To Abrams, the heart of it is that Hulme and Parker were such complex and tragic characters. Yes, the slaying they plotted and committed was brutal. And yet there was an elegance and tenderness to them. Together, though both had suffered unspeakable pain as a result of serious diseases they had endured as children, they created a fabulous world, a heaven beyond heaven, a kingdom they called "Borovnia" populated by kings and princesses, and murderous princes, and ruled by "saints" — stars of the movie screen, James Mason, Mario Lanza and Orson Welles, described once by Hulme as "the most hideous" man on earth, but all the same, fascinating and alluring.
There is no doubt that Parker and Hulme had no room for anyone else in this world they had created, that in their minds, they were the only ones who had the key to the magical Fourth World. But there also is no doubt that they were both desperately lonely and isolated young girls, and that the comfort they took in each other, and the passion they drew from each other, was thought to be too dangerous, too passionate, and perhaps too Sapphic to survive in the tidy colonial city of Christchurch in the last waning days of Victorianism.
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| Kate Winslet |
To some, that has made the Parker-Hulme case something of a metaphor. To those who see it that way, all of the players in the case are tragic characters, drifting from the beginning inexorably toward their own final destruction, all played out against a backdrop of rigid social mores and crushing class-consciousness.
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| Melanie Lynskey |
To others, there is a supreme irony in the case, and it is this: Parker and Hulme were driven, above all, by a passion to ascend into the pantheon of celluloid saints they had canonized — James Mason, Mario Lanza, Orson Welles. And 50 years after their most heinous act, as thousands sat in darkened cinemas, watching Kate Winslet play Juliet and Melanie Lynskey play Pauline, they apparently got their wish.
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