JoIf you are a criminal, it is prudent to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, playing security is not in the DNA of most lawbreakers, and this was certainly the case with Geraldine Elizabeth “Liz” Carmichael, who in 1974 took the world by the force. with Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers with the 20th century. Motor Car Corporation and its flagship product: the Dale, a three-wheeled car that promised to deliver 70 miles per gallon, making it the ideal vehicle for an America devastated by the oil crisis. When Liz launched this rogue creation, she had already started making a woman, which added even more fuel to the frantic media fire that would soon sink her.
Directed by Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker, and produced by Jay and Mark Duplass (Wild Wild Country), HBO’s four-part docuseries The lady and the valley (debuts January 31) begins in the early years of Liz’s life, when before making the transition he married and abandoned two wives – and the many children he had with them – before starting with the third couple Vivian. They had five children together and, as Vivian’s brother Charles remembers, Liz (then known as Jerry) was always a gregarious species of grifter, skilled at creating false identities and defrauding suckers (especially companies) of their earned money. . Given Liz’s fondness for counter-artist schemes, it wasn’t long before the Michael clan fled federal agents thanks to an elaborate counterfeit cunning. The current memories of her daughter Candi paint a picture of a traveling itinerant life fleeing, so she and her siblings ’birth certificates bear false names, a situation that still causes them headaches.
The lady and the valley she spends most of her first installment on Liz’s wild story, which is animated by animated recreation sequences created with old photos of the players in question. It is a new stylistic turn that conveys even more the madness of the early years of the Michaels, in which family reunions were organized through coded newspaper messages and everyone had to be prepared, at an earlier time, to take the flight to midnight. a new city and home. In short, Liz was a hardened charlatan. She was also a trans woman and, while evading the authorities, slowly began the transition process, a development that was easily accepted by her children and, after minor initial hesitations, by his wife Vivian.
After a surgical procedure in Tijuana, Liz began living publicly as a woman, and in 1973, while working in a marketing company, she discovered an invention as brazen and unconventional as it was: the Dale, a three-car. wheels (created by Dale Clifft) who immediately decided it would be his revolutionary ticket to world domination. After revising Clifft’s original designs to make the Dale more attractive (full of canary yellow paint), Liz got a prototype at the Los Angeles Auto Show. He then made a leap in the press to announce his intentions to confront U.S. automatic hairdressers, even making Dale appear in The price is right. After a while, Liz was a front-page sensation, with the uniqueness of her product that only matched the boldness of her claims.
Given Liz’s criminal past — and her status as a federal fugitive — it won’t come as a surprise to learn that she soon began attending mafia characters for the Twentieth Century Motor Car Corporation, the name of the which came Atlas shrugged, written by Liz’s favorite libertarian author, Ayn Rand. He also began taking customer deposits for the car in production, which he was supposed to have in a trust deposit account, but which he used to fund his new business. This was a clear case of fraud, especially since the makeshift Dale, built by a few fashionable random engineers with borrowed parts, was doomed to fail. A series of investigative stories by KABC journalist Dick Carlson soon exposed the farce, which led to criminal prosecution and, after Liz was convicted, a new escape from justice and her shadow business operation almost il · Legal.
The lady and the valley she thrives when she continues to focus on Liz’s daring scam, reinforced by first-hand stories from family and colleagues who describe her as a cunning deception and a loving wife and mother. For most of her first three episodes, she demonstrates a fun gonzo portrait of rebellious self-definition, as Liz struggles to counter legal and social norms to do something about herself. Unfortunately, however, by the time their latest installment arrives, the Cammilleri and Drucker series fall in love with provoking sympathy for their subject as a victim of intolerant anti-trans discrimination, in large part because the attitude of the means to Liz — led by Carlson, Tucker’s son — follows her ugly legacy on Fox News: it was to ridicule and despise her as a man posing as a woman to evade law enforcement. (Dick Carlson eventually won a Peabody for his transphobic coverage of Carmichael and would later headline the exit of transgender tennis player Renee Richards.)
“… the media’s attitude toward Liz — led by Carlson, whose son Tucker follows his ugly legacy on Fox News — was to ridicule and despise her as a man posing as a woman to evade law enforcement.”
The fact that Liz was treated unfairly (and sometimes horribly) by reporters is undeniable from the archive footage on display. However, through a comment from any speaker and a score that makes clear his attitude of celebration, The lady and the valley tries to portray Liz as an unjustly persecuted outlaw trans hero, who simply doesn’t care about her sizable rap sheet. To do so, it minimizes and / or rationalizes its criminality, which only plunges it into a disordered and dubious logic. Most confusing of all, the series argues that Liz’s trans identity was not a hoax and therefore unrelated to her criminality (which makes sense), to then turn around and argue that if she had grown up in a different and more tolerant era, he could have led a very different, law-abiding life, a contradictory stance that ends up suggesting that there is a link between his transit and chronic charlatanism.
Consequently, The lady and the valley he finally loses the thread, culminating in a history lesson on evil trans men and women that, by its inclusion, makes Liz an oppressed and similar avant-garde rather than an extravagant skimmer who was until her day of death . Ultimately, it is consumed both with the hagiographic import of its material, with the realization of the Liz saga meaningful“That he forgets what made him convincing in the first place.”