The Unforgivable
This is a YouTube short that says in the state of Washington -- the setting for the 2021 movie The Unforgivable -- they don't criminally prosecute children under age eight.
The plot of the movie is that Ruth Slater confesses to shooting and killing a sheriff who was there to evict her and her five year old sister, Katie, but five year old Katie was the real shooter. So Ruth is released from prison and wants to find her sister who has been adopted and people are not on her side.
That is probably the second scene I saw from this movie, though probably not that clip per se because I only learned today that five year old Katie shot the sheriff. I had not heard of this movie until maybe a couple of weeks ago when I tripped across some clip involving the arrest scene where Ruth Slater orders food at a diner for her sister and sits the little girl with her back to the window so Katie won't see Ruth's arrest.
That first clip I saw didn't really explain what the movie plot was. It had some blurb about she traded her future for her sister's future and then I wondered what that meant and looked around a little and found a clip of Ruth ranting hysterically "She was only five years old."
So I thought maybe the movie plot was something like the sheriff offered to not evict them if he could molest Katie with Ruth's permission. And Ruth shot him instead.
The kind of gotcha clip above that in Washington State Katie wouldn't have been prosecuted is interesting to me as a movie error that casts light on legal and cultural differences from one place or jurisdiction to another. This movie is a rewrite of a British TV series that won awards and had a similar but probably not identical plot.
I haven't seen either the American film or the British TV series. The British series is called Unforgiven and is set in Yorkshire.
Wikipedia says Ruth Slater was found guilty of murdering two police officers when she was a teenager. The synopsis is short. The description of each of the three episodes is a bit more detailed, but doesn't indicate Katie shot anyone.
I was kind of hoping to find information on what exactly inspired the author to tell this story. I tend to like stuff based on real world events, though I'm very aware movies based on real events are not documentaries and typically take substantial creative license.
But I didn't find any information about why this story was told. The British series won an award and I guess that was enough to inspire someone to do a remake in the form of a film adaptation for American audiences.
So IF the British series didn't have the detail that Katie was the real shooter, I have to wonder why that plot point was added when rewritten as an American movie.
Americans see a lot more murder and violent crime than most so-called developed countries, as mocked recently by some Canadian YouTuber. I personally think that's in part because Americans are the descendants of the European misfits who went "FUCK THIS NOISE! I would RATHER travel four months on a wooden ship to an unknown land and probably DIE than put up with you wankers any longer!"
America and Australia get compared as culturally similar. Australia was a penal colony. It was a nearly empty island where the British shipped folks they NEVER wanted to see again but were "too nice" to just kill. [1]
So as someone who has not seen the original British TV series nor the American film adaptation, I'm guessing they maybe added more dramatic psychological trauma to the story because to Americans it's like why would you wreck a car decades later over merely witnessing two murders?? Like it needs real psychological trauma involving guilt or something to make THAT plausible!
So culture will influence interpretation of what happened. Write that down, put it on a sticky note and attach it to your bathroom mirror or something.
If the detail is accurate that Katie wouldn't have been prosecuted in Washington State, then this is a movie similar to the 1991 movie Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead where a bunch of kids rise to the occasion and get jobs or learn to cook or whatever to survive the summer because when they dropped the dead sitter off at the morgue, they dropped off all the money with her.
All the personal growth etc. in the movie wouldn't have happened if they hadn't screwed up that piece of a fairly ridiculous movie because I'm somewhat confident that if you left for another country for the summer and the babysitter promptly died, before the end of the summer the authorities would be involved.
A lot of so-called coming of age flicks with teenaged protagonists seem to be a fantasy about growing up quick that crams a decade or more of reality into a summer or something like that.
I'm sixty one years old and STILL learning how best to feed myself. Granted, I have significant health issues, but most Americans today don't seem to be that savvy about cooking and nutrition and so forth. BUT we should believe that over the course of one summer, a sixteen year old pothead becomes a gourmet chef and also learns to care about his younger siblings instead of finding them endlessly annoying.
The real takeaway from both these movies is that 99 percent of the drama of the film in question should have never happened and only did because some teenager screwed up something that would have moved most of the problems out of the way if they had gotten that one detail right.
If you are in law enforcement or the court system, your takeaway should be: Teenagers are "dumb" and inexperienced and make mistakes rooted in not knowing how the system works and if it involves the legal system, it's potentially a life RUINING mistake.
The detail that Katie wouldn't have been prosecuted in the state where the film adaptation is located reminds me of what I read about the 1993 Robert Redford film Indecent Proposal which said that in the book upon which it was based, the wealthy businessman is Arab and the young couple whose wife he wants one night with is Jewish. So changing that to three fairly privileged White Americans -- because the down on his luck young husband is an architect, not a janitor -- leaves out a lot of cultural context in the original story upon which it is based.
I know movies are entertainment, but they are a powerful vehicle for spreading ideas and mental models, so it bothers me that so many are so full of completely unrealistic nonsense.
It's somewhat sad to me that so many movies simultaneously promote some concept of teenagers as hyper competent and also giant screw ups where no adult around them catches the error.
In Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, the oldest girl gets a job and is really good at it and her pothead brother learns to cook and they save the company she works for from financial disaster and bankruptcy while redoing the entire house as well.
In The Unforgivable, Ruth is super sensitive to protecting her sister from seeing her get arrested, but doesn't think to ask in twenty years of incarceration if they would have sent a five year old to the big house?
And having said all this, I feel better about apparently projecting my baggage onto the film snippets I saw and assuming she actually killed a sheriff because she was protecting a five year old from brutal sexual assault because that's more realistic than a young woman doing twenty years to protect her five year old sister and never learning they wouldn't have prosecuted Katie to begin with.
I'm someone who likes time travel stories and stories that otherwise show two potential paths. In real life, we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different choice and we frequently don't have a good idea of what was on the road not taken.
If you take out the detail of "Oops! Washington State wouldn't have prosecuted Katie!" I wonder what are the potential paths forward here? Because it's not uncommon in my experience for people to get a pass at a young age and have their takeaway be "I don't need to behave responsibly!"
I knew a gal who had a kid in her teens or something like that and the daddy was blamed for everything. So decades later while getting divorced from a different man, she's just going to play the victim card and try to screw him.
That didn't go like she imagined. She wasn't sixteen anymore.
For comparison, there is a movie based on real world events called Beyond The Law about a man with tremendous personal baggage from shooting and killing his abuser as a young child. That's an excellent movie for realistically showing how ethical people cope in the aftermath of very serious trauma endured at a young age.
Footnote
[1] I am not readily finding it, but some years back an article was posted to Hacker News about the fact that a LOT of people died on the voyage to Australia. So many died en route, they began only paying the ships for the number that arrived alive to reduce the rate at which they were starved and neglected to death to improve profits.
And there's also the question of how NICE was that to the Natives of Australia? Here's ME saying elsewhere that wasn't NICE.