The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Michael Showalter, bears the same name as the 2000 documentary narrated by RuPaul. Jessica Chastain gives a tragically heartfelt performance as Tammy Faye Bakker as Andrew Garfield solidly but somewhat underwhelmingly plays her husband, Jim Bakker.
I remember as a kid seeing Tammy Faye on television briefly and in passing, but the Christian Network never played in our household. It was only later that I connected her with a name and that connection was tenuous at best because I learned it from Saturday Night Live. In fact, much of my world knowledge in the 80s and 90s came from a strange and skewed combination of SNL, Seinfeld, MTV and family dinner conversations-turned arguments that centered largely on the politics of the day. Thus, I took my media-fed, bite-sized knowledge of her and encapsulated her as a histrionic woman whose husband played the straight-laced part to her histrionics. The media painted her as a caricature of herself – her voice was high and flightly, her makeup was too heavy and outlandishly clownish, her drama was not worth our time. I bought into all of it, dismissing her presence as a footnote in whatever junk tv I was watching. I still might have dismissed her even after seeing this movie, but I needed to do some research for a discussion at our local theatre. In reading more about her, I realized the mistake I had made in judging her.
There is so much more to one person’s story than what the media allows us to see. The concept of a person equaling more than the sum of his or her parts seems so obvious and simple, but we often don’t stop long enough to internalize it. We don’t ask ourselves, “Wait, is that really all to the story?” “Are there other viewpoints to consider?” “What is that person really feeling and why?” “This person wasn’t always this way or that way, so what led to this point?”
For someone like me who did not grow up with the PTL network, the film fills in the gaps. It gives Tammy Faye credit and, due to Chastain’s spellbinding performance, shows her to be quite a lovely person. She embodies what seems to have been Tammy Faye’s mantra all along – Christians should love and care about everyone. This mission is captured in the historically accurate and honest scene in which Tammy Faye interviews Reverend Stephen Pieters, a gay Christian pastor living with AIDS. In what was a groundbreaking moment, she tells him, “How sad that we as Christians, who are to be the salt of the earth and are supposed to love everyone, are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care.” Tammy Faye, flanked by her puppets and full of care for others, sold heart and soul on the PTL. And her many followers were sold. She was a young, sweet Christian woman who was warm and consistent. The film also has its heartbreaking moments as we witness her slow unraveling. In scenes with her aloof mother, Chastain does an absolutely brilliant job showing in her eyes both her resilience and hurt. She tries to ignore Jim’s behavior and inclinations with this same resilience. Chastain certainly holds this film together and she should be commended. But just as the film admirably gives Tammy Faye a kind of vindication, it ignores a central event with Jim Bakker that would have explained more about why she fell apart.
In her film review for the Vox, Alissa Wilkinson refers to “You’re Wrong About,” a podcast that reconsiders an event, idea, movement, person or phenomenon that has been miscast in the public imagination, our collective memory. Since beginning my listening journey with this podcast, I’ve learned, for instance, that we completely over-exaggerated the phenomenon of Stranger Danger (yet we still can’t seem to see a white van parked in a suburb as anything but sinister) and we completely shucked the McDonald’s Hot Coffee Case as a flimsy judgement (neatly packaged as a joke in Seinfeld) when at its heart, the case was quite real and damaging to the actual victim. I’ve learned that Kitty Genovese’s murder was, in fact, not witnessed by 38 bystanders and that Tonya Harding was not the monster we all thought she was. Incidentally, the show also devotes five entire episodes to Princess Diana which may be beneficial before watching Spencer, itself a kind of historical recast.
The podcast’s past-obsessed hosts, journalists Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes, discuss the Bakkers and Jessica Hahn in their January 25, 2019 episode. They recount much of what Jim Bakker reveals in his later biography, “I Was Wrong,” including his being molested as a kid by a fellow churchgoer. They also go into the details of the Jessica Hahn story, a scandal that takes up less than 30 seconds in the film. In 1987, as Jim Bakker fell from grace, the public was fed juicy headlines about the woman who “took him down.” The movie, and Jim’s version of the events, would have you believe that he was a victim of a treacherous woman. According to Hahn, a church secretary who was 20 years old at the time of the events in 1980, Jim was the exact opposite.
In a lengthy Playboy interview (the only publication that would give her platform) alongside a photo shoot, she describes how preacher John Wesley Fletcher orchestrated a meeting between herself and Bakker in Florida under the guise of having Hahn babysit Jim and Tammy Faye’s children. Fletcher told her the couple was having marital problems and she was summoned to “do something great for God.” She was ushered into Jim Bakker’s hotel room and the events that follow are truly nightmarish. According to Hahn, Bakker rapes her repeatedly and when he is finally spent, Fletcher does the same. After their aggravated rape, the two men blithely do a PTL telethon together. Hahn says in the interview that this was “the day when two men stole my life…they took from me what should have been for somebody I loved…I will never in my life know what it’s like to make love for the first time with a man I love…and no money in the world can pay for that.” She continues, “I want this on the record. I fought a long time to feel like a woman and feel good about myself and I don’t see these [Playboy] pictures as being filthy. I see what they did as filthy.”
Jessica Hahn came forward with these allegations 7 years later for many reasons, but she seemed to have stayed quiet for one – she was told she would bring down the PTL if she said anything. Her name may still be salaciously whispered as the reason Bakker’s empire fell, but he found himself in jail due to financial crimes that had nothing to do with her.
Including any of this information in the film would have obviously created quite a different story arc, but I, for one, would have been much more satisfied. There is a moment when Tammy Faye visits him in jail to finalize some divorce papers that he apologizes. He doesn’t apologize for anything specific, yet Tammy Faye responds, “that poor girl.” Given the fact that the film does nothing to address Hahn as a living human being, it’s oddly incongruous.
A film that does a better job of retelling and examining a woman’s rape story is Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel. Also based on the true events and adapted from Eric Jager’s 2004 book “The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France,” the film explores the circumstances surrounding a rape case in 1386 that led to the country’s final judiciary trial by combat (duel). The story involves Jean de Carrouges, a skilled knight in battle, his wife Marguerite de Carrouges, and Jacques Le Gris, an eloquent and intelligent squire and long-time friend of Carrouges. When Le Gris rapes Marguerite, she steps forward to accuse her attacker and as a result, puts all three of their lives in jeopardy. Not only will one man perish in the duel, but if Carrouges loses, Marguerite will be burned alive at the stake as punishment for her false accusation.
Let’s sit with that last statement for a moment. If her husband loses, Marguerite dies. Because somehow that proves she’s lied about the accusation. If her rapist loses, Marguerite lives. Because that proves she’s innocent. Medieval logic. It would be a great sketch in Monty Python and The Holy Grail if it weren’t so decidedly unfunny.
Written by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Nicole Holofcener, the film is told in three chapters, from three points of view: Carrouges (Matt Damon), Le Gris (Adam Driver) and Marguerite (Jodie Comer). It’s a clever narrative technique but also tricky to pull off. How do you tell the same events without losing your audience? How do you show a pretty brutal rape scene not once, but twice? To be sure, there are moments that drag, but each story is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) different enough that you want to keep going. Structurally important is that Marguerite’s story comes after the men’s. Her story is prefaced by the same title card, “The truth according to…” but unlike the first two, the words “the truth” linger on the screen before they fade.
Rape cases often come down to a “he said, she said” logic and the historical record tends to favor men. In the case of Jessica Hahn, her testimony stays consistent, but as a collective, we see her as another bimbo from the 80s, as someone who purposely pulled the strings behind Bakker’s fall from grace. Any rape that occurred is simply inconsequential. When Marguerite de Carrouges comes forward 600 years earlier, she is not believed, even by her own husband. He accuses her of doing something wrong before he eventually concedes that she is telling the truth and even then, it feels like a concession that he makes only so he can finally kill his friend-turned-enemy (a soured relationship due to issues of class and battle, not at all about Marguerite). All the more reason why we root for her in the film. In speaking up, she puts her marriage with an abusive husband at risk (yes, he hits and effectively rapes her too). She puts her place in society at risk. She puts her friendships at risk. There are more dire consequences for a woman in 1386 when she points her finger at her attacker. So why would she do so unless she wanted true justice?
In a grueling battle scene that is historically accurate but dramatized for the screen, Carrouges does kill Le Gris and Marguerite is thus vindicated by the erupting crowd. In a brilliant turn, Marguerite rides horseback through the street in a kind of daze, unsmiling, reacting to the cheers and shouts with defiant but deeply sad eyes. This is not vindication for her. This is vindication for her victorious husband and she clearly knows it. And those cheers would have gone up no matter who the victor was, for as her mother-in-law says, “The truth does not matter. There is only the power of men.”
The Last Duel highlights the sexism and misogyny of Western patriarchy, remnants of which we still live with today. The Eyes of Tammy Faye could have picked up those same threads. Before Tammy Faye died of cancer in 2007, she talked with Jessica Hahn on the phone. “She had the biggest heart,” Hahn recalled. “She goes, ‘Jessica, if I were with you right now, I’d hug you.’ And I just died inside. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what she had to go through.’” If Hahn’s story had been included at all, we might have had just a little more well-deserved sympathy for Tammy Faye.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye has its issues, but if you know nothing about her beyond the surface, it’s worth a watch, especially for Chastain’s performance. The Last Duel, likewise, is at its best when Jodie Comer is on screen. The strength and determination of both performances give their real-life counterparts a well-deserved voice, dignity, and grace.
The Eyes of Tammy Faye Rated PG-13 with a run time of 2 hr 6 min
The Last Duel Rated R with a run time of 2 hr 32 min
