She went to “Suburban Fury,” a documentary about Sarah Jane Moore, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975 (and failed, mostly because of a faulty weapon), and didn’t know much about her and didn’t offer much interest. I thought, frankly, about those strange outbursts of violence in the 1970s. (There were many, such as the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, which is closely linked to Moore’s story.) Moore seemed, at the time, the unlikely killer — a 45-year-old single mother, who seemed like she could be one. Played by Maureen Stapleton. The question that arises in any photography like this is “Why?” (Assuming you think the answer is different from the person in question having a serious mental illness.) This question has already lingered in the Moore case. However, Suburban Fury does that rare thing and provides a very specific motive for Moore’s heinous crime.
Only one person is interviewed in the entire film, Sarah Jane Moore. (This was the agreement I made with director Robinson Devore: that no one else would appear on camera.) calm A pathological narcissist, the type who tells her life like a novel, making stories she’s told millions of times seem spontaneous. Her memory is often fickle and, at times, contradictory, but when she declares, categorically, that she was never mad, she says it with such aristocratic insouciance that it is difficult, for a moment, not to believe her.
So why, while standing in a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, did Moore try to kill President Ford? To fully understand it, you have to know her extraordinary backstory, which is all in the film, told in such an out-of-order way as if this were a brilliantly sinister mystery out of a spy thriller.
We learn how Moore, who was born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1930 (she liked to imply, falsely, that she was a Southern aristocrat), married and divorced five times (twice to the same man), and how she gave birth to four children. Most of them gave up on them. How she moved to Danville, California, 40 minutes outside of San Francisco, and became involved in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. How when Patty’s father, Randolph A. Hearst, appeased the kidnappers—those psychopathic dregs of the Symbionese Liberation Army—by starting a PIN program to donate $2 million in groceries across the state, and Moore was signed on as the program’s accountant. how she She became radicalized (like Patty, she became acquainted with the SLA and its leader Senki) and joined other underground leftist groups in the Gulf region. And how, even in the midst of that excitement, she was recruited to be an FBI informant, a task she did faithfully, reporting on what was happening within those groups.
Moore’s attempt to kill Ford emerged from the chaos of the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-counterculture era of the 1970s—a tumult of despair, rage, and cynicism that settled over everything like a damp fog. Here was her logic. When Ford took office after Richard Nixon resigned, and chose New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, we now had, for the first time, an unelected president. and Vice President. Rockefeller was the star of the wealthy WASP establishment, and in 1971 he oversaw the disastrous response to the Attica prison uprising. This coincided with one of the major political revelations of the 1970s: a series of assassinations and attempted coups in foreign countries instigated by the CIA, not to mention FBI complicity in the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. “I’m just doing what they do,” Moore thought. Her reasoning was: If you killed Ford, and Nelson Rockefeller became president, Rockefeller was such an obvious bad egg that he would expose how corrupt the whole system was. Remember the Twinkie Defense? I guess this could be called Noam Chomsky’s acid defense.
Along the way, the documentary shows us just how many crossed wires there are in Sarah Jane Moore. In 1950, when she was 19, she collapsed in front of the White House in a bout of “amnesia,” which is telling, because she was not so much someone with memory problems as someone who invents identities, and discards them. The way a snake sheds its skin. In her twenties, she studied acting with Lee Strasberg. (We see publicity shots of her wearing silk clothes, and she has the balanced beauty of someone who might have made it into Hollywood.) Despite her radicalization, she remained committed to her work at the FBI, writing lengthy reports every day, as she had done before. It was for her reasons, and this sense of being pulled in two opposing ideological directions at once echoes Lee Harvey Oswald’s fractured, psychotic character (something the film never considers).
Then throw a few well-timed disasters into the mix. Patty Hearst, who played a large role in Moore’s conversion, was arrested on September 18, 1975, just four days before Moore attempted to assassinate Ford. As for Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Charles Manson’s former associate who also attempted to assassinate President Ford…this incident occurred just 17 days before Moore’s attempt. Was Moore’s crime a copycat crime? The film never raises this possibility, though it’s hard to avoid guessing that was one aspect of it.
Moore’s demeanor, in the archival clips we see around the time of the assassination attempt, and in interviews she gives for the film (in which she is eerily reserved, with a vibrant complexion and graying curls), remains arrogant and unapologetic. The premise of Suburban Fury, which Moore interviews in a period piece as ironic as the back seat of a 1970s station wagon, makes her seem like a classic performative figure — a woman descended into darkness out of a need for attention. The strange thing about Suburban Fury, even though it holds you with a kind of intense tension, is that the point of the film is limited to Sarah Jane Moore’s justification of her own life, so much so that the film, in the end, almost disappears. She flirts with support for Moore’s defense of her actions: that she tried to kill the president as an incentive for social justice. Then again, believing this to be real might just be crazy looking on the inside.