Stevie

directed by Steve James (2002)

What happens to the people we leave behind?

Steve James signed on with the Big Brother program when he was in college in the 1990's.  He and Stevie, (Stephen Fielding), established a bond when the boy was 11.  James finished college and moved on, but he didn't forget about Stevie.  This documentary is about him reconnecting with his "Little Brother", 10 years later.

I was about ready to throw in the towel pretty early on because the documentary felt exploitive of the disparities between a well to do film maker versus his simple minded rural redneck "Little Brother".   Then bam! Stevie is accused of molesting an 8 year old relative while babysitting.  What!?  Did we just enter the sordid zone?  Damn sure became compelling viewing after that revelation.  I couldn't stop watching.

Especially riveting are the interviews with Stevie's aunt, the mother of the victim. Her righteous anger is contrasted with some compassionate statements later on, and that is precisely what makes the documentary interesting.  It presents a fairly dispassionate viewpoint by illustrating the dynamics behind his upbringing,  and showcasing Stevie as he is:  a victim and victimizer both. Stevie wasn't a monster born in a vacuum;  it took a whole lot of abuse and neglect to create a man lacking the empathy and morals that would make committing such a terrible crime impossible.  His mother and grandmother are shown behaving badly with regards to him and each other. You hear about how his mom never wanted him and how horribly she treated him. The neglect and abuse is heightened when compared to the daughter she did look after, though the mom is no candidate for mother of the year with her regards to her daughter either.

Another really good sequence is when Stevie and his girlfriend Tonya, visit Chicago. Tonya is a sweet girl, and both Stevie and her have disability related incomes but they are talking about getting married even though that would affect both of their SSI monies.  In the city, they stay with Tricia, one of Tonya's high school friends. Tricia has cerebral palsy, which makes it a bit hard to understand her, but she's straight to the point with Tonya, and asks if he did it - sexually abused his cousin.  Tonya equivocates, but admits, yeah, there's evidence.  Tricia then talks about what happened to her personally with sexual abuse or assault, I'm not sure what but, Tonya knows what she's gone through in terms of bringing her abuser to justice.  Tricia may have a hard time enunciating, but she is super articulate on her own devastating experience.  She's compassionate towards Stevie, but she's first and foremost, Tonya's friend, and she prods Tonya to think about what kind of man Stevie actually is before taking steps towards marrying him.

Then there's the bizarre sequence with members of the Aryan Nation that had me shaking my head.  It takes all kinds I guess.

Stevie's had a sad, circumscribed, life and the tragedy is that it appears to have been an entirely avoidable corruption of his potential.  If he had been raised by people who loved and nurtured him, who knows what kind of man he might have been.  There's a part where the director puts Stevie in touch with a foster parent couple who were caring, and who Stevie obviously felt loved by, but they also talk about how they stopped Stevie from getting raped a few times when he was in the group home where they worked.  The implication being that they weren't able to protect him all the time, and for sure weren't able to protect him once they stopped working in that group home.

I felt really sad after I watched this.  I don't know that I can make a convincing argument that Stevie was exploited by the director, but I feel like he was.  It was inherently voyeuristic and I felt a bit of shame that I was being entertained watching this real life Jerry Springer show.  The fact that I feel simultaneously revolted and sympathetic towards Stevie means the director did a good job, though I don't think he deserves any commendations for deciding to make the documentary in the first place.  What was the point?  To illustrate how a system that fails kids creates adults who end up in jail?  I think that fact is well established, and this particular documentary doesn't bring anything but anecdote to that discussion.  The best thing that can result from this film, as the director in the interviw below states, paraphrasing Stevie's sister, "There are other families like hers out there, and this film might be able to help them."  While this is true, knowing there are other people who have gone through the same problems does make it easier somehow to bear up under that burden,  the film still feels sleazy and that potential benefit to society comes at the expense of a man who seemingly lacks the intellect to understand what he was getting into with the whole film making process.

Stevie was abused and neglected from the time he was born, and what he had to endure growing up can be seen as a blueprint for him becoming a criminal and a sex offender.  Instead of being reared in a safe environment he was tossed around and tormented, instead of being cherished and loved he was told how worthless he was and abandoned.  This documentary is an indictment of both the biological caregivers who failed him, as well as the social services that are supposed to step in to protect children from abuse and neglect.  Stevie never really had a chance.   He's a prime example of "falling through the cracks" in the social safety net.  I'm not trying to make excuses for his appalling behaviour, but seeing how he was raised, well it's more like he was trained on how to be a bad person than a decent one.

Maybe I am reactionary when it comes to my dislike of this film, but I don't think so.  If you took out the sexual abuse angle and showed Stevie being a run of the mill underacheiver, guilty of less heinous crimes, it would maybe feel even more exploitive, because then you wouldn't have his being a sex offender helping you to overlook and justify the fact that his squalid circumstances and entirely all too common life story are being shown as much for people's amusement as for any overarcing societal benefit.  Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but I really feel that many people watching this will do it with a disdainful eye, looking down with a perspective of superiority and disgust, at hillbilly rurals they judge to be their lessers.  Compassion for folk in dissimilar circumstances can be hard to come by.

I'm trying to seperate my feelings about Stevie in particular, from my feelings about the film as a whole.  I think it's guilty of the American fallacy of focusing on the individual and not seeing the forest for the trees.  It doesn't extrapolate Stevie's circumstances to the innumerable children in the exact same shoes as him, leaving that step up to the viewers.  It's an obvious conclusion though, so I hope viewers will come away with a sense of outrage that prompts more than the kneejerk conservative reaction towards criminals - lock 'em all up and throw away the key.  My hope is that they'll be putting it all together and thinking about the reasons why little kids grow up to become criminals, and that will make them want to make the world a better place, especially for children at risk.

 IMO, universal social programs as well as programs that target vulnerable populations are among the most effective ways to make sure kids are helped before they are damaged.  Once they're messed up, it's much harder to repair them, but it's not impossible.  Attempts made to heal kids who've been victimized by violence and neglect would reap so many benefits for society as a whole, not to mention for the abused kids who grow up and presumably make the same mistakes parenting their children.  The cycle will continue indefinitely, if we don't target money so kids are supported in ways that preclude them growing up to be prisoners.   I believe that, generally speaking, spending money on prisons is a misallocation of resources that should have been spent earlier - on child devlopment and societal structural supports.  That's a much better value for our dollar and would create a much healthier society.

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