Thread by @studentactivism

So I watched #AbductedInPlainSight last night, and it's as bonkers as everyone says. But it also really resonated with me, as a child of the seventies.

I'm going to try to keep spoilers (is that the right word for a documentary?) to a simmer, but if you don't want to know anything more about the doc than you do now, feel free to mute the #AbductedInPlainSight hashtag.

There are five big explanatory threads for the family's behavior in #AbductedInPlainSight. The doc leans hard on four of them, and I want to talk about three of them, including the one the doc gives short shrift to.

(The two I'm not so interested in are the family's particular naiveté and Berchtold's...charisma, for want of a better word.) #AbductedInPlainSight

The documentary nods a few times in the direction of talking about the Broberg parents' fear of what Berchtold could do if he went public with what he knew about them, but partly because of their affect, it kind of glosses over it. #AbductedInPlainSight

There's something very specifically 1970s about the way Berchtold was able to slither into the Broberg parents' sexual lives, and the power he wielded over them once he did. #AbductedInPlainSight

The seventies was a time of intense, simultaneous sexual experimentation and sexual repressiveness, and it's hard for us today to fully relate either of those phenomena. We're far more liberated than that generation, but also, weirdly, less permissive. #AbductedInPlainSight

The American sexual milieu of the seventies—post-sixties, pre-AIDS—remains a foreign country to most of us today. More so, I'd argue, than the sixties or even the fifties. #AbductedInPlainSight

The next major explanatory thread of #AbductedInPlainSight was societal lack of understanding—even awareness—of sexual abuse of children. I felt like the movie didn't handle that particularly well—wasn't quite sure what it wanted to say.

But a related phenomenon that a lot of people are shocked by in the movie made perfect sense to me, and that's the Bergolds' willingness to maintain social ties with the Berchtolds. #AbductedInPlainSight

It's not quite naiveté, and it's not quite acceptance. It's something structural—a reflection of the language and framing and resources and community support that would be available to a family like them in a situation like that today, but weren't then. #AbductedInPlainSight

People who came of age back then have stories. Not stories like that, most of us, but stories. #AbductedInPlainSight

So while the bizarreness of the story definitely leaped out at me, there was an undercurrent of something else as well. An inevitability, almost. A horrific inevitability. #AbductedInPlainSight

It's a very good film, I think. Better—deeper and richer—than it seems at first glance. #AbductedInPlainSight