My first Hot Docs film of the day was THOUGHT CRIMES, an intriguing documentary about the landmark case surrounding New York “Cannibal Cop” Gilberto Valle, who was charged with conspiracy when he repeatedly posted detailed, sexually viagra to order violent and misogynistic fantasies about kidnapping, torturing, killing and eating women on a fetish website forum.

In September 2012, Valle’s wife discovered emails, chats and disturbing images on his computer that suggested that he was planning to harm several women, including some that she knew. She immediately alerted one of best price cialis the women (who took it as a joke), and then went to the police. In March 2013, Valle was convicted on charges of conspiracy to kidnap, and unauthorized use of a police database – without any concrete evidence that the plans were in fact real. The ruling was later overturned, thus setting in motion a lengthy chain of appeals that is still ongoing.

In the Q+A, someone asked director Erin Lee Carr (former VICE Media producer and daughter of the beloved late NYT columnist David Carr) if she had developed a romantic relationship with her subject (!), and she turned visibly red and incredulous. The question was surprising given that Carr does not present her subject as especially sympathetic; in fact, he comes off more as a pasty creep (although a recent Huffington Post review of the film claims it ‘humanizes’ him). But the film hinges on the fact that his personality does not matter when it comes to the legality of his case, and whether putting him in prison for creating an elaborate fantasy – no matter how distasteful – would be tantamount to the dystopian persecution of a thought crime (this also reminded me of the recent Remy Couture case in Canada, which was documented in the similarly-titled film ART/CRIME).

As one of the film’s legal experts asserts, the government cannot, as a rule, lean toward incarceration where there is doubt. Post-9/11 this has increasingly been the case, where preventative measures have become a priority, and the watchdog government increasingly intrusive and fascistic (Canada is following suit with the pending Bill C-51 “Anti-Terrorism Act”). And Valle’s case hangs like bait over this frightening frontier– it is the case that will determine how the first amendment rights are read going forward concerning conduct on the internet –whether something you look up on google could be used against you as “an overt act” that counts as taking steps toward a crime, and punishable by law (with some of the things I’ve googled I am undoubtedly already on viagra now a list somewhere).  He still has one more appeal to get through later this year, reportedly scheduled for the day after THOUGHT CRIMES premieres on HBO.

The most disturbing part of Valle’s fantasies wasn’t their brutality as much as the fact that he singled out women he knew personally as the targets of these fantasies, posting their names and pictures on the fetish website as his potential victims, and then describing all the ways he was going to hurt them – including his own wife. A trip to visit one of them, and the salacious conversations surrounding this trip with his alleged co-conspirators online was viewed as constituting the “overt act” that made his “plans” transgress the boundary of mere fantasy. As the director pointed out in the Q+A, this is not a victimless crime – these women have to live with their very visible association with this case (apparently they all declined to be interviewed).

Shades of irony hampered the film somewhat (the running gag of close ups of Valle cooking food mirrored the sensationalistic photoshopping tactics of the local tabloids) as did a flippant ending in which the subject is mocked outright while Ace Frehley’s ‘New York Groove’ pounds through the end credits. Admittedly, when talking about this case the alliterations are tempting and puns come easily, but with such stakes as this film presents, it undermines the wider implications of the story. In a sense the how much is viagra 50 ending also came off as a dismissal of the confidence the director had been allowed by Valle and his family, as though her film was at its end so no need to maintain neutrality (needless to say, her subject is not a fan of the film). These nuances aside – and really, they are minor – the film blasts open an important discussion about First Amendment rights with the added bonus of an attention-grabbing central case study.

++++

THOUGHT CRIMES has one more screening at Hot Docs on Thursday April 30th – 4:15pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Details and tickets HERE.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).