‘Stockholm, Pennsylvania’ and Our National Obsession with Abducted Women

Nikole Beckwith wwrote and directed the movie Stockholm, Pennsylvania which premieres tonight on the Lifetime channel at 8PM Eastern. The screenplay won the 2012 Nicholl Fellowship, made the 2012 Black List, and was selected for 2013 Sundance Labs. The movie, which stars Saoirse Ronan, Jason Isaacs, and Cynthia Nixon, was recently nominated for three 2015 Critics Choice Awards, including Best Movie for TV.

Here is the film’s IMDb plot summary:

A young woman, kidnapped when she was a child, returns home to the family she barely remembers and struggles to feel at home.

Here is a preview clip:

http://player.aetndigital.com/pservice/player/../embed-player/?siteId=lt&tPid=435813955625

Yesterday in Indiewire, Nikole was featured in a first person column. Some excerpts:

I grew up when kidnapping and abduction had just insinuated itself as a new American fear. My parents told stories of their childhoods teaming with freedom, the geography of their hometowns seemingly boundary-less, their only chaperone the sun in the sky. Meanwhile by the time I was nine and convinced my mother I could walk to the store across the street on my own, she watched with gritted teeth through the window until I landed safety within the confines of our driveway unwrapping my fresh pack of gum, her eyes trained unblinking on the swish of the automatic door willing me to reemerge unchanged.

The newness of this fear gave it an urgency I was otherwise unaccustomed to, and that urgency set it apart from the other suburban concerns we were taught to be mindful of; traffic, stray or unfamiliar dogs, homemade Halloween candy, swimming without a lifeguard. We were regaled with warnings about white vans, strangers asking for help finding their missing puppies, people who claimed to be a friend of our parents trying to pick us up from school. This was the age of The Amber Alert. The news picked up stories of blonde haired girls gone missing and edited the segments into an onslaught of images and terror graphics that played on repeat in our living rooms. All of this became an early part of my worldview both in the vulnerability of being a child and later the predatory culture that surrounds being a woman.

As I got older I slowly started to recognize these images and growing, dare I say, mythology around missing children and abducted women as more than just warnings but as an evolving cultural appetite that felt more and more invasive to me. I made “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” out of genuine curiosity about the complicated emotionality in these stories that is often eclipsed by sensationalism, and as a counterpoint to the damsel-in-distress-narrative we seem so married to, or at the very least far too comfortable with. In a conversation which is often focused in the wrong direction, over-examining and the details of someone’s victimization, I wanted to make a story that didn’t focus on the private particulars of someone’s survival, or sexualize or exploit its protagonist.

A feature with Cynthia Nixon, Nikole Beckwith, and Saoirse Ronan from an appearance at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival at which the movie made its international debut.

For my April 2013 interview with Nikole in which we discuss Stockholm, Pennsylvania at length, go here.

The movie has its Lifetime channel debut tonight at 8PM Eastern.