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MIFF 2016: Christine Chubbuck, the TV presenter who killed herself on air

The shocking on-air death of TV presenter Christine Chubbuck in 1974 had all but faded from memory, but two very different films have put it back on screen.

Karl Quinn
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Chances are you've never heard of Christine Chubbuck​, but her extraordinary tale is at the heart of not one but two films at MIFF. It was (arguably) the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film Network, too.

Here's what is known about Chubbuck: on July 15, 1974, the 29-year-old presenter on Channel 40, a local TV station in Sarasota, Florida, shot herself in the head, live on air. She was rushed to hospital and, 14 hours later, declared dead.

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The line-up of films for the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016 is released.

Here's what is not known about Chubbuck: why she did it, and what she wanted us to make of it.

In their very different ways, Christine and Kate Plays Christine probe this story. The former is a compelling but relatively straight dramatic retelling, with Rebecca Hall mesmerising in the lead. It's darkly funny at times, though its finale is utterly shocking, even when you know it's coming.

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Kate Plays Christine is a more complex affair, a documentary about an actress, Kate Lyn Sheil​, preparing to play the role of Chubbuck in a feature film that exists only within the construct of this same documentary. It's a closed loop that makes for a remarkably open reading.

What becomes clear in both is that Chubbuck was intensely frustrated by what she saw as the tabloidisation of television news coverage, the rise of the "if it bleeds, it leads" mantra. If anything, her concerns seem even more relevant today than they were in 1974, as media across the board resort to an ever-widening array of tricks and gimmicks to retain readers, viewers or listeners.

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English actor Rebecca Hall plays Christine Chubbuck in Christine.

One way of reading Chubbuck's suicide is as the ultimate "well if that's the way you want it" gesture. Her last words on air were delivered as if they were the introduction to a news item. "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts and in living colour," she announced, "you are going to see another first – an attempted suicide." She then pulled a .38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver from the bag on her lap, placed the muzzle to her neck just below her right ear, and pulled the trigger.

We know all this because the scene was reported in great detail by Sally Quinn for The Washington Post. That 5700-word article forms the primary text on which Sheil's preparation is based, the launch pad for the actress's journey into the psyche of a woman so depressed, frustrated, lonely and/or angry that she thought this act of self-violence made sense. It's a journey that, the film makes clear, poses risks of its own for the performer.

Chubbuck had requested her segment be recorded that day – typically, it wasn't – but the two-inch Ampex tape on which the images were stored has not been seen since. According to a former station colleague interviewed in Kate Plays Christine, the tape is in the possession of the widow of former station owner Bob Nelson.

Kate Lyn Sheil both plays and prepares to play Christine in Kate Plays Christine.

The death scene is recreated in Christine, but in Kate Plays Christine it is contested territory. Should it be recreated? Does Sheil have the will to do it? If so, and having forced herself to identify so closely with Chubbuck to play her, does the act pose a risk to her own mental health?

Above all, why does writer-director Robert Greene even want to recreate the scene – is it to reveal something about Chubbuck's death, or merely to revel in it?

Footage of Chubbuck is scarce but eventually Sheil meets Steve Newman, a former weatherman, who has some tapes. Reluctantly, he screens them for her.

"We wouldn't be here [talking] if it weren't for the way she ended her life," he says. "She didn't have an extraordinary career, she wasn't an extraordinary person – she was extraordinarily nice and I loved her, but it's the blood and gore aspect of it, the violent nature of her end and the public nature of her end, that is the hook.

"Christine's biggest beef with local news was that it was turning to blood and guts," Newman continues. "So the very thing that she hated the most is the motivation for resurrecting this video and her life again and highlighting it. I can live with it, but I don't necessarily like it."

One of the strangest aspects of Chubbuck's story is that it isn't terribly well known, not even in Sarasota. When people do recall her death it is usually as the inspiration for Sidney Lumet​'s 1976 film Network, which starred Peter Finch as unhinged newsreader Howard Beale, who threatens to kill himself on air, but is then reborn as the "angry man" of news, urging his viewers to run to the window and shout "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more".

Christine Chubbuck.

Kate Plays Christine repeatedly references Network, but Dave Itzkoff​'s book Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, is equivocal about the link.

Itzkoff claims screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky​ started work on his story in December 1973, seven months before Chubbuck's death, and very early had a scene in which Beale contemplated on-air suicide.

Then again, Itzkoff also writes that at one stage Chayefsky had Beale threatening to "blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the 7 o'clock news, like that girl in Florida". The line was later deleted.

At any rate, there were factors at play for Chubbuck other than professional frustration. She was, at 29, still a virgin, and was apparently not happy about that. She wanted children, but had been told after she had an ovary removed that the window in which she might feasibly conceive was only a year or two. In Christine's version of events she had a prior history of mental illness, too.

Neither of these films offers any easy answers about what drove Chubbuck to do what she did. Nor do they help us make clear sense of it. We can empathise, we can ask whether our odd compulsion to see this mythical footage is healthy, we can wonder about the lengths to which a director will push an actor in search of a performance.

But ultimately we're forced to conclude that Christine Chubbuck's death was in a very real sense pointless, its reasons and its meaning forever just beyond our grasp.

For help and advice, call Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or Lifeline on 131 114.

Christine screens on August 6 and 12, Kate Plays Christine on August 2. The Age is a media partner of the Melbourne International Film Festival. Details: miff.com.au

Follow Karl Quinn on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist or on Twitter @karlkwin

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