Dying for Attention: the Strange Story of Christine Chubbuck
by Lorette C. Luzajic
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living colour, you are going to see another first — attempted suicide.”
Anyone whose ears pricked up during this segment of small-time Florida’s news back in 1974 was unwittingly witnessing the famous last words of reporter Christine Chubbuck. What they witnessed next was unforgettable- the dark haired journalist reached down to pick up a gun, then held it behind her head and fired.
It was business as usual- for a few seconds. The segment ended in a fade to black, and the ubiquitous chirp of commercials jingled. Christine’s boss was furious about her gruesome little piece of performance art. She’d been protesting the industry’s blood thirst for a while, but this kind of hoax was just plain sick. It took Chris’s coworkers a few shocking moments to register that they were looking at a real gun, at real blood. Christine had committed suicide live on air.
It was no secret that Christine was bitter about the salacious, sensationalist nature of the media, and furious at how hard it was to be taken seriously. Christine’s statement was stark and determined. There was no room for margin of error- the reporter had researched her story well. Apparently, she’d been at the cop shop asking questions about the most certain modes of exterminating yourself for a “story” she was working on about suicide. Her death was written into the script, complete with after-story written down in case her colleagues didn’t know what to say after the incident.
Chris was born in Ohio, and came to work for a small cable station in Saratoga, Florida. At work Chris was competent, confident, and attractive, though her coworkers also described her as intense and moody. Chris carried the heavy burdens of the human condition on her shoulders, distressed by how the world worked and how people treated each other. The fact that no one really knew her is telling- apparently, she’d always been isolated, and had no lasting friendships or romantic relationships. In her youth, she had formed a club for girls called The Dateless Wonders, and perhaps the tongue-in-cheek feistiness of said group already belied a distress at being forever dateless.
Christine was just shy of her thirtieth birthday when she died, and she made much ado about her spinster status. No relationship went beyond two dates, and by all accounts including her own, she’d never been touched by a man. In the months before her death, she had bravely asked a few men out to dinner, turning the tables instead of waiting in vain to be asked out. Though the men accepted, they didn’t show up for their meeting.
Chris’s coworker Andrea Kirby said Chris often lamented her alienation, saying that she would love to be loved, if only for a day or a week. And though camerawoman Jean Reed appreciated Chris’s macabre humour and “great sense of the absurd,” Andrea admitted that she felt Christine was very intense, that she “came on so heavy.” Her mom said she felt profound loneliness and threw herself into her work to escape her loveless life. She felt disconnected. While no one particularly disliked Christine, no one really liked her, either. The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn quoted Chris’s mom saying, “She felt…if you reach your hand out to people and nobody takes it, then there’s something wrong with your drum beat, and she felt she really couldn’t register with anyone except her family.”
The possibility of Christine having her own family to love one day was nonexistent- while you can’t hurry love, the option exists to conceive nonetheless. But Christine had had an ovary removed and was told her chances for childbearing were nearly nil.
While Christine’s unprecedented statement was absolutely political, her dissatisfaction at work likely just gave a forum for a dramatic exit from her depression, one she knew the news would be all over. It was a bold fuck-you, but the woes of work were just a vehicle for expression, not the driving force behind it. Chris’s mom confessed that she had been seeing a psychiatrist, and Chris had previously attempted suicide, unsuccessfully. Sometimes she joked roughly about the attempt to people she had barely met, and this is no doubt part of the difficulty people had getting close to her. Sally Quinn reported that Jean Reed felt Chris was almost selfish. Her work ethics were precise and thorough, but she was greedy for
compliments, needy and desperate. While everyone tried to be proactive to that need, Chris was not very supportive of others, very critical, very demanding. Reed said she could cut others down “without flashing an eye.” Another camerawoman said she was standoffish and sometimes showed off with crude language.
Yet beyond her social awkwardness, fierce intelligence, and depression, Chris was otherwise not much different from anyone else. She had a chocolate coloured poodle, and a yellow Volkswagen. She enjoyed baking cakes. She took care of her luxurious straight curtain of dark hair. She was a sharp dresser. She was a strong swimmer and enjoyed the beach. According to Sally Quinn, she had written some biographical notes when she was fifteen, expressing that what she wanted most was “to become a lady with a little spice, a housewife, and a mother.”
Christine was cremated and sprinkled into the ocean, but if she’d been buried, she would be turning in her grave at today’s gladiatorial surreality TV, un-news, and paparazzi-driven fluff. Some believe that in a world where Jennifer Aniston’s haircut is more important news than the Congo holocaust, Christine Chubbuck is better off dead. Others feel that in dying so publicly, she was rightfully, even heroically, vindicated in a manner of her own choosing.
But her family felt the act was her most selfish one. Her mom felt Chris had no right to bring gore into people’s homes. Her brother Greg told Sally Quinn, “I can think of nothing more grotesque than seeing a beautiful young woman blow her brains out on TV.”
