So, Robert Blake got away with murder. Less than a week after a jury declared him not guilty in the murder of his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, the LA Times reports that Blake is looking to jumpstart his flagging movie career. That's right, he won't be wasting any time or money looking for the "real killer" of his daughter's mother. Instead he'll be using his recent notoriety to get himself into of those edgy independent flicks. Or perhaps even a reality show.
Anyone who saw his last movie role in David Lynch's meta-noir Lost Highway knows how creepy the implications of Blake's exoneration are. In that film, he played a Mephistophelean character who helps jazz musician Bill Pullman kill his cheating wife. Blake's "Mystery Man" also acts as Pullman's conscience, trailing him throughout the film with a video camera and haunting him with the proof of his crimes. The whole moebius-like narrative unfolds in Lynch's gorgeously-lensed vision of an infernal Hollywood. According to the film's co-writer Barry Gifford, Lost Highway grew out of Lynch's obsession with the OJ Simpson murder trial. The film was Lynch's attempt to answer the question: "how can OJ golf?"
So you may very well be asking yourself, how can Blake be reading scripts and shopping for reality shows? Simple, because he'll be largely forgiven. Where Nicole Brown Simpson (young, beautiful, virtuous, rich), was an "innocent" victim, Bakley (older, homely, venal, gold-digging white trash) was "guilty" as hell. Blake himself, asked to theorize on who killed his wife, simply said, she "made a lot of enemies." In other words, she deserved to die. And of course race played a tremendous role in cementing OJ's pariah status among the Hollywood elite. Time will tell whether the Hollywood establishment will allow Blake to bury the memory of his crimes, but it's clear that no tears are being shed over Bakley's unsolved murder.
But Robert Blake isn't the only one getting away with murder this week. The NY Times reports that 17 GIs "implicated" in the deaths of 3 detainees will walk. No one but the ACLU, a handful of human rights groups and a few spleen-venting bloggers will raise a fuss. As in the Blake case, America is ready to forgive. The murder victims? They were no innocents. They too "made a lot of enemies." They "deserved" to die.
Instead of OJ, I think it's more interesting to compare the outcome of the Scott Peterson trial to the Robert Blake trial. In each case, we have a (white) man accused of murdering his wife but as you correctly pointed out, Bonnie Lee Bakely was painted as a greedy whore (which in all fairness, she probably was), while Lacy Peterson was a wholesome suburban mom-to-be. There was much less physical evidence against Scott Peterson than there was against Robert Blake and still, Peterson was convicted. Makes me realize how important the jury's perception of the victim really is.
Don't get me wrong, I think Scott Peterson and Robert Blake are both guilty as sin but based on the evidence, Blake should have been convicted and Peterson acquitted.
PS - Dinner at Vitello's, anyone?
Posted by: Roger Deburgh | March 29, 2005 at 11:46 AM