{"id":5308,"date":"2006-09-15T11:29:48","date_gmt":"2006-09-15T15:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5308"},"modified":"2010-07-15T14:46:49","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T18:46:49","slug":"the-dahlia-files","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5308","title":{"rendered":"The Dahlia Files"},"content":{"rendered":"

Great piece<\/a> by the wonderful Seth Mnookin about “the black dahlia”, and the ongoing fascination with that unsolved murder – but the piece is really about James Ellroy, a writer I absolutely LOVE.<\/p>\n

James Ellroy was 10 when his mother, Geneva, was killed. He initially buried his grief; later, he dealt with his feelings by channeling them through a morbid, erotically charged preoccupation with the Dahlia murder. “Betty Short became my obsession,” he explained in My Dark Places, “my symbolic stand-in for Geneva Hilliker Ellroy.” As a teenager, Ellroy imagined himself as Short’s lover, protector, avenger, and killer, and his escalating mania fueled an increasingly fetishistic sexuality (“my Dahlia obsession was explicitly pornographic”). When he was in his late teens and early 20s, Ellroy would break into houses to smell women’s underwear; at night, he’d embark on eight- and 10-hour masturbating jags. “She spawns my lifelong dialogue on misogyny,” Ellroy said about Geneva and the Dahlia. Readers of his ultraviolent, hard-boiled crime novels will know that’s quite a dialogue.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Great piece. I will be seeing the film – even though I don’t really think Brian DePalma is the right director for it. (Nobody asked ME though.) Maybe Neil LaBute would have been right for it – even though he might not be the most obvious choice. I don’t know. DePalma seems to have too much unexamined misogyny to take on this story – and this story needs to be able to comment on misogyny – not just revel in it. But I haven’t seen it yet – so the Sheila jury’s still out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Great piece by the wonderful Seth Mnookin about “the black dahlia”, and the ongoing fascination with that unsolved murder – but the piece is really about James Ellroy, a writer I absolutely LOVE. James Ellroy was 10 when his mother, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[996],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21166,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5308\/revisions\/21166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}