Fictional documentaries and truthful fictions: the death penalty in recent American film.

• Author: Dow, David R.

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. Thus, The Thin Blue Line is a movie that cheats because it is the story of an inmate wrongfully accused, yet it literally resulted in the saving of an innocent man's life. Dead Man Walking does not cheat in the slightest, but whether it affects the real world to even the slightest degree is open to question. Fourteen Days in May cheats by suggesting that the executed inmate is innocent, but without letting us see the supposedly exculpatory witness. The Green Mile shows the execution of someone we know is innocent, yet it also shows two other executions where the guilt of the inmate is not in question, as well as showing a particularly hateful criminal get murdered in prison. In this sense, TGM simultaneously provokes in the viewers discomfort with the death penalty (we see nonviolent as well as innocent men get electrocuted) and also satisfaction when we see a vile criminal suddenly shot. This very conflict is as common as it is inexplicable, and TGM is the only one of the films to evoke it. In short, the documentaries are false and the fiction is true.

This essay consists of two major sections. In Part I, I address the death penalty regime in America. The discussion combines a summary of recent research as well as anecdotal evidence based on my own experience of representing death row inmates. In Part II, I turn to the films and argue that, although death penalty documentaries are fine and gripping films, the Hollywood productions do a far better job of illuminating the entirety of the death penalty world. The documentaries, like the popular media in the United States, exemplify a transfixion with the problem of executing an innocent man. To be sure, the execution of an innocent man represents the quintessential failure of the justice system; nevertheless, the fact that there are innocent men on death row is a symptom of far more widespread problems, such as ineffective assistance of counsel and inadequate appellate review. The Hollywood films, though fiction, do a far better job at communicating this basic truth.

1. THEORY AND PRACTICE

   There are two reasons one might oppose the death penalty. One reason is that it is wrong for the state to kill; the other is that although it is in theory acceptable for the state to execute, it is wrong in practice. The first of these reasons is absolute and categorical; the second is conditional.

   Similarly, just as there are both conditional and categorical bases for opposing capital punishment, there are both conditional and categorical bases for favoring it. The categorical argument is typically referred to as retribution; the conditional arguments are grounded in utilitarian considerations. In fact, the utilitarian argument can take several forms, including general deterrence, specific deterrence, even eugenics. In any case, because the validity of the utilitarian argument depends on empirical data, it can be disproved, and someone who supports the death penalty solely on the grounds of utilitarianism might change his or her mind, in view of the data. On the other hand, the retributive impulse is simply that: an impulse, a feeling, an urge one has. The retributive rationale is a moral position that does not depend for its justification on any fact of the matter. One who supports the death penalty for reasons of retribution essentially maintains that vengeance is a legitimate basis for state action.

   Thus, because both the pro- and anti- forces have available to them both absolute and conditional forms of argument, the debate concerning the death penalty can take place at either a theoretical or a practical level. I therefore want to stress that my thesis is not that documentaries are practical while Hollywood films are theoretical (or vice versa). My argument, instead, is that documentaries are not simply practical, they are misleadingly and narrowly so. The problem of executing innocent men(4) is a practical issue, rather than a purely theoretical one, but it is only one of a myriad of practical issues, and it is more properly understood as a symptom of a larger problem rather than as a problem in itself. This point is apprehended by the Hollywood films, though not by the documentaries. The Hollywood movies, moreover, illustrate a much greater willingness to grapple with the theoretical issues, issues that the documentaries studiously eschew.

   1. THEORY

      Camus once said that the only serious philosophical question is the question of suicide. In death penalty cases, the only serious question is homicide: whether the state ought to engage in it. Every other issue is just a distraction.

      I have on my desk a death certificate for a man I represented. There is a space on the certificate where the physician who declared my client dead was required to indicate the cause of death. The cause of death is listed as homicide. Unlike the word murder, which is a technical legal term of art, the word homicide is simply the sum of its parts: homi from homo, meaning man; cide from cidere...