03/24/2023
In 2017, Investigation Discovery (ID) released a TV movie version of Final Vision, which was really more like a reboot of the 1984 TV miniseries Fatal Vision but with Joe McGinniss himself –– rather than Freddie Kassab –– serving as the protagonist. It is an admittedly subjective judgment, but for me –– and contrary to the filmmakers’ intentions –– the climactic scene in which Jeffrey MacDonald murders his family illustrates the implausibility problem that has long plagued the government’s story about what happened that night in February 1970. Granting that one never knows what really goes on in the private life of a married couple, actress Jessica Harmon’s Colette MacDonald is rendered in the scene as a nasty, emasculating woman and Scott Foley’s MacDonald as an almost cartoonishly patriarchal narcissist.
Colette (regarding Kimberly’s having wet the bed): “She’s five. That’s perfectly normal.”
Jeffrey: “Don’t ever tell me what’s normal and what’s not normal! I am a doctor, Colette! Do you understand? Do you understand? Do you understand? I am in charge! You don’t tell me anything!”
Colette: “Please, Jeffrey. You’re pathetic!”
Such imagined dialogue makes sense from a narrative perspective. If Jeffrey beat Colette to death while in a blind rage, something she said would have had to trigger a deep sense of fury, and perhaps shame, in him. But this doesn’t square with the Colette of history who, while no doubt capable of anger, was considered by all who knew her as an especially sweet, loving, and self-sacrificing person. And while it is certainly possible that Jeffrey spoke this way behind closed doors, there does not appear to be a hint of this kind of attitude from the public MacDonald of history. (MacDonald was highly ambitious. But ambition and arrogance should not be conflated. There are humble people who are also ambitious. There are people whose arrogance is the very reason they lack ambition.)
Regardless, we really have a double-problem. The government’s story has always struck some number of people as contrived and straining credulity. But, needless to say, MacDonald’s story –– particularly in light of the existing evidence –– does not sound particularly plausible either. All of which gives all the more gravity to our enduring question: what happened that night? At the end of the day, the Final Vision scene may have just been up against the acting and screenwriting limitations of the average TV drama.
