On
14th May 2006, I watched See No Evil: The Moors Murders on UTV. I no longer
watched dramas on television, I preferred documentaries. But this drama really
moved me in ways nothing I had seen all year had. But I had not expected this
drama to be as good or as thoughtfully put together. How does one portray evil
without endorsing evil? How does one depict evil without glamorizing it? These
were the difficult questions facing any storyteller. Years ago I had read
numerous magazines and books on mass murders which my mum collected (like many
housewife's she had a morbid fascination with such things - as a form of modern
horror) and I was often put off by the way such writers seemed to glamorize
such killers and dwell on the gore. Yet surely you could not depict evil
without showing the actions of evil? Well what See No Evil proved to me, was that you could depict evil without
ever showing anything. What See No Evil
did was show how evil affects people touched by it - the family of the victims,
the police, and even the family of the killers. Of course such a strategy
required brilliant acting and a sensitive and honest script - something See No Evil had in spades. There was
nothing mawkish, cliché or kitsch about this drama, only gut wrenching
humanity. And it was humanity that separated evil people like Brady from good
people. Ian Bradey was an evil animal and a psychopath, he reduced the world to
the most brutal terms in which the strong had the right to inflict pain and
suffering on the weak for sport. He had no concept of the feelings or humanity
of others - that brutal animal viciousness allowed him to kill without
compulsion. Myra Hindley on the other hand was an enigma - but I thought she
was very easily manipulated by others. Bradey manipulated her towards evil acts
no woman is thought capable of (cruelty and heartless insensitivity to others
was taken to be a very male thing - but women as care givers and mothers were
thought of as more morally principled) later I felt she was manipulated by
therapists, governors and well meaning liberals and Christians to seek
repentance, but whether her repentance was genuine or just convenient only her
maker will know. Played against Bradeys callous inhumanity and Hindley's
voyeuristic blood lust was the genuine humanity of those whose lives they
touched - the chasm of feeling for others was immense. It was this gap between
the twisted immoral lives of those who embraced evil and those whose lives were
destroyed by them that See No Evil
portrayed so well. In 1997 at the Sensation exhibition Marcus Harvey
notoriously displayed his portrait of Myra Hindley, which was painted using,
casts of children's hands, which were dipped in paint and the applied in a
ben-day dot fashion. It was a clever and conceited painting, but utterly
heartless and immoral - a kind of very sophisticated homage to a sick woman.
But it was typical of the deceased culture in which violence was a form of
entertainment and in which real human relations were substituted for the
glamour of the simulacrum. What a great drama like See No Evil showed was that art could touch ones heart and instruct
us in the betterment of our humanity rather than appeal to our worst instincts.