We also watch, looking for motivation. We don’t really get one – or at least, not a single or simple one. Partly, this is because history offers no such easy answer. Making up a soliloquy that spelled everything out would have been dishonest.
Also, people of the era didn’t talk about their feelings. Fathers rarely expressed love for their children. People often communicated indirectly, such as providing, or doing something nice, to express love. In real life, Kehoe told a neighbor he’d shot her dog. She neither said nor did anything in reply. Instead, she merely stopped ferrying Ellen Kehoe to Lansing on grocery trips. Today, that’s considered passive aggressive, avoidant. Then, it was normal, polite. Throughout the script, there’s a dance as to what’s being said and what’s not. As a result, we’re left to guess about Kehoe’s motivations, and each viewer may have a different answer.
As a result of this choice not to spell out motivation beyond what can be extrapolated from history, Kehoe’s finances can seem odd. But what’s here is fact. That cash box, silverware, and jewelry really were found burned on his estate. Rather than make up an explanation, I’ve presented the facts and trusted viewers to make up their minds.
I have, however, given hints in Kehoe’s dialogue as to my own suspicions. By all accounts, he was smart, handy, and reliable, given to anger but not insanity. I’ve tried to suggest that, given his high self-evaluation, he deeply felt like a failure as a man. This echoes what we know of similar terrorists, such as the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing. Money clearly wasn’t the only issue. Feeling he had achieved something was. After a lifetime of childless toil, despite his intelligence, he wasn’t successful at anything except being thrifty. Despite having money, he felt himself on the verge of destitution. Only with his farming and political campaigning a failure, with his wife slipping away and his cherished savings dwindling, did he meticulously plot revenge. The school and the taxes that supported it were only a scapegoat, only one factor that might have made a difference in his life – and the only one he could hit. It wasn’t Kehoe who had failed, he told himself – it was Huyck and the community that embraced that school. It wasn’t expensive health care that was to blame for eating away his savings, the only thing he had achieved – it was taxes. But I’ve tried to render these hints delicately, without dishonoring history or his victims, and let viewers decide.
But although it was Kehoe’s story and the details of the bombing that most drew me to the story, it’s the second half of the script that I’m most proud of.
The main character dies halfway through the movie, revealing that he’s not really the main character at all: Bath is. Or, rather, the Bath school disaster is. Because this isn’t a portrait of a mass murderer, in which he might die in the climax and the entire recovery would be reduced to a dénouement. No, this is a dissection of an event, from multiple perspectives. It’s a much harder story to tell, but it’s far more meaningful.
Despite my initial attraction to the story’s more dramatic elements, this was always part of the plan. In fact, before deciding on this more linear structure, I thought the story would have multiple chapters, each from a different perspective: one Kehoe’s, another Monty Ellsworth’s, another about the boy killed by shrapnel, another about a girl who happened to stay home that day, etc. While an interesting structure, incorporating all these stories into one linear tapestry made for a better organic whole.
Depicting the town’s varied responses was also a kind of atonement. After all, I was drawn to Kehoe’s story too. He’s the obvious focus, and we all find the monstrous fascinating. We love mobsters and serial killers. But monsters’ victims have stories too. I wanted to give them a voice. I wanted the story to be theirs too. In this way, the story pivots, undermining our fascination with the killer.
And personally, I find the aftermath of climaxes much more interesting than the climax itself. In a traditional story, it’s often the dénouement and what we’re not shown that’s most interesting. Murders and explosions, dramatic though they might be, have lifelong and varied consequences, ones no less fascinating and moving, though rarely depicted.
So we see how the whole community responds, how the rest of Michigan and the whole country responds, how politics gets interwoven with these personal tragedies, and how even the family of the killer has been victimized. We see how victims’ families can disintegrate and how people don’t know how to talk to the victims. We even see how pyrotol is taken off the market, though not due to any government action. Many of these responses to the tragedy are mixed: politicians both legitimately care and want photo ops; visitors to the town are both compassionate and voyeurs; townspeople both appreciate aid and would rather the limelight go away, out of their own shame that one of their own did this; and reporters (including Monty Ellsworth) attempt both to tell the victims’ stories and to cash in on them. We can even feel mixed about the steps the victims take to force themselves to get back up and soldier on. We know wounds have been created that will take lifetimes to heal, but we also know that life finds a way to go on, despite.
The political angle particularly interests me. The story takes place at a time of profound change, in which rural one-room schoolhouses were being replaced with grade-specific education. We see other signs of change, such as women voting and Lindberg making history. Even pyrotol was an invention of World War I. After the bombing, Bath, which would have been cut off from the rest of the world a few generations earlier, finds its tragedy national news. Democracy demands response to dead kids, and government responds to the tragedy quickly, though only on the state and local level. Today, Bath would almost certainly be declared a federal disaster area, regulations would govern the ensuing charities, and no victim would be buried in an unmarked grave. Tragedy is often the vehicle that spurs change, as we see when pyrotol is removed from the market, but even this is a half-measure is indicative of the era, since it happens without the regulation that would also keep dynamite from the hands of anyone walking in off the street.
The film ends with the disposition of Andrew Kehoe’s corpse, in order to tie everything we’ve seen in the second part back to the first. We have at times sympathized with Kehoe, only to hate him, as we see the brutal consequences of what he’s done. Now, we see that his sister has the same conflicted set of emotional responses – and we see that she too is a victim. The coroner’s forgiveness and embrace of her is as close as we get to closure. Her final monologue, over her brother’s gave, sums up all the conflicted feelings we may also have about what has happened, without any unrealistic resolution. Kehoe was a man, we can never fully know his motives, and this event happened, the fullness of which the human brain cannot hold. Beyond this, we can only speculate.
That final monologue also summarizes and adds to some of the themes and questions of the movie. It invokes the theme of religion, which runs throughout the script – without, I hope, becoming too obtrusive. Religion may provide comfort and inspire humanitarianism, but we’re also left wondering what role it played in Kehoe’s formation (the KKK’s statement against Catholics notwithstanding).
Most crucially, that monologue adds to the question of Kehoe’s motivation and the question of whether criminals are made or born. We have seen Kehoe’s sign, as well as characters’ commentary upon it. Kehoe apparently intended the sign to mean that his actions were forced upon him by the school board, by Huyck and by taxes, though we know this to say more about his need to believe this so than an expression of fact. We’ve seen him struggle in his youth, with his wife’s health, and with his own sense of failure. Without getting into psychoanalysis that wasn’t popularized until later, Dr. Crum ties this question of Kehoe’s “making” to the damaged psychologies of the Bath children, wondering if Kehoe’s final message was wrong, in the way Kehoe meant it, but right in that Kehoe wasn’t born evil but had some earlier trauma. Through our own psychological lens, we can guess that Kehoe’s trauma came during his childhood and that he lashed out against children, perhaps unconscio
usly, causing similar traumas in others – almost as if spreading some disease. Like Kehoe’s sister, we are left digging through the past to find answers: in the wake of what’s happened, she pieces through her memories of Kehoe’s childhood; and in the wake of her questions, we can do the same.
Kehoe’s sister also suggests that he may have “tinkered” with the stove, causing the fire that killed their stepmother. Not having been shown this, we can only guess – just as she is left guessing. If true, this would mean that Kehoe was already a killer even then. To some, this would suggest that Kehoe was actually born bad. To others, this would suggest that he was made bad, not by taxes but by losing his mother, by his father’s distance, and by his stepmother. Again, we’re not told what to think. We can even believe that, in the wake of Kehoe’s trauma over his mother’s death, that brief Catholic sermon about watching people burn in Hell was the catalyst for all his later actions. But we’re more likely to see his childhood as having lead – not inexorably, but combined with the rest of the circumstances of his life and personality – to all the horror we’ve been so brutally shown. And her use of the word “tinker” suggests that even his mechanical tinkering, like his thriftiness, goes back to these earliest years – and to the earliest scenes of the film, tying the whole together.
On the Title and the Script in General
The film’s title is both literal and metaphorical. It places emphasis upon Kehoe’s stepmother, who is the only person we watch actually burn, and on how Kehoe stood watching her for a few seconds before taking action. Of course, we and the residents of Bath also watch many die and suffer horribly. But as the Crums remark, we are all burning. And his sister says that Kehoe is burning in Hell.
The deeper question isn’t about who’s burning but whether all we should do is watch. Ellsworth saw Kehoe suffering, especially when he beat his horse to death, yet did nothing. Could someone have stopped Kehoe, had they not been so content to watch? We see people suffering all the time, without taking action: the homeless, the depressed girl in the café to whom no one says a word. We see guns killing, like pyrotol does in this movie, and accept it. We go to see movies like Watching People Burn, much as tourists came to see the aftermath in Bath. We sympathize with the victims, and our communal mourning gives us a powerful emotional experience and maybe even catharsis. Yet this also provides us with an excuse to enjoy – even savor – the violence, by wrapping that enjoyment in moral righteousness. We watch, like young Kehoe with his stepmother, and do nothing.
The script doesn’t demand that we do otherwise. It doesn’t give us a cause to take up. It presents, not peraches. It does not tell us Kehoe’s motivation, preferring to let us observe and make our own decisions. It does not tell us what to think about religion. It does not tell us what to feel about our own desire to watch people burn or our inaction in response. It does not tell us if criminals are made or born. It shows us what and how, but never why. It puts us and its characters in the position of rescue workers, digging for answers in the rubble left by history.
This is how it goes. History offers no explanations, only interpretations. We struggle through; patters emerge only in retrospect. We turn tragedies into media events, mourn by proxy, take one lesson and ignore others. We repeat the same mistakes, slowly straggling in fits and starts towards that utopian horizon. We rebuild our fallen towers, and in time forget the bones on which they were built. We look back and think what we could have done differently, yet feel things couldn’t have happened any other way. And at all points in this evolution, we mythologize the past and make demons and heroes out of complex men, as if a single moment could define a life. But any human life is complex, subtle, interesting, unknowable, and fundamentally irreducible to any ideology or interpretation. Kehoe’s sister makes this clear, as her love of her brother merges with her hatred and shame over what he did.
This is America. This is our history. We watch people burn. But we put out the fires. And in their ashes, we rebuild. And at our best, take steps to prevent another fire. Until the next one burns, whereupon the process repeats.
Thus do we edge ever closer to our utopian promise.
This is how history works.
About the Author
After graduating magna cum laude from Lawrence University (Appleton, Wisconsin), Dr. Julian Darius obtained his M.A. in English, authoring a thesis on John Milton and utopianism. In 2002, he moved to Waikiki, teaching college while obtaining an M.A. in French (high honors) and a Ph.D. in English. His controversial dissertation, the novel Nira / Sussa, is also available from Martian Lit.
In 1996, while still an undergraduate, he founded what would become Sequart Research & Literacy Organization (Sequart.org), an organization devoted to promoting comic books as a legitimate art form. He writes for Sequart’s website, has authored books on Batman Begins and classic DC Comics stories, and has produced documentary films for the organization.
He currently lives in Illinois.
About the Novel Nira/Sussa
He’s a tenured creative writing professor. A well-respected novelist. And a recovering sadistic pervert with a penchant for young girls. His name is Julian Darius, which by great coincidence just happens to be the name of this novel’s author.
She’s a teenage groupie who insists he buy her a collar before they have sex. She seems to know his desires better than he does. And she wants to fulfill them — even ones he claims not to have.
The result is a strange love story that explores how far we’d really go, when given the opportunity… and whether men and women could truly live together, if they were completely honest about their desires.
This erotic and violent novel, criticized as pornographic, is nonetheless supremely literary and won its author a Ph.D. in English.
Nira/Sussa. A novel by Julian Darius. Cover by Doug Smock. From Martian Lit.
About Martian Lit
Martian Lit is dedicated to publishing quality, offbeat works of both fiction and non-fiction. For more information and for exclusive content, visit MartianLit.com.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: Tertellian
Chapter 2: Nellie
Chapter 3: Pastoral
Chapter 4: Agricultural Politics
Chapter 5: Banging Your Head Against the Windmill
Chapter 6: The Day Before
Chapter 7: 18 May 1927
Chapter 8: The Day After
Chapter 9: The World Comes to Bath
Chapter 10: And Under Lindbergh, the World Keeps Spinning
Epilogue
Afterword
Julian Darius, Watching People Burn
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