DAVID VAN TAYLOR: The Subject Was Suicide

One bleak December afternoon in 1985, 18-year-old Raymond Belknap jammed the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger. James Vance, Belknap’s 20-year-old best friend, reloaded the gun and turned it on himself.

Belknap died immediately. Vance--whose self-inflicted shotgun blast tore away his nose, cheeks, jaw, tongue, teeth and gums--initially survived the suicide attempt, living for three years--long enough to file one of the most bizarre civil lawsuits in entertainment history.

Before he died, Vance, with his family, opened their lives to New York director David Van Taylor, whose documentary, “Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest,” explores in chilling detail how the alienated Nevada youth came to believe that subliminal messages in the music of his favorite British heavy metal band, Judas Priest, caused him to shoot himself.

The film, which took five years to complete, combines interviews of the teens’ parents, friends and Judas Priest band members with trial excerpts and stark footage of a severely disfigured Vance recounting the gory details of the shooting at the very spot where he tried to take his life.

Van Taylor talked from New York to reporter Chuck Philips about “Dream Deceivers.”

What intrigued you about the Judas Priest case that caused you to devote five years of your life to making a documentary about it?

When I first read an article about the subliminal lawsuit I thought the whole thing sounded absurd. The idea of blaming a suicide attempt on unseen forces in rock music, it just seemed ridiculous to me.

But what happened over the course of making the film is that I got less and less judgmental and more and more empathetic with all of the characters, especially the teen-agers. What I hope the film does is take people through a similar transformation, so that they can see this story through the eyes of the teen-agers who were most affected by it, the lost youth.

What does your documentary tell us about the condition of the American family?

I think it says that the American family is under a lot of strain. That, like so many other things in the world, the family is in trouble. If I was a teen-ager like James Vance and I heard Vice President Quayle exhorting people about returning to traditional values, it wouldn’t really mean very much to me. The troubling fact is that for many teen-agers, the family no longer holds the kind of meaning that we would like it to.

Some of the most powerful scenes in the film are the shots of James, the disfigured survivor, just sitting there talking and smoking a cigarette. What do you think his presence brings to the film?

I’ve showed a lot of different versions of this film to people in the past five years and my experience is that when you take James out of the picture it becomes very easy for people to dismiss the whole story. But the minute you see and hear him, it drives home the fact that these people went through an extreme trauma.

You realize that they weren’t just greedy people who cooked up a scheme one day to make some money, as so many have accused them. Everyone involved in this believed very strongly and sincerely in their cause, and I think that seeing James helps you understand why.

Why do you think the families would not take responsibility for the shooting?

This kind of thinking is indicative of a wider trend which we’ve seen manifested in the Robert Mapplethorpe case, the 2 Live Crew case and, more recently, the whole brouhaha over Murphy Brown and Ice-T. More and more people in this country are trying to blame art for problems they don’t understand. I think cases like the Judas Priest trial show us just how powerless people feel over their lives.

When you ask Judas Priest singer Rob Halford to recite the lyrics to one of the songs Vance said drove him to pull the trigger, he seems to have a hard time even recalling them. Do you think metal bands have any responsibility to let fans know that their music may not be not all that heavy?

I find it tremendously sad in a way that Halford doesn’t remember the lyrics. While I suspect that they probably didn’t mean so much to him when he wrote them, they sure mean a lot to kids like James. That’s the final irony here. That there are all these kids out there who invest a lot of meaning in songs by musicians who don’t even understand or remember what they wrote.

What do you think the Judas Priest case says about American culture in general?

What it says to me is that there’s a whole class of young people out there who see no viable future for themselves, a generation that is getting no vision from anywhere on how to move forward and begin living in some fulfilling way.

What I ultimately hope to convey to the audience is the point of view of these teen-agers. There are so many kids out there these days who feel hopeless and powerless and loud, angry music is the only thing they find any meaning in. It’s their only form of expression. If there is a message here it’s that I wish people would start listening to what these kids are trying to tell us.

“P.O.V.’s” “Dream Deceivers: The Story Behind James Vance vs. Judas Priest,” airs Monday at 10 p.m. on KCET, KPBS.