UNITED STATES
MTV
IN HOLLYWOOD, WOMEN OVER 40 ARE RARELY THE HEROINE — EVEN OF THEIR OWN STORIES. BUT WITHIN NETFLIX’S HORRIFYING TRUE-CRIME SHOW ARE BRAVE AND BRILLIANT WOMEN WE CAN ALL LOOK UP TO.
INKOO KANG
[Spoilers for The Keepers ahead.]
The Keepers is probably the most brutal and devastating watch of the year. Streaming now, the Netflix documentary revisits a cold case — the murder of a 26-year-old nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik, nearly half a century ago — and chronicles a sexual-abuse case involving scores of teenage victims at a Baltimore Catholic girls’ high school. The rapes and other sexual assaults of as many as 100 girls (and in an earlier incident, at least one boy) by the school priest, Father Joseph Maskell, and his associates may have never come to light if it weren’t for one of Sister Cathy’s students, Jean Hargadon Wehner, who alleges in the doc that the nun was killed for her knowledge of the priest’s crimes. Wehner had already suffered sexual abuse by an uncle when she met Father Maskell and his collaborator Father Neil Magnus. The latter exacerbated her feelings of guilt about the earlier assault(s) by telling the 14-year-old victim, “I don’t really know if God can forgive this.” Wehner’s accounts of the priests’ cruelties are nauseating and infuriating — as is the decades-long guilt Father Maskell fostered in his spiritual ward by essentially blaming her for Sister Cathy’s murder. The nun disappeared shortly after Wehner reported the priest’s sexual assaults to her teacher. Months later, Wehner desperately brushed maggots off Sister Cathy’s face as Father Maskell threatened to kill anyone else the girl told her secrets to.
That Wehner and Father Maskell’s other survivors have been through hell and back is abundantly clear. But a few days after bingeing on The Keepers, I found myself recalling the doc with a smile thanks to the graceful aging of many of its protagonists. I’ve spent the better part of the past decade worrying about getting older. Pop culture — which I’m steeped in as a critic — just might be the worst lens through which to consider female aging, and the films and TV shows on the subject that stick out in my mind foretell nothing good. From All About Eve to The Clouds of Sils Maria, movies about women on the “wrong” side of 40 mark them for obsolescence and replaceability, like a leaking refrigerator. Since Getting On (HBO) is set in a gerontology ward, the hospital comedy naturally focuses on the mental and physical decline of the gray-haired. Amour, about an elderly man who kills his longtime wife after she suffers a debilitating stroke, is a personal nightmare. “Have you seen The Golden Girls?” you might ask. Yes, I have. I adore it, in fact — and, by the way, three of the four cast members are dead.
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