Fictional documentaries and truthful fictions: the death penalty in recent American film.
Constitutional Commentary › Vol. 17 Nbr. 3, December 2000
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Fictional documentaries and truthful fictions: the death penalty in recent American film.
When it comes to death, most Hollywood movies cheat. They cheat by tinkering with the truth, because the truth as it actually is is too complex or too disturbing to confront honestly. (The so-called happy ending is the most famous form of such cheating.) They cheat because people generally prefer happiness and simplicity to darkness and complexity, especially where their entertainment is concerned, and filmmakers tend to give people what they want.
Even great movies cheat. For example, last year's Oscar winner for best picture, American Beauty, cheats egregiously. The movie (for the one or two of you who have not seen it) deals with modern times: It is about suburbia, men and women who mindlessly pursue meaningless careers, bigotry, and finally, hope and redemption. In the end, the character played by Kevin Spacey is murdered. This is not a surprise ending because the Spacey character narrates the movie in a voice-over, and he tells us as the movie opens that in less than a year he will no longer be alive. We know at the beginning that 110 minutes later Kevin Spacey's character will be dead. Spacey plays a morally ambiguous character. He is in the midst of a full-blown mid-life crisis. He is a lousy husband and a worse father. For virtually the entire length of the film, he lusts after his daughter's high school classmate. In the end, however, he gently rebuffs a neighbor's homosexual advance and--again gently--declines to have intercourse with the high school cheerleader who is lying pants-less on his couch. The message here is not subtle: Spacey redeems himself, in this movie about figurative death and spiritual renewal, and just as he does so, he gets shot. This bloody ending would be at least a little depressing--except that the Spacey character is still talking; he continues the narrative voice-over even after his brains have been blown out and blood is pouring from his head. We see him lifeless but can believe that he is not dead because we hear him still full of life. Through this narrative technique, Spacey stays alive despite having been murdered. He even tells us what it is like to be dead, and thereby blunts the tragedy of his death. In science fiction or fantasy, dead people can keep talking, but in a realist film--and this movie's power is its stark realism; there may not be an untrue or unreal sentence in the entire script--narration from a dead man is cheating. Death penalty movies cheat as well. Unlike American Beauty, they cannot cheat by having an execution victim remain alive (although The Green Mile, which I discuss below, comes close to this mode of cheating). Instead, they cheat by featuring an innocent inmate: someone who, by nearly anyone's estimation, deserves to be living. This focus is their mode of distraction, their mode of avoiding moral complexity. Death penalty movies that focus on innocence cheat because they allow the viewer to be certain that the protagonist ought not to be killed; such movies permit viewers to oppose a death penalty without opposing the death penalty. In real life, we do not have that indulgence. When death penalty movies cheat, they obscure the fundamental moral questions that the death penalty involves. One might expect documentaries to be more real and Hollywood productions to be less so, but one would be wrong. Exactly the opposite is true. Documentaries cheat much more than Hollywood movies. Most (though not all) documentaries cheat by focusing almost exclusively on the issue of innocence, whereas many Hollywood movies willingly grapple with moral complexity by featuring at least one guilty inmate.(1) Moreover, although the focus on innocence might seem innocuous, it is in fact rather pernicious, because it contributes to the increasingly widespread view that there is no great harm in violating a person's rights as long as we are certain that the person is guilty. My thesis, then, is that fiction is more true than nonfiction, and I will illustrate this thesis by examining four principal films, two documentaries and two Hollywood movies. The documentaries are The Thin Blue Line (TBL), which deals with a former inmate of death row in Texas named Randall Dale Adams, and Fourteen Days in May (FDM), which deals with a former inmate of death row in Mississippi named Edward Earl Johnson. Adams was released; Johnson was executed. The two Hollywood films are Dead Man Walking (DMW) and The Green Mile (TGM). Both involve fictional murderers, and both are set on Louisiana's death row. DMW, though based on a work of nonfiction,(2) is itself fiction; it centers around an inmate of death row who is a composite of multiple murderers rather than a single accused. TGM is based on a work by Stephen King,(3) so it should come as no surprise that the film combines realism with supernaturalism, and it is therefore an achievement of heroic proportions that this film does not cheat. The ironies implicit in my argument are numerous and multi-dimensional. Thu...See the full content of this document
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