Every generation in American life is marked by a crime that captures its dark side and because of that becomes hard to shake. For instance, I grew up in the shadow of the Charles Manson murders which spoke to a six-year-old me, whose Boomer parents left Helter Skelter lying around to read and discover how terrifying adults could be. Today’s zeitgeist slaughter may well be the killings of Hollywood producer Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, at the hands of their deranged son, Nick.
While the Manson murders were really the boomers’ baggage, they nonetheless haunted me. Between kindergarten and first grade, I lay up at night worrying how I’d defend my mother and sister from such an insanely bloodthirsty crew of home invaders when my father was traveling on business.
Welcome to Gen X. Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” was an interesting movie mainly because it pegged how these killings ushered in a new era. In the 1970’s, bands of weird people roaming around the country just became a mainstream fixture of American life and we had to become accustomed to it.
My Millennial partner thinks the O.J. Simpson murders were the same for her generation, and in a strictly made-for-TV sort of way, perhaps she’s right. But things that play out on the screen like just another Netflix show are entertainment, they don’t get stuck in your craw the same way. Unless you have a strange and ineffectual houseguest named Kato, they aren’t personal and don’t speak to you the same way.
For Millennials, the Menendez brothers and JonBenet Ramsey sagas could also arguably be as much ‘cusp of consciousness’ as the Mansons were for me. Except last year, we were informed the Menendez boys may have had extenuating circumstances making their murder of their parents marginally more justified and that it was really the senator from New Jersey by the same name (no relation presumably) who was the real baddie.
The killing of six-year-old JonBenet – who her parents had weirdly pushed into beauty contests – led to a long national obsession, yet again, like O.J., it was very tabloid. So heinous, so shocking to the imagination, so ‘who are these people?’ that it could have happened on Mars as opposed to Colorado.
The Reiner murders are different because the parricides involved are less far out, less otherworldly, at least to anyone who has had to deal with mental illness close up which, nowadays, is an awful lot of people. Consider its constituent parts.
Let’s start with Rob. President Trump’s post about the killings was, most people agree, off-key and – to the degree it’s even a meaningful word nowadays – inappropriate. I didn’t love Rob Reiner either. Maybe it was the fact he and George Soros co-funded the BS Russia-gate narrative against which I’ve got my own gripe. Or maybe it goes back further to when, as a kid watching “All in the Family,” I wondered how such a doofus of a guy would have as hot a wife as Sally Struthers – it just didn’t seem fair.
But neither of those things justify his getting his throat slit by his own son. I’d say nobody deserves that, though there are a few monsters out there who actually do, let’s just say that 99 percent of people don’t deserve that, and Meathead – despite his stupid politics – was likely not an evil man.
No, it’s all about Nick.
As The Maine Wire reported earlier in the week, Nick Reiner spent part of his shiftless life on the streets of Portland. Take a stroll downtown in Maine’s largest city today, and look some young, able-bodied homeless fellow in the eye, and then tell me if someone like Nick isn’t still there. That eery, vacant look – the ticking time bomb just waiting to explode.
Here’s an entitled kid who has had life served to him on a silver platter, with high-powered parents so eager to fix his brokenness, too eager, perhaps, there’s nothing they wouldn’t do. Even drag him to Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party while fearing he might make a scene, but fearing even more what he’d do if left to his own devices.
On both sides of the equation, this tragedy involves such exaggeration that’s it a parable impossible to ignore. Boomer guilt writ large, swirling around in the powerlessness of a couple powerful enough to inflict their opinions and ‘values’ on tens if not hundreds of millions of people. And a millennial more detached from the here and now than your average screen-obsessed thirty-something hopelessly lost in his own lack of social grace and utterly alien to consequence.
Like Hunter Biden, big names moved heaven and earth to help Nick “tell his story” in a way intended to make us empathetically believe he’d conquered his demons. Except, apparently, he hadn’t.
“You’re going to have to bail me out,” Nick prophetically says in a half-cocked stab at a home movie. For him it was rote. Over twenty rehabs and a world of permissive, maybe even enabling, Olympians trying to fix him while he remained unconvinced, comfortable perhaps in his own brokenness.
Whether you like Rob Reiner or don’t, you can’t not feel for a father trying desperately to save his son. Whatever the blow-out was at that Hollywood Christmas party on his last night on earth, it appeared to traumatize the uber cool guest list yet was probably just a taste of everyday life with Nick. Yet it took a grisly double-murder to get the spoiled brat where he belongs, which is in a straightjacket.
This gets to the bigger issue. In this country right now we seem to spend too much time fretting about the care and feeding of the severely mentally-ill and not enough on the very real questions of the threats to public safety they pose. Cue Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza’s mom, Tyler Robinson’s “roommate,” or the legions of strange women who gush over Luigi Mangioni. Either we get serious about radically anti-social behavior, or we keep trying to wish it away (or worse yet, call it cute).
Should preventative detention be a thing? Maybe so.
From the lost generation of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway to a generation in which characters like Nick Reiner just lurk about, lost and waiting to lash out, for reasons that are not quite clear. One thing is for sure: Rob Reiner won’t be fixing anyone. Maybe, if we’re all very lucky, GenZ will put the pieces back together and their children’s crimes will miraculously become more wholesome.
In the meantime, it is worth considering what to do with the the ticking time bombs — other than, that is, depositing them on the streets of Portland.
