UNTRUSTWORTHY IMAGES, DISGUISED FICTIONS Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet
When Patsy Ramsey speaks, it’s an uneasy quality in her voice – more so than the words themselves – that draws attention and doubt to the person we are faced with. Exhausted and wooden, her speech carries a discomfiting monotony, often upheld as evidence of her complicity in the 1996 murder of her six-year-old daughter, the Coloradan child-pageant queen JonBenét Ramsey. In footage of one of history’s most dissected and overanalysed press conferences, Patsy’s head bows in search of the appropriate adjectives to describe the crime, but her tone fails to fully emphasise the ones she lands on. She can’t imagine such a ‘horrible’ thing ever happening to her family. The crime was a ‘heinous’ one. She is ‘appalled’ that anyone could believe that she or her husband, John, seated next to her as they front the press, were involved in their child’s homicide.
This press conference took place in May 1997, but in the Netflix hybrid documentary Casting JonBenet (2017) by Australian director Kitty Green, it has been imagined anew. In one restaging, Patsy’s sensible cherry-red lipstick has turned hot-pink; in another, the usually downturned corners of her mouth have become a broad, handsome smile. One of the Patsys stares with immense interrogation at her mock husband as he regurgitates dialogue, while another plays her lines for schmaltz, adding a sense of feigned outrage to those same adjectives. ‘How do you go on camera and say these lines and make them look real?’ an actor playing Patsy deadpans.
Most of what is shown in Casting JonBenet – a sleek, crisp documentary shot predominantly in the colours of a bruise – takes place within these kinds of inverted commas. The
