Hard Feelings: A Review of Lorena Lorrie Moore (bio) When I was growing up, I knew of two Lorenas: my grandmother, after whom I’d been named, and Lorena Hickok, the journalist friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I was familiar with only as the author of a child’s biography of Helen Keller, which I had read and loved. Hickok and my grandmother died within a year of each other, and after that, since I never was actually called Lorena, I felt the name had perhaps disappeared. Twenty-five years later, in 1993, it resurfaced in the form of Lorena Bobbitt, who, in wild misery brought on by her husband’s abuse, made the nightly news by taking a kitchen knife into bed and cutting off her husband’s penis. She then flung the penis out the car window into a suburban Virginia field. The media had a heyday. At the time, I turned my back on this lurid story: it seemed to have no real meaning, only shock value and madness. Its real-life squalor (as Alice Munro has written, don’t we prefer literary squalor?) was more than I could bear. Plus there was that name. I didn’t choose [End Page 600] to live completely under a rock, but perhaps I curled up fetally and threw some sand in my eyes. The writer and director Jordan Peele, who has made an interesting reputation by fusing narrative genres of comedy and horror, marbling the meld with politics, has recently produced a four-chapter, Amazon Prime docuseries about the Bobbitts titled Lorena. Its director, Joshua Rofé, who was ten years old at the time of the Bobbitt event, has spliced together new and old footage for the info-mad internet age, to create a meandering, circling story that is indeed part comedy, part horror, part politics. Over four hours long, it has by hour three some compelling emotional heft. Prior to that, however, one will encounter some puzzling things. For instance, at the beginning, everyone is smiling: police officers, neighbors, prosecutors, dispatchers, urological surgeons. There is the staged noise of rumors. The “appendage” (network news at the time was not allowed to use “the p-word”) initially goes missing, and one rumor has it that it went down the garbage disposal. Another rumor claimed Lorena had swallowed it. (When it was found in that field, it was placed in a hot dog box from a nearby 7-Eleven. Really?) The camera lingers on everyone, holding them in its gaze long enough so that small, uncomfortable grins—rueful, dazed, disbelieving, grateful for a moment to be alive, uninjured, not bored—flicker onto all the faces. This is where the director wants to begin: with the comedy (if disaster plus structure equals tragedy, and tragedy plus time equals comedy, we are starting at the end). Is it simultaneously cruel and nervous laughter on the part of these smilers? It sure does look like it. In a 24/7 news cycle, it does not take long before even TV studio audiences get involved; the reportage/entertainment circus that ensued organized itself around a kind of gender war. Comedians entered from both sides. “She told him where the dick was. I would [End Page 601] not have told him,” shouts Whoopi Goldberg from her stand-up stage. “She took away the thing that means most to a man,” says Bobbitt’s brother, emphasizing the idea of the penis as property—valuable, not simply “junk.” (This idea perhaps was shared by Lorena, and her crime conceived as a justifiable theft or seizure of property; her virginity was likely similarly commodified.) The subject of abuse and harassment generally is right around the corner, and in between the Bobbitt story and its Errol Morris/Philip Glass–style soundtrack (electronic, minimalist) comes quick footage of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Tail Hook scandal, the William Kennedy Smith acquittal. The large glasses, big hair, and bulging shoulder pads that were the fashion for women in 1993—and which now seem a costume in the gender wars—make the female commentators on television appear as if they are attempting protective coloring, puffing their...
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