Balloon Boy Is a Hoax, Poor Kid

I didn't want to believe that Thursday's helium balloon TV drama was fake when all the signs pointed that way last week. But now the evidence of a balloon boy hoax has been confirmed by the sheriff who stuck up for Richard and Mayumi Heenes' story that their son Falcon was trapped inside the balloon so many of us watched race terrifingly across the sky. Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden says now that the Heenes planned the stunt in a bid for a reality show of their own.

This is such dumbfounding, twisted exhibitionism, so much an indictment of reality TV and the bizarre pandering-filled dreams it inspires that I feel like I'm writing about a cheesy plot synopsis. Truth isn't just crazier than fiction; it's also more didactic and obviously a morality play. But what I keep thinking about is the moment in which 6-year-old Falcon Heene outed his crazy parents, unwittingly, it seems, and on TV, of course. “You guys said that, um, we did this for the show,” he said on CNN. It's the kind of childish truth that has the appeal of The Emperor Has No Clothes. Only Falcon turned his candor against his mother and father. I'm trying to think of the right parallel, from history or literature or the movies. Who's got it? Whatever it is, it doesn't bode well for Falcon. He has to contend with letting his parents down, in their twisted universe, or with recognizing how wrong and nutty they are, in the world the rest of us live in. Neither is an uneasiness a 6-year-old should have to live with.

Tags: balloon boy, falcon heene, richard heene

Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.

Comments

What about the mom?

By: reneels | Mon, 10/19/2009 - 20:03

I'm surprised to see so little mention of the mother's role in this fiasco. From the outside, the Heene family dynamic appears to be the controlling father/ passive mother, which can be a recipe for disaster. Do Double XX-ers have any take on this?

Pirandello

By: eccecattus | Mon, 10/19/2009 - 08:44

I'm thinking Pirandello. The five characters that make up the Heene family are looking for their author. Pirandello comments at the end of his novel The Late Mattia Pascal that reality has none of the obligation to verisimilitude that a novel has. Maybe we won't find characters like the Heenes in literature- they're just too implausible.

Sick and sad

By: Mizz.Givens | Sun, 10/18/2009 - 22:41

IDK why the parents would do this. They must have known they would be found out. You can never get a child to be silent. I hope they get prosecuted and CPS looks into the family. I don't say that lightly; it seems the parents put their children in precarious situations for their own benefit.

Oh this is definitely a story

By: feefifoto | Sun, 10/18/2009 - 22:00

Oh this is definitely a story Mark Twain could have written, akin to The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, or The $30,000 Bequest.

Barf speaks louder than words.

By: eccecattus | Sun, 10/18/2009 - 18:22

Falcon's vomitus on the Today Show ought to be read as a poetic expression of his abjection- the disgust inexpressible with his six-year-old's vocabulary, the horror and shame of having to accuse his parents on television for a family project that, though ill-conceived, probably seemed like great fun at the outset.

So why did you guys fall for it?

By: Vanessa | Sun, 10/18/2009 - 17:43

I knew it was a hoax before the balloon landed. They were reality alums. What were the chances that it wasn't gonna be a twisted ploy to get on TV?

Where was the skepticism? Were people caught up in it, or did they think it was as fishy as I did but no one had the courage to go check in the attic, or voice an opinion in case the kid really was in there?

I caught some flack from my friends for calling bs early on- but it seemed like a sure bet that it would turn out this way. Why couldn't anyone either in the media or the demi-media (sites like this) call for some skepticism when it really mattered? When people were hysterical and thinking the boy had fallen out and died, for instance.