I watched the documentary Suburban Fury about Sarah Jane Moore, who tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford in 1975 (she failed, largely due to a defective gun), but she I didn’t know much about it and didn’t provide much information. Frankly, I thought about that extraordinary bout of violence in the 1970s. (There were many such cases, including the Patty Hearst kidnapping, which is closely tied to Moore’s story.) At the time, Moore seemed the most unlikely of assassins—she She was a 45-year-old single mother who may have been a woman. Played by Maureen Stapleton. The question that always comes with a shoot like this one is “Why?” (Assuming you think the answer lies outside of the fact that the person in question is severely mentally ill.) And that question lingered throughout the Moore case. But “Suburban Fury” does that rare thing, offering a very specific motive for Moore’s infamous crime.
Only one person is interviewed throughout the film, and that person is Sarah Jane Moore. (That was the deal she made with director Robinson Dever: He wouldn’t let anyone else appear on camera.) Even in her 90s, Moore still has quite the brook. doing. Calm pathological narcissist. A person who weaves his life like a novel, a story that has been told a million times and sounds spontaneous. Her memory is fickle and sometimes contradictory, but when she declares that she was never crazy, she says it with such aristocratic calm that it’s hard to believe it even for a moment.
So why did Moore, standing in the crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, try to kill President Ford? You need to know the extraordinary backstory. Everything is there in the movie, told out of order, as if it were some sinister glowing puzzle in a spy thriller.
How Moore, who was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1930 (she liked to falsely imply that she was a Southern aristocrat), married five times (twice to the same man) and married five times (twice to the same man). Find out how she went through multiple divorces and had four children. , most of which she abandoned. How she moved to Danville, California, 40 minutes from San Francisco, and became obsessed with the Patty Hearst kidnapping. Patty’s father, Randolph A. Hearst, defeats the kidnappers — the Symbionese Liberation Army, a psycho-guerrilla ragtag collection of revolutionary dregs — by starting the PIN program, which distributes $2 million in groceries across the state. When he tried to calm her down, Moore said, how did he do it? I signed on as an accountant for the program. how she They became radicalized (like Patti, she sympathized with the SLA and its leader Cinque) and joined other underground leftist groups in the Bay Area. And how, even in the midst of the frenzy, she was recruited as an FBI informant and dutifully carried out her duties, reporting on what was going on within these groups.
Moore’s attempt to kill Ford echoed the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-counterculture funk of the ’70s, a cacophony of despair and anger, the cynicism that had settled over everything like a damp fog. Born from principles. And this is her reasoning. When Ford intervened after Richard Nixon resigned and selected New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, he created the first unelected president. and vice president. Rockefeller was a poster boy for the wealthy WASP organization, and in 1971 he led the disastrous response to the Attica prison riot. This coincided with one of the key political revelations of the ’70s: a series of assassinations and attempted coups in foreign countries instigated by the CIA, not to mention the FBI’s complicity in the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. . Moore thought, “I’m just doing what they’re doing.” Her logic was this. If she killed Ford and Nelson Rockefeller became president, Rockefeller was obviously a bad egg and it would become clear how rotten the whole system was. Remember Twinkie Defense? I think this could be called Noam Chomsky’s acid defense.
Along the way, the documentary shows just how many mixed lines there were within Sarah Jane Moore. In 1950, when she was 19, she collapsed in front of the White House from a bout of “amnesia.” This is telling because she is not so much a person with memory loss as a person who forges identities and sheds them. How a snake sheds its skin. In her 20s, she studied acting with Lee Strasberg. (Looking at publicity photos of her in silky costumes, she has the poised beauty of someone who might have made it in Hollywood.) Despite her radicalization, She continued to work hard at her FBI job, writing long reports every day. It’s in keeping with her purpose, and this sense of jumping in two polar opposite ideological directions at the same time reflects the psychotically torn character of Lee Harvey Oswald (who never gets much attention in this film). ).
Then add some timely disasters. Patty Hearst, who played a major role in Moore’s transformation, was arrested on September 18, 1975, just four days before Moore attempted to kill Ford. As for Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm, a former Charles Manson follower who also attempted to assassinate President Ford…that incident occurred just 17 days before Moore’s assassination attempt. Was Moore’s case a copycat crime? Although the movie never raises that possibility, it’s hard to avoid speculation that that was the dimension.
In archival footage of the assassination attempt and interviews she conducted for the film (she is eerily well-preserved, with her vibrant skin and gray curls visible), Moore’s demeanor remains as arrogant and sinister as ever. There’s no sign of it. The very setting of Suburban Fury, in which Moore is interviewed in an ironic period setting, such as the back seat of a 70s station wagon, shows her as a typical performer, a person so desperate for attention that she falls into darkness. It makes her look like a woman. What’s strange about Suburban Fury is that, while it leaves you with a certain mesmerizing tension, the film’s perspective is very limited to Sarah Jane Moore’s rationalization of her own life. I mean, the movie is almost over by the end. She flirts with Moore’s defense of his act of trying to kill the president as a social justice trigger. Again, believing that to be true may seem like madness from the inside.
