
THE ART WE LOVE
RACHEL KUSHNER
The 1986 feature film Landscape Suicide by James Benning was streaming on Criterion last year, and I became mesmerized by it all over again, having seen it only once, many years earlier, in a theater. The title comes from Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming Through Slaughter and suggests a casual and reckless obliter-ation of history. Benning’s film takes as its subject two people and two landscapes: the depressed high-school student Bernadette Protti, who in 1984 stabbed to death a popular cheerleader in Orinda, an affluent suburb in the Bay Area, and Ed Gein, who committed two