A few weeks ago, ‘The Staircase’ premiered on HBO Max, a fictional series about the same case that includes the self-titled ‘true crime’ created in 2004 and directed by documentary filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade. The real story dates back to 2001. Kathleen Peterson, wife of writer Michael Peterson, is found dead on the stairs of her house. Her husband, who finds her and calls the police, reports what appears to be a spectacular fall. But the victim’s injuries, more typical of a beating, cast doubt on both that explanation and the writer’s innocence. The creator of the fictional series is the always interesting Anthony Fields (‘Simon Killer’, ‘The Devil at All Hours’) and is a proposal that gives a lot of game.
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Waiting to see how it evolves, there are already many places from which to approach it. Personally, I am interested in your reflection on the power of narration to modify reality: the difference between how the world is and how it is told to us, and the mechanisms by which we believe and validate a story and others do not. I also like how it unfolds, in an unusually dark and sinister ‘mainstream’ proposal, one of the key themes in Campos’ filmography: evil as something unfathomable and practically with a life of its own. And I am amazed at the sheer dedication of well-known actors (Colin Firth, Toni Collette or Michael Stuhlbarg) to characters that represent and/or face extremely perverse aspects of the human condition. However, what fascinates me most about this fictional version of ‘The Staircase’ are two things. One, the decision made by Campos to dedicate an arc of his proposal to the filming of De Lestrade’s documentary. The French director and his team are among the characters in the series and actively participate in the plot. seems to me one of the games between reality and fiction most suggestive of recent years.
The other thing that interests me is the controversy that Campos’ decision has aroused and that Julie Meyer reflects very well in her article for Vanity Fair ‘The Staircase filmmakers feel ‘betrayed’ by HBO Max’s adaptation’. The theme is that. Very briefly, De Lestrade and other members of his team (among them the editor Sophie Brunet, who had a romantic relationship with Michael Peterson) have felt betrayed by how they are represented in the series and hints about his role in the case. As has happened with the series on the Lakers (‘Lakers: Time to win’), the offense of those portrayed comes face to face with the star argument: it is a fiction, it does not have the obligation to fully adjust to reality. Obviously, a debatable argument when the fictions quote the characters with names and surnames. But I can’t help but see in the decision and the controversy of this ‘The Staircase’ a perverse and funny movement. It is as if fiction, tired of true crime stealing its narratives, its strategies and its resources to make the stories more dynamic and attractive, had decided to take revenge. It is a fun move that also contains a very perverse question/paradox: Are we today more permissive with the alteration of reality from ‘true crime’ than from fiction?