There’s not many good things you can say about Harvey Weinstein. One thing he did do while his company Miramax was distributing Madonna: Truth or Dare was to allow a snippet of footage of Warren Beatty commenting that his then-girlfriend Madonna “doesn’t want to live off-camera.”
In 1990, when this footage was shot by filmmaker Alex Keshishian, the concept of social media couldn’t have been predicted. The Real World hadn’t even been broadcast on MTV. The closest thing we had to reality TV and regular people getting their 15-minutes of fame was America’s Funniest Home Videos. But even they had editors who went through the footage to see what would work and what wouldn’t.
Now, all someone needs is a YouTube or TikTok account and a smartphone. You can record something and just by the stroke of luck become an overnight sensation. But fame is fleeting and some people are quickly forgotten. Ruby Franke is one of those borderline type of people Beatty talks. Like Madonna, she has to have all the attention on her at all time. It’s an addiction I think some people have. I really think extroverts are just people who have somehow be the focal point of every environment they are in.
Despite what people want to say about Millennials, not all of them spend their lives on their phones. I know quite a few who enjoy time to themselves without having to document it all. And if I’m pretty sure you know some Millennials who are the same and so forth and so on. Not every member of a generation behaves like a worker drone doing everything that’s expected of them.
Having gone through all my stuff at my mom’s house with all the old photo albums and pictures, there’s about four or five photo accumulating the 19 years I lived from birth to went I went to college. (I left for college on Sept. 13, 1997. My birthday was the next day.) I wonder how many photos parents born in the era of camera phones have. If they got them developed at Wal-Mart of Walgreens, how many photo albums would it take to accumulate 19 years of photos? I don’t think it would take just five.
Yes, people are proud of their kids and love them, wanting to document everything. But not everything needs to be documented. You have to have a good filter with birthdays, special ceremonies, fishing/camping/hunting trips, cookouts, etc. Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke looks at a person who had no filter. Ruby, like so many people on the Internet, started making money and then realized she could make a helluva living. I don’t know if it was her and her ex-husband, Kevin, being raised in the Mormon church that made her want to present her life all over the Internet. Or was there was something already in Ruby in which she just had to stand out?
They say you can’t tell something about people just by looking at them. But I think one’s personality and behavior is reflected in their appearance. Ruby just looks like the type of who will schedule DIY tasks every weekend expecting her whole family to work on it even if they wanted to do other things. They may have been Mormons but it’s obviously she wore the pants in the relationship as the old saying goes.
Even though Ruby isn’t interviewed, we do see a lot of her videos including unedited footage of her more or less just screaming at her kids and ex-husband, Kevin, who is interviewed. While I feel the former better half kept a lot of things hidden possibly to avoid giving the prosecution any leverage, I think when Ruby cut him off and began associating with Jodi Hildebrandt more, he was really out of the loop to the physical abuse the younger children endured. Kevin, for the most part, seems like a push-over doormat of a husband who kept giving Ruby an inch just because it would stop her from having a bitchfit for 10 minutes.
The relationship between Ruby and Hildebrandt is so twisted, it’d make a helluva movie if it wasn’t already in the news. There’s a 42-minute documentary on Hildebrandt on Max if you want to watch it as a companion piece. It focuses closer on the fraud therapist as she basically force many Mormon wives into turning their backs totally on their husbands. One of the shunned husbands in that documentary comments how Hildebrandt told his ex-wife to put up rules on the bedroom that he could only be in the bedroom if he was sleeping or quickly changing clothes.
The Ruby documentary adds more credence to the theory that Hildebrandt is a closeted lesbian who manipulated gullible women into giving her more money and preying on their religious beliefs. But I don’t believe Hildebrandt really believed the religious rhetoric she was spewing but she made others believe that even thinking their husbands are cheating on them just by looking at other women. I think she really got off on dominating her female and male clients especially when she could make the wives get the upper hands.
There’s speculation that Ruby and Hildebrandt were preparing for cult-like human sacrifice of her younger children. However, I feel Hildebrandt wouldn’t believe the nonsense she was telling Ruby about how the children were possessed by demon. Hildebrandt was able to manipulate people like Ruby who lived in religious bubbles.
Personally, I know both Mormons who lived in the Utah area as well as other parts and you can always tell the Utah-based Mormons are more sheltered. Therefore, they’re easier to twist around your finger if you know the right things to say and do. Sadly, the laws are on the side where women can take their kids and leave filing for divorce. As long as there’s no reports of child endangerment, it’s legal. Also, it’s easier for a woman to accuse her husband of molesting their children.
Also on the side of the law is how much parents/legal guardians can expose their children all over the Internet. As long as there’s no physical harm or sexually-related things, it’s all perfectly legal. And there’s the rub as kids don’t really have a say as their parents shove a cell phone in their face and make them perform. Ruby’s eldest daughter, Shari (who resembles a young Brie Larson), has become an advocate for protection of children against vloggers. Something needs to be done because it can stay on the Internet.
Just this week, the State of Utah implemented a law to help children of parent vloggers. Kevin had encouraged a bill to be made saying children really can’t give informed consent on whether to filmed and have it uploaded on the Internet. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law and it gives adults a path to scrub from all platforms the digital content they were featured in as minors and requires parents to set aside money for kids featured in content.
Ruby’s oldest son, Chad, is also interviewed at length. It was actually Ruby and Kevin’s shitty parenting skills that led them to Hildebrandt. You can tell in some pictures Chad didn’t want to be in the videos as most teenage boys don’t always want to spend time with their families. It was Chad’s harsh punishment that quickly turned the tide against Ruby among her followers as they both discussed in a video how he was punished for seven month by having to sleep on a beanbag. But I think it was more about how Hildebrandt wanted to see men of any age punished and tortured.
It’s a hard documentary to watch mainly because like a lot of social media people, the public loves them until they don’t. It can take months or years for us to see someone’s true colors. We have to admit that people who post a lot about their lives on social media are just showing you what they want to show you. And if they’re making a lot of money off of it, they’re going to do what they can to make it look perfect.
I’m wondering about the long-term effects of this social media craze in 20-30 years. Will a lot of children of parent vloggers be able to get jobs or into colleges if they have that stigmata of their parents? I know from my hometown, whoever your parents are could determine whether you got a job at a certain place or not.
Back during the peak of Facebook in the late 2000s, a man got in an argument with his father who he had friended. His father uploaded a photo of his son when he was a toddler looking grumpy on the toilet. Yes, it’s a stupid thing to do, especially if the man did business with people and they say him tagged in that post. It’s also embarrassing. Parents need to realize they have limits.
There’s a reason a lot of pictures of young children have remained behind a cellophane wrapper in a closed photo album on a bookshelf collecting dust. Not everything has to be shared with the world. We all need our privacy. And just because one person seeks attention at all times, doesn’t mean everyone around them wants it.
A lot of people want to live off camera.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 