing no graph­ic details or dra­mat­ic reen­act­ment of the inci­dent, which would unques­tion­ably be in poor taste.

This is an extreme­ly sen­si­tive sub­ject: more than two decades after the fact, it is still hard to fath­om how two 10-year-old boys could be capa­ble of com­mit­ting such a heinous and vio­lent crime. When they were sen­tenced, Ven­ables and Thomp­son became the youngest con­vict­ed mur­der­ers of the 20^th cen­tu­ry; the appar­ent­ly ran­dom and whol­ly sense­less nature of their crime irrev­o­ca­bly dam­aged our col­lec­tive belief in the inher­ent inno­cence of youth.

At the time, nation­al news­pa­per head­lines described the pair as ​“Freaks of Nature”, their act one of ​“Unpar­al­leled Evil”. The media’s role in deter­min­ing the pub­lic dis­course around killers is often telling in the sense that iden­ti­fy­ing and pub­li­cis­ing them as some­thing mon­strous and ​“non-human” allows us to dis­tance our­selves from those whose morals seem anti­thet­i­cal to our own. Yet sure­ly it is more dis­turb­ing to accept that those who com­mit vio­lent crimes, even one as appalling as this, are still peo­ple, with the same basic needs and impuls­es as the rest of us.

Detain­ment does not offer any easy solu­tions. And it is not an espe­cial­ly shock­ing or rev­e­la­to­ry work. Its sim­ple pow­er lies in the uncom­fort­able but unavoid­able truth that it is only by attempt­ing to under­stand such crimes that we can hope to pre­vent them from hap­pen­ing. That although we may pre­fer to assign blame on indi­vid­ual terms, or point the fin­ger at the cor­rup­tive influ­ence of film and tele­vi­sion, soci­ety as a whole must share some respon­si­bil­i­ty for keep­ing chil­dren and the most vul­ner­a­ble among us safe.