It is hard to think of another mystery in recent history that has fired the engines of cultural production quite like the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, the Alabama teenager presumed to have been killed during a senior class trip to Aruba in 2005. The case has been the subject of more than a half-dozen nonfiction books (the latest, “Portrait of a Monster: Joran van der Sloot, a Murder in Peru, and the Natalee Holloway Mystery,” arrives in July), episodes on both “Law & Order: SVU” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” uncountable hours of “Nancy Grace” on CNN and an entire subspecies of dramatic programming on Lifetime.
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When the story first broke six years ago, the cable-news media received scrutiny for devoting so much time to the disappearance of one pretty, white young woman from an affluent suburb when similar attention was rarely, if ever, paid to the lost, mistreated children of the urban underclass. Lifetime broadcast a movie about the case — titled simply “Natalee Holloway” — in 2009 and set a ratings record for itself. An insidious franchise was born.
“Justice for Natalee Holloway,” to be shown on Monday, is the sequel, and after it comes “Vanished With Beth Holloway,” a new documentary series about the disappeared featuring Natalee’s mother as its host. Tragedy ages most of us, but it seems to have had the opposite effect on Beth Holloway, a special-education teacher who has been a persistent television presence since interest in her harrowing experience swelled.
Exhausted and distinctly middle aged looking when she first emerged, Ms. Holloway is now smoother skinned, sleeker and blonder, as if she had committed to being reborn as a young Deborah Norville. The makeover is the most unsettling thing about the show, because it suggests that Ms. Holloway has embraced her circumstance with a certain Canyon Ranch enthusiasm. It is doubly jarring that Tracy Pollan, who plays her in both of the Lifetime movies, doesn’t look as good as her model.
“Justice for Natalee Holloway” and the first half-hour of “Vanished” devote themselves to excavating the cruelties of Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch student among those last seen with Natalee. Now awaiting trial in the killing of a young woman in Peru, he has offered various versions of his encounter with Natalee in Aruba and then recanted them as lies. Despite Mr. van der Sloot’s untrustworthiness, Ms. Holloway keeps returning to him in hope of honest explanations.
It is not merely that she has lived the reality quietly threatening every mother that makes her a kind of signature Lifetime heroine; she also embodies a maniacal, crusading spirit that rightfully mistrusts law enforcement to get the job done.
Lifetime began as a network devoted to narratives of female suffering — at the hands of adulterous or abusive husbands and all manner of male miscreants. It has since created a fief of mini-niches, one of which lionizes women who operate beyond the bounds of the law to find kidnapped children, missing sisters and so on. In the Lifetime worldview institutions are often objects of suspicion; a psychiatric facility, for example, might commit you for no good reason (“Committed”).
Portraits of brazenness born of desperation are part of the Lifetime mission, and the network seems compelled by the notion that Ms. Holloway has defined her life by her daughter’s absence. She tirelessly pursues the truth. She ventures around the country speaking about the dangers of international travel. She has founded the Natalee Holloway Resource Center to help families of the missing. But what the films suggest, almost accidentally, is that Ms. Holloway perhaps didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought. Natalee might have been more of a rebellious, partying, risk taker — which is to say an average teenager — than her mother had realized.
In the end what is compelling and cautionary about Ms. Holloway’s story is not simply that something terrible happened but that she was too wedded to the idea of her daughter’s straight-A exceptionalism. In her view Natalee was not the kind of girl to allow a boy in a bar to use her belly button as a shot glass and then stumble off with him into the night. At a time when we are expected not only to love and care for our children meticulously but also to befriend them ardently, the prospect of self-delusion is the real
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