The first film by Cecilia Condit, Beneath the Skin, is based on a real-life incident in the artist’s life. At one point, she dated Ira Einhorn, also known as the Unicorn Killer after he murdered his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, and hid her corpse. Condit was taking medication that deadened her sense of smell, so she always wondered if she was in the same room as the dead body.
Part of the Jill Sands trilogy, as all three star the actress, these films — Beneath the Skin, Possibly in Michigan and Not a Jealous Bone — exist in a place where the voice and ideas of children coexist with dangerous men who only want two things: sex and death. Yet even connection between women can be difficult; as the narrator only spent time in the home with the killer, she doesn’t even know if it was true or a dream, as the perception of the rest of the world never even knew they were together. All she has is her own hazy experience; all she knows of the dead girl is that they found her body but never her head; all that remains is a hazy skull, scan lines pushing it into and out of raster.
“I dreamed that it was me, not her, that he killed two years ago.”
The artist told Morbidly Beautiful, “In the making of my first piece, Beneath the Skin, I discovered channels to put my own rage and fear into perspective, as well as see what happened as just another story “that happened to my life.” Although it is not the only freaky story I survived, it prompted me to start a dialogue in which each piece I make speaks to the others, giving the body of my work added complexity and depth. Their totality has become somewhat like a memoir with more to come.”
I often think about the true crime that we now absorb as pop culture. What was once either on the front page of yellow journalism or between the pages of pervier than porn but available right on the shelf black and white detective magazines is now every channel, A&E and an endless alphabet soup of channels once all about learning now just telling us how the latest wife shot her husband in the face or what dead baby left behind neon haze in the luminol spray. We want a new crime all the time without realizing the endless grief and life-decimating path of the crimes we fall asleep to or share around the Microsoft Teams water cooler. What of the people caught in its wake?
As the narrator — Condit? — remembers, everyone sat around a table telling a true story of their life. There was no YouTube or TikTok; even the unsharp VHS images were the future at this point. Like so many friend-of-a-friend urban legends, they all sat around some kind of fire and shared strips of their collective unconsciousness and man, did she have a story to tell. Others may react aghast, but that’s the kind of memory made in the sharpest way; today, that person would look at the camera, say “I need a moment” through wet, burning tears, and the camera would keep rolling.
Condit’s movies impact me like few can. They make me see the connections in the world, the wonder of what was once new in the old, and how men have left behind scars even on the people they didn’t touch.
You can watch this on YouTube.
