A Filmmaker Confronts Her Pedophile Grandpa

A monster can be a green, scaly lizard that towers over buildings. Or a blood-sucking fiend in a black cape. Or an equivocating, self-pitying old man who refuses to own up to the lives he has destroyed and hides behind the blinkered assurance that God will forgive him for his sins. 

This is the beast at the heart of Great Photo, Lovely Life, a raw, hard-to-watch new HBO documentary that reminds us just how banal evil can be. His name is Bill Flickinger, a serial pedophile who preyed on the women in his family and the children he saw as a chiropractor in Pennsylvania. One of his granddaughters, Amanda Mustard, turned into a talented photojournalist and filmmaker with a long memory. “I love that I get to make exposing the truth about something a part of my job,” she says in the film. The truth she exposes in Great Photo, along with co-director Rachel Beth Anderson, removes a cloak of silence, complicity and fear, one painful but cathartic frame at a time.

Unlike many, Mustard gets to confront her monster, and she does so with her weapon of choice: the camera, and all its merciless acuity. “I didn’t want to do things that are bad,” Flickinger fumbles. “To me it was too much of an open temptation.” Mustard, who confronts her grandfather alongside her mother, Debi, can barely contain her disgust, and it’s impossible to blame her. Mumbling pities about divine redemption, refusing to take accountability for his evil, he is essentially unredeemable. Reaching out to Flickinger’s potential victims, offering some form of closure or at least acknowledgement, Mustard cuts to the chase: “It’s the least that I can do as the granddaughter of this piece of shit.” Sickened as she is, as a journalist — and a woman with courage and grit to match her anger — she swims into the story like a shark.

Memoirists are often told to not mistake narrative for therapy, and the bar for telling such stories is rightfully quite high. Great Photo scales it, even if it makes the viewer a little queasy along the way. As a photographer, Mustard makes great use of stills, images frozen in time that serve as reminders of who these people have been. We see Flickinger as a child, and as a young man, not to generate sympathy but to remind us that evil is a very human characteristic, not some mystical boogeyman waiting to pounce from the bushes. We witness the evolution of Mustard’s relationship with her mother, Debi, one of Flickinger’s earliest victims, who still instinctively has a difficult time admitting her father’s depravity.

Debi’s mother (Flickinger’s wife) protected him for decades, knowing full well what he was doing. So did a criminal justice system that kept letting Flickinger off with slaps on the wrist — probation here, a removed license there — as he continued his predatory attacks. Primarily a family study, Great Photo is also a quietly outraged look at how a serial pedophile can slip through the cracks.

The church played a part as well. The Flickingers were devout Christians, to the extent that divorce was never really an option. When Debi was a child, the family was praised for singing in the choir together. When Mustard takes one of Flickinger’s former patients and victims back to his old chiropractic practice in Harrisburg, his former boss hems and haws, passively castigates Mustard for not practicing Christian forgiveness, then leads the group in a performative group prayer (the “You’ve got to be kidding me” look on Mustard’s face is worth a thousand of her photos). For his part, Flickinger speaks piously of reaching the Kingdom of Heaven, never giving credence to the probability that, according to his cosmology, he’s heading for The Other Place. It takes a village to enable heinous crimes, and Flickinger had a very supportive and hypocritical one.

Great Photo is ultimately about the incalculable value of truth, and the pains that might be required to reach it. Despite what Keats said, it can be quite ugly. And yet it remains as essential as the air we breathe.