Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

THE MATTHEW SHEPARD STORY – 2002

This is a short film about a young man who was the victim of some homophobic hatred. No matter what the circumstances could have been, no matter what the condition, language or behavior everyone could have demonstrated, killing someone just because he is different is simply absurd. And I say any difference cannot justify killing him, her or them illegally or legally. All act of lethal violence against any one has no justification at all.

But in this film, in this case the emphasis is not so much set on the son who finds out he is gay in high school, probably when he went to his first homecoming dance with a girl he could not cope with, but about his parents who had accepted this fact, about the parents after his death, after the first part of the trial that convicted the killer, a young man like Matthew, of the crime, and before the second part of the trial when the jury is going to decide on the sentence. The death penalty is sure but a plea can always be accepted by the parents.

The question is what can the parents do? What would Matthew tell them to do? Will he require the death penalty or will he request mercy for his killer? If Matthew was a beautiful person;, an intelligent person, a gracious person, he must have known violence leads to violence and some one some time must stop the hate machine and say: “Okay, you killed me. Okay you meant to kill me and you abandoned me in a place where I took two days to bleed to death, to die, before my body was discovered. Okay you intended to kill and to torture. But you did all that from a crooked belief that people who are different have to be gotten rid of and that did not come from you, and anyway I cannot find closure and peace in your death. I can only find closure and peace in forgiving you and hoping you will forgive yourself.

I regret a little the father decided to follow another line in front of the court and to accept to show mercy and take the plea from the defense but for the wrong reason, so that the killer may suffer remembering his crime all along his long life. It does not even matter whether the murderer does or not. What matters is what the world can remember from Matthew, the message he can transmit to us from beyond his grave, from beyond his torturing chamber, from beyond the long agony and suffering ending in death. And that message has to be a message of mercy that may lead some people to realizing the way out in a divided situation is necessarily to come to terms with the difficulty and moving on towards more tolerance and more understanding.

But the message is for us today that we have to put that division, that antagonism behind us and move towards providing everyone in this global society of ours with the same rights and the same duties, no matter what their personal choices may be. But remember: we cannot respect something, a religion, a sexual orientation, a culture, an ethnic origin, or whatever you may think of, if we do not know about it, if it is kept and has to be kept locked up in a closet.

A very strong film on a situation that will little by little tend to move away and get lost behind us and bygones will have to be bygones. The day is close when this will happen, will be the case.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU