The Fascination of Betty Broderick

From a Feminist Viewpoint:

In the middle of the night in 1989, she made her way to the bedroom of her ex-husband and his new wife and killed both of them in their sleep. She never denied having done it. The question all these years has been "What is wrong with her?"

Elizabeth Ann Broderick clearly had something wrong with her. She had been a beauty and an A student in high school, married a promising medical student she adored and put him through med school and then law school, bore him children, and lived the picture-perfect married life as expected of children born in the post-WWII baby boom. He rose in his profession, the family vacationed in Aspen--and she had all the money in the world she wanted.  She was charming and beautiful, if a bit of a drama queen, and swore that all she had ever wanted to be was a "mommy."

There were cracks in the marriage all along, and nothing either she or her high-powered lawyer husband Dan did much of anything to resolve issues. Buying something, having another baby, moving to a more prestigious neighborhood--none of the traditional solutions did anything but fan the flames of her discontent.

Watching The Betty Broderick Story series, a part of the Dirty John on USA Network, I was thrust back to the 1992 series A Woman Scorned, starring Meredith Baxter-Birney as Betty Broderick. The earlier series did not give much time to Dan Broderick, but focused on Betty, and portrayed her as irrational, on the surface almost as much as deep down. Baxter-Birney's rage burned through the small screen, and her ability to display a cool exterior whenever it was needed was extraordinary acting indeed. The new series shows us that Dan was no paragon of mental health either, but at least balanced enough to see that his home situation was getting out of hand. He tried to limit the children's exposure to her, the more violent her moods and language became, and it would seem he hoped that at best one day she would leave them and him alone. Betty was unpredictable; Dan was rock-hard but at least better at human transactions.

In 2020, with the tightly-wound Amanda Peet playing Betty Broderick, we see a young couple working hard to fulfill the American fantasy of married life, and it takes a while before the picture becomes a horror movie with the ring of truth. Betty is a Jekyll-Hyde character, female 1980s version, who cannot sleep at night and feasts on the rage she holds for her husband. She goes to their former home, yanks his expensive clothes out of the closet, and burns them in the backyard. She drives her car into the front of his new house. She calls him hundreds of times, leaving obscene messages on his answering machine, and when talking to her children on the phone uses vile language about their father and his fiancée relentlessly, all the while they, in tears, beg her to stop.

This is more than a story of the worst marriage known in U.S. history. It is more than a story of a woman becoming unhinged at losing her husband and children. It is more than a story of what Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no name," a woman  who bought the myth of marriage being the most rewarding career she might have and finding herself depressed and unfulfilled. These factors are all part of it but is something else here--two people living out the same madness, a folie a deux, feeding each other's mental illness in the only way they can understand. She fears losing him and she drives him away. But it's more than that; he acts out her fears by having an affair with a younger, more desirable version of her. In the real-life story, Betty gained weight and her anger made her physically unattractive--how they will achieve that in this nuanced reimagining of the earlier series I do not know. (The final episode on Season 1 airs tonight, July 14, and the series will continue with her story next season.)

Betty's illness is at the heart of the story. She becomes a different person through her mental deterioration. She cannot accept her part in Dan's inevitable choice to leave her. From the 2020 vantage point one cannot help wondering why this woman did not get help sooner--even though we do know that the personality disorders (Wikipedia says narcissism and histrionic personality disorder) she had are not exactly curable. Today there are anxiety drugs and antidepressants that probably would have helped, and maybe a brain scan and a few months at a rehab-spa would have done some good. As it was, she rejected therapy and chose to indulge her obsession with her own anger, fear, and hatred until it won out, once and for all.

We don't understand all we know about the tawdry tale, but it will fascinate us until the day we are able to put a name to it.