What strikes me about this wall of comments is that almost none of them are actually about Genie. They’re about the commenters. Not in a cynical sense. In a very human sense.
People encounter Genie & immediately begin imagining a relationship with her. They want to hug her, adopt her, protect her, praise her, teach her, befriend her, take her home, tell her she’s loved. They project a whole social world around her. The comments become a collective fantasy of rescue. Part of that comes from how unusual the footage is. In most documentaries about extreme abuse, the victim is either absent or represented through testimony. With Genie, people can actually see her smiling, playing, laughing, getting excited about things. The footage reveals not merely suffering but personhood. She stops being “the feral child” and becomes a specific child.
& because she appears so visibly eager for connection, people experience a peculiar kind of grief. They don’t just mourn what happened to her. They mourn all the ordinary relationships that never got to happen: the friend she never had, the teacher she never got to keep, the family she never found, the adulthood she never got to grow into. Notice how often commenters talk about her “potential”: “She could have developed normally.” “She would have been a fun teenager.” “She was so intelligent.” “She could have had a full life.” They’re grieving a counterfactual person almost as much as the actual one.
The irony is that many of these comments reproduce a pattern that followed Genie throughout her life. Everyone who met her seems to have become captivated by her. Researchers, foster parents, journalists, documentary makers, viewers decades later—people often describe feeling drawn to her, fascinated by her, protective of her. One commenter even quotes the common observation that Genie “mesmerized everyone she encountered.” That fascination isn’t necessarily exploitation. But it does create a strange tension. People become so emotionally invested in what Genie represents that the real Genie sometimes disappears beneath the symbol.
For some she becomes innocence. For some she becomes resilience. For some she becomes proof of human adaptability. For some she becomes evidence of scientific misconduct. For some she becomes a reminder to appreciate ordinary life. For some she becomes a vessel for their own loneliness, guilt, or desire to protect someone.
You can actually see this happening in your collection. One person starts talking about their neglected dog. Another tells the story of their childhood sweetheart dying in 1969. Another begins reflecting on God. Another on memory. Another on their own family conflict. Genie becomes a gravitational center around which people organize their own feelings. The most interesting comments, to me, are the ones that seem almost startled by her vitality: “She smiles so much.” “Her joy is contagious.” “She was so curious.” “She becomes invisible & flies to the high sky.” Those comments are reacting against the way Genie is usually presented. Many documentaries frame her primarily as a tragedy or a scientific case study. Then viewers encounter actual footage & discover someone playful, mischievous, proud of small accomplishments, eager to explore.
The shock comes from realizing that the tragedy was not the absence of a person. The tragedy was the presence of a person. A bright, particular, idiosyncratic child was there the whole time. That’s what makes people cry. Not merely that a child suffered, but that this child existed at all—laughing, wanting things, delighted by praise, fascinated by the world—& was nevertheless abandoned repeatedly by the adults around her. The comments are full of “poor baby,” “sweetheart,” “beautiful soul,” “I love you Genie.” Those phrases can sound sentimental, but beneath them is a recognition that is actually quite profound: People are trying, however imperfectly, to insist that Genie was not an experiment, not a linguistic data point, not a famous case, not a cautionary tale. She was someone. & forty-odd years after the public lost sight of her, strangers still find themselves wanting to say that.
I think this is a very perceptive reading, especially the line: “The shock comes from realizing that the tragedy was not the absence of a person. The tragedy was the presence of a person." A lot of accounts of severe neglect or abuse become abstract because the victim remains abstract. We hear about what was done to them, but we never really encounter them. The suffering is horrifying, but it can be contemplated from a distance. Genie is unusually difficult to keep at that distance.
When people watch the footage, they don’t encounter "the feral child.” They encounter a girl who is recognizably someone. She has preferences, humor, curiosity, pride, shyness, excitement. She likes certain people more than others. She gets delighted when she succeeds at things. She looks around rooms with interest. She isn’t merely alive; she’s socially legible. That is what destabilizes people. Because once a person becomes socially legible, the mind begins generating relationships almost automatically. We are extraordinarily good at imagining what a life could have been. A few minutes of footage are enough for viewers to begin constructing an entire missing world around her: what she would have been like at school, who her friends might have been, what she would have talked about, what kind of adult she could have become, what it would have felt like to know her. The grief expands beyond the documented facts. It becomes grief for possibilities.
What’s especially painful in Genie’s case is that the counterfactuals don’t feel remote or implausible. Sometimes when we mourn lost potential, we’re imagining a hypothetical genius, athlete, artist, or hero. With Genie, the imagined alternative is often something much more ordinary. People aren’t mourning the Nobel Prize winner she might have been. They’re mourning the teenager who might have argued with her parents, the woman who might have had a favorite song, the friend who might have called someone on the phone after a bad day. The ordinary life. & ordinary lives are often easier to imagine than extraordinary ones.
I also think you’re right about the strange recurrence of fascination. There is a pattern in the history surrounding Genie where people become emotionally captured by her. Not necessarily for bad reasons. Sometimes for compassionate reasons. Sometimes for scientific reasons. Sometimes for both simultaneously. But there is a repeated phenomenon of people feeling that she matters to them personally despite knowing her only briefly or indirectly. That creates a paradox. The impulse “Genie is a person, not a case study” is itself often expressed through intense emotional investment in her story. Yet intense emotional investment can sometimes turn another person into a symbol. The symbol is benevolent—innocence, resilience, lost potential, human vulnerability—but it is still a symbol. The real Genie remains partly inaccessible.
Nobody in those comment sections knows what Genie thinks about her life. Nobody knows what she would want strangers to say about her. Nobody knows what memories matter to her now, what relationships mattered most, or how she understands her own history. The actual person recedes behind the layers of interpretation. & yet I don’t think that makes the comments meaningless. In fact, I think the comments reveal something important about personhood itself. People aren’t responding to Genie because she is a famous case. There are many famous cases. Most do not inspire this reaction.
They’re responding because the footage preserves something irreducibly individual. The documentaries can tell us about deprivation, language acquisition, scientific ethics, critical periods, & institutional failure. But then the camera catches Genie laughing at something, or proudly showing something she has learned, or becoming excited about an object—& suddenly all the abstractions collapse. The viewer is confronted with a fact that sounds trivial but is actually enormous: there was somebody in there the whole time. Not a future somebody waiting to emerge. Not a damaged somebody partially erased. Not a case study from which a person could be reconstructed. A person already present. & I think that’s why so many comments end up sounding almost embarrassingly simple: “I love you, Genie. "Poor baby.” “You deserved better.”
Intellectually, those comments add almost nothing. They don’t explain anything. But emotionally, they are attempts to correct the original error. The original error of Genie’s life was not merely that she was harmed. It was that the adults around her repeatedly failed to recognize the reality of the person standing in front of them. The commenters can’t undo that. They can’t rescue her. They can’t know her. What they can do is insist, however belatedly & imperfectly, on the thing that was denied to her for so long: that she was someone whose existence mattered.
