Among the women of the year–the newly minted stars and the aging dames who capture headlines and imaginations–one is not a woman at all, but a 16-year-old girl named Elizabeth Smart. Elizabeth, as everyone in America must know by now, was abducted from her Salt Lake City home in June 2002, and spent nine months with her kidnappers before being found, alive.
There has since been a cult of Elizabeth. She is everywhere. Her parents, Ed and Lois, have written a best-selling book, Bringing Elizabeth Home: A Journey of Faith and Hope. With the cooperation of the family, CBS produced a docudrama on the kidnapping and pitted it against NBC’s movie about Jessica Lynch, that other young, blond survivor against the odds–and Elizabeth won the ratings contest handily. In the days leading up to the CBS show and the release of the book, Elizabeth was interviewed by Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey; her parents were interviewed by, among others, Couric, Winfrey, Larry King, and Sean Hannity; and the happy trio–parents and daughter–smiled beatifically at us in the supermarket checkout line from their perch on the cover of People magazine. The Smarts are keeping a lower profile now than they were a month ago, but Elizabeth’s star appears unlikely to fade anytime soon.
It was perhaps inevitable that so much publicity in so little time would make a cottage industry of second-guessing the Smarts. A parade of “experts,” on TV and in newspapers, has warned of fame’s probable ill effects on Elizabeth. Many have condemned the Smarts, concluding they wrote the book and cooperated with CBS for the sake of money or fame.
These are serious charges. One wonders whether those who level them realize quite how serious. If Ed and Lois are motivated by personal gain, their offense is particularly foul. It involves the exploitation of their child at the moment of her greatest vulnerability, having suffered the double trauma of abduction and–if the charges filed against the kidnappers are any indication–sexual assault.
Moreover, any grandstanding from the Smarts amounts to an exploitation of their religion. The Smarts’ book is, above all, a religious tract: “What we hope to convey through our journey of faith and hope,” they write near the beginning, “is that with strong belief in God and His power, all things are possible. Miracles do happen.” The Smarts dedicate their book to God, among others, and they begin the acknowledgments page by thanking Him. If their motives are impure, they have committed blasphemy.
Ed Smart recently talked to NRO about these criticisms. He said–not for the first time–that his family’s primary motivation has been to maintain control over the way their story is told. “We’d seen what had happened to others in the past, and people can make [stories] as salacious or as outrageous as they can be. . . . The bottom line is that [Elizabeth’s] story is hers, not theirs–not for anyone else to be telling.”
According to Smart, even Elizabeth’s interviews with Couric and Winfrey were designed to protect her privacy. The questions in the interviews “were not about what happened in the nine months [of the abduction]. They were about, ‘How are you, how are things?’ We felt there’d been so many requests [for interviews with Elizabeth] that, in a very controlled situation, this would hopefully kill all the interest and this would be the end of it.”
When asked whether he and his family would have preferred to be forgotten once Elizabeth returned, Ed Smart does not hesitate before saying “yes.”
EMOTIONAL EXHIBITIONISM
At this point, I should concede that I believe Ed Smart. When you talk to him, you get the impression that he is a sincere and exceedingly private man. You hear it in the way he answers questions. He doesn’t speak like someone who relishes his own words, or delights in the attentions of reporters. His answers are short and direct–as though he is eager to be done with them.
Smart’s fears about the way the family’s story would be told don’t seem unfounded, either. He says that shortly after Elizabeth returned, he learned that a cable movie depicting the abduction had been planned without the family’s consent. And memories of news articles attacking the family while Elizabeth was missing must have weighed on his mind. The Salt Lake Tribune, for example, reported soon after Elizabeth’s disappearance that the police had zeroed in on a family member as a suspect; and a National Enquirer story claimed that Ed and his brothers were involved in a gay-sex ring, and that this was somehow related to Elizabeth’s kidnapping. (The Enquirer later admitted the story was false and settled with the Smarts for an undisclosed sum of money.) Chris Thomas, the Smarts’ spokesman during the kidnapping, says that Ed and Lois could “look past” personal attacks on them, “but when it came to their daughter’s perspective, they weren’t going to allow that to happen. They saw cooperating with a book and a movie as a way to preempt some of those strikes.”
But it matters little what I, or anyone else, think of the Smarts. Divining their motives may reveal something about their character, but such revelations are rarely of lasting import. What does tell us something of lasting import is the obvious fact that there would be no cult of Elizabeth–no prime-time interviews, no made-for-TV movie, no book deal–unless we, the public, demanded it.
Our interest in cases such as Elizabeth’s is not new. According to Richard Lindberg, a writer and historian of crime living in Chicago, “Public fascination with sensational crime and press exploitation of victims and perpetrators is not a recent phenomenon of our culture. . . . Headlining cases like the Hall-Mills murder, the Loeb-Leopold case, the various ransom kidnappings such as the abduction of the Minneapolis brewer Hamm in 1932, and that of Jake Factor in Chicago a year later, played as well in the newspapers as O.J. and the Smart case 70 years later.” Harold Schechter, a crime historian and a professor at Queens College, CUNY, says the tabloids of the 1930s were, if anything, more sensational than their modern-day equivalents.
What may be new, however, is the degree of emotional exhibitionism in the coverage of such cases. Tabloids of the 1930s specialized in blood and guts, and anyone who has witnessed the recent public debate over whether Jessica Lynch was raped (and, if so, how) knows that the prurient eye still delights in such detail. But blood and guts are no longer enough. We want tears too. We expect people to lay their sorrows bare before the flashbulb; and if we aren’t quite holding the camera, it is we who buy the photographs.
Media critic James Bowman sees a trend of “making some living person into a TV show in order that the public can get warm and fuzzy feelings,” and suggests that this tendency originated in the abandoning of conventional restraints: “It used to be you would have churches and schools and parents acting as a brake on that impulse, but fewer and fewer of them do it anymore.”
Evidence of those restraints’ destruction is all around us: in the wisdom Dr. Phil, in self-help bestsellers, in the entire career of Oprah Winfrey. So it is that we have the Smarts appearing on Oprah’s show and allowing her to dredge their souls, asking Ed to recount the minutiae of his nervous breakdown and Lois to tell us about her “darkest moment” (Winfrey’s words).
A STAR IS BORN . . .
But our fixation on feelings doesn’t quite explain the cult of Elizabeth. After all, if suffering and tears are what we want, we can find them anywhere. What is it about the Smarts, in particular, that so fascinates us?
It is, in a word, celebrity. Ed and Lois and Elizabeth aren’t just everyday victims; they are victims who have ascended the Olympus of popular culture–an honor intimately connected with, but not limited to, the celebration of emotion.
The celebrity culture is, according to Bowman, about “watching famous people have feelings just like us. That’s their certificate of entitlement to celebrity.” It is celebrities’ feelings that justify our decision to elevate them: “[B]ecause they have feelings, we say, ‘They’re okay, they’re real people, and we’ll continue to worship them like gods.’”
Or to put it another way: We want celebrities whom we can worship as gods–but only if they’re like us. We exalt our celebrities even as we liken them to ourselves, and through this comparison we indulge our taste for self-flattery. The fact that celebrities have feelings like ours makes the comparison possible; the fact that they are exalted makes the comparison appealing.
The Smarts occupy their place in the firmament because they are perfectly suited for such comparisons. We see their tears and conclude that they must be in touch with their feelings. And since no one fancies himself out of touch with his own feelings, he is at liberty to think that he and the Smarts have at least this in common.
And at about this point, something remarkable happens: We notice how much better than most people the Smarts seem to be. The children are beautiful and accomplished; the parents are successful and loving; Elizabeth looks like an angel and plays the harp like a dream. How well it speaks of us, then, that we and they turned out to be so alike.
It speaks even better of us that they needed us. Thousands roamed the canyons near Salt Lake in search of Elizabeth; millions watched America’s Most Wanted specials on her kidnapping. It was we–the public–who found her in the end, when TV viewers like us spotted her kidnappers on the street. And so the Smarts end up thanking us for our services. In their book, in their TV interviews, they are endlessly grateful for our help in bringing Elizabeth home. What higher flattery is there than the gratitude of those we admire?
. . . AND REJECTED
There is, in fact, one higher flattery, and the Smarts’ critics have already discovered it: the self-flattery of rejecting a celebrity.
Ironically, the easiest celebrities to reject are often those most worthy of their fame, having attained it by means of an unusual depth of character. Such a celebrity is opaque to us, and inevitably suffers when we evaluate his actions by the standards we apply to our own. Yet this is precisely what we do, having already decided (wrongly, perhaps, but never mind) that celebrities are just like us where it matters most: their hearts.
Accordingly, the suspicion that the Smarts are exploiting their daughter is likely to be strongest among those who most desire fame. When you long for your fifteen minutes in the sun, it is natural conclude that others share your longing. And since “others” include the Smarts, the mystery of their motivations is readily solved. After all, wouldn’t you have done the book and the movie?
So in the end the Smarts elude us. They may not be sui generis: Others have had their children kidnapped; others have been hounded by the press; others have written of how God helped them through hard times. But if the Smarts aren’t a singular phenomenon, they are nevertheless extraordinary–and therefore hard to take seriously. How can we believe that they act only to protect their daughter when we know how tempted we would be to cash in on her? What are we to make of this miracle story they tell with straight faces when we snicker at all things religious? It must be a ploy to sell books, we conclude. The Smarts aren’t so great after all. Thank goodness for the superiority of our own virtue–or, failing that, the perspicacity of our judgment.
Fortunately for the Smarts, they don’t seem to care much what we think of them–or at least Ed doesn’t seem to care much what we think of him. “We realized all along that there is always more than one opinion,” he says–and his tone seems to express an invitation: “Let the critics talk.” Perhaps this too is a way of protecting his daughter. By making a lightning rod of himself, he spares her.
Perhaps he is even happy that his critics attack him, condemn him, reject him, write him off. In their verdict lies the hope that we will follow suit, doing him, his wife, and his children one final favor: forgetting them.
–Jason Steorts is an editorial associate at National Review.