Today movie and television screens seem more filled with fictional crime and courtroom dramas than ever. Serial killing has become especially popular, piling up more bodies within a week’s worth of broadcasting and box office receipts than the total number of actual homicides committed across the country in months, I’d wager. Viewers and critics often praise the most successful of these films and programs as “raw” or “gritty” or even “real.”
But they are not real. In fact, they have become increasingly formulaic with the passage of time. Character types from the noir era persist: the hardened criminal, the even harder cop who bends the rules to catch the crook, and the women who prove the downfall of both types of men. Collecting an elaborate series of clues to capture and convict the thief or murderer, a pillar of crime literature since Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie at least, remains the central storyline in film and on tv.
Perhaps more important for the visual media, the look of crime and courtroom dramas has become conventionalized. Battlefield reporting during WWII and Vietnam led to the Direct Cinema of D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967) and Frederick Wiseman’s High School (1968), and they in turn have given us the faux-dingy staging, shaky camerawork, and fast-paced editing of Homicide or The Wire or True Detective. For many viewers, this look has become synonymous with the term “documentary.” So many crime and courtroom shows and movies identify themselves proudly as “docu-dramas.”
But the truth is stranger than fiction — perhaps nowhere more so than in crime stories — and the range of visual styles for depicting actual crime and punishment on screen is wider than handheld, you-are-there deceptions. Below are several non-fiction crime and courtroom stories with astonishing plots and alternative imaging.
Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) demonstrates how mistaken, sometimes willfully, the American criminal justice system can be. After the lethal shooting of Officer Robert Wood during a traffic stop just after midnight on Thanksgiving, 1976, Dallas police arrest Randall Adams as the culprit. Despite evidence pointing to another suspect, local prosecutors place Adams on trial and a jury convicts him. The film’s “wrong man” story is not entirely innovative — Alfred Hitchcock popularized this theme a generation earlier — but its style is remarkable: After each interview, shot with a fixed camera in close framing, Morris presents a staged recreation of the testimony with haunting music by Phillip Glass. As successive interviews provide new information, updated dramatizations play out on screen. The final effect was so compelling that local authorities granted Adams a new trial. After watching The Thin Blue Line, see the film’s Wikipedia page for the second verdict and even stranger developments in Adams’ and Morris’ relationship. The movie’s effect upon popular media was just as strong. Morris’ recreations inspired countless imitators on the small and large screen, ranging from Unsolved Mysteries to America’s Most Wanted to much of the programming on TruTV and other crime networks. Start at the beginning of this shift with The Thin Blue Line, available instantly on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.
But they are not real. In fact, they have become increasingly formulaic with the passage of time. Character types from the noir era persist: the hardened criminal, the even harder cop who bends the rules to catch the crook, and the women who prove the downfall of both types of men. Collecting an elaborate series of clues to capture and convict the thief or murderer, a pillar of crime literature since Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie at least, remains the central storyline in film and on tv.
Perhaps more important for the visual media, the look of crime and courtroom dramas has become conventionalized. Battlefield reporting during WWII and Vietnam led to the Direct Cinema of D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967) and Frederick Wiseman’s High School (1968), and they in turn have given us the faux-dingy staging, shaky camerawork, and fast-paced editing of Homicide or The Wire or True Detective. For many viewers, this look has become synonymous with the term “documentary.” So many crime and courtroom shows and movies identify themselves proudly as “docu-dramas.”
But the truth is stranger than fiction — perhaps nowhere more so than in crime stories — and the range of visual styles for depicting actual crime and punishment on screen is wider than handheld, you-are-there deceptions. Below are several non-fiction crime and courtroom stories with astonishing plots and alternative imaging.
Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) demonstrates how mistaken, sometimes willfully, the American criminal justice system can be. After the lethal shooting of Officer Robert Wood during a traffic stop just after midnight on Thanksgiving, 1976, Dallas police arrest Randall Adams as the culprit. Despite evidence pointing to another suspect, local prosecutors place Adams on trial and a jury convicts him. The film’s “wrong man” story is not entirely innovative — Alfred Hitchcock popularized this theme a generation earlier — but its style is remarkable: After each interview, shot with a fixed camera in close framing, Morris presents a staged recreation of the testimony with haunting music by Phillip Glass. As successive interviews provide new information, updated dramatizations play out on screen. The final effect was so compelling that local authorities granted Adams a new trial. After watching The Thin Blue Line, see the film’s Wikipedia page for the second verdict and even stranger developments in Adams’ and Morris’ relationship. The movie’s effect upon popular media was just as strong. Morris’ recreations inspired countless imitators on the small and large screen, ranging from Unsolved Mysteries to America’s Most Wanted to much of the programming on TruTV and other crime networks. Start at the beginning of this shift with The Thin Blue Line, available instantly on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.
Joe Berlinger’s and Bruce Sinofsky’s Brother’s Keeper (1992) is another story of the failures of the criminal justice system, this time in a more familiar documentary style and with heavier doses of classism and exploitation. In tiny Munnsville, New York, the four eccentric Ward brothers largely keep to themselves on their dilapidated family farm (1992). When William dies in 1990, brother Delbert finds himself accused of his murder by lazy state police, careerist prosecutors, and sensationalist media personalities. Locals valiantly defend Delbert both within and outside of the courtroom, however, as the state’s case takes increasingly ugly, ridiculous turns to avoid admitting its mistakes and malfeasance. See how low a priority justice can be within the world of law and order, especially when the accused seem least capable of defending themselves, in Brother’s Keeper, available instantly on Netflix and iTunes.
Surprisingly, this award-winning film’s trailer remains difficult to locate, but consider the enthusiastic endorsement of writer and actor Spalding Gray’s bladder:
Joshua Zeman’s and Barbara Brancaccio’s Cropsey (2009) resembles the serial killer dramas so popular on television today, with some moments borrowed from first-person shock horror films like The Blair Witch Project. As the directors trace the myth of the Staten Island bogey man back to its origins in a series of real child murders, they reach the sort of deranged killer that seems at first to belong in movies like The Silence of the Lambs or in tv shows like Dangerous Minds. On further examination, though, Cropsey’s killer appears less like a sinister mastermind and more like the Peter Lorre’s pathetic wretch Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), among the earliest and greatest films in all of serial killer cinema. The terror of Staten Island is himself a victim, damaged by one of the last vestiges of the Eugenics era in the United States, a house of horrors on an industrial scale built by people of supposedly sound minds for the greater good of society. See how far the blame spreads in Cropsey, available instantly on Netflix and iTunes.
Director Kurt Kuenne’s investment in Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008) is even more direct and personal than the filmmakers’ role in Cropsey. After the murder of his longtime friend Andrew Bagby, the acquittal of Bagby’s girlfirend for the crime, and the subsequent birth of their child Zachary, Kuenne felt compelled to make a film that would introduce the son to his deceased father, whose memory remains preserved not only in the minds of other friends and family, but also within the stacks of videotape that Kuenne had shot throughout their shared lives. As Kuenne tries to reconstruct Bagby on screen, the custody battle over Zachary between Bagby’s parents and the woman whom they believe killed their son and the child’s father rages inside the courtroom and beyond. There is no calculated presentation of the evidence here, as in The Thin Blue Line; the images and the narrative are as raw and emotionally saturated as such a horrible, absurd situation demands. And the final turn in the story is shocking, gut-punching, and heart-breaking. See the damage that one misfit can do within a community of healthy people in Dear Zachary, available on DVD from Netflix and instantly on Amazon and iTunes.
David Turnley’s Shenandoah (2012) turns the tables: the community is sick, and one family suffers terribly on account of its irresponsibility, fear, and anger. When the evidence begins pointing toward four high school football players as the killers of a Mexican immigrant in a small, Pennsylvania mining town, the local police and citizens encircle their hometown heroes, fire off racial slurs at the victim’s friends and family, and resist the intervention of federal authorities. While most of the boys hide behind their lawyers, though, one begins to rethink his actions and the attitudes of the town that has raised him. If you wonder who in America could possibly support recent political campaigns based on vilifying immigrants, and whether there is any chance to correct those mischaracterizations and learn to live together as a more unified nation, see Shenandoah, available instantly on Netflix and iTunes.
Barbara Schroeder’s Talhotblond (2009) is a crime story for the 21st century. The motive for murder, a love triangle between one young woman and two men, is as old as human history. But the romances occur entirely online; neither man ever meets the woman in the flesh before one kills the other. Nor is the older man honest about himself in his virtual communications with the girl; though aged 47, married, and working an ordinary blue-collar job, he presents himself as an18 year-old Marine recruit. The “tall hot blonde” of the film’s title, also the girl’s username online, may not be an entirely innocent victim of some creepy old loser either. To suit its subject, Talhotblond has a modern look. Instead of dramatic recreations of the events, with actors seated in front of computers speaking aloud the lines that they type, Schroeder allows the online affairs play out on the movie screen just as they did on the monitors of the two characters: as a series of unvoiced, disembodied text messages. Rather than dull and distant, this technique deepens viewers’ involvement, as they too await the next response from the mysterious electronic ether that conceals more than it discloses. Fall down the rabbit hole of digital desire and see the all-too-real consequences in Talhotblond, available instantly on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.
Unlike fictional police procedurals and courtroom dramas, in which determined cops and noble prosecutors hunt and cage the lone wolves that bring inexplicable evil into normal communities, all of the non-fiction films above argue that the crime is the result of much broader circumstances. Even the most foolish or awful individuals act in response to their environment, and often their surroundings contain absurdities and cruelties that trigger bad behavior: poverty, prejudice, corruption, greed, jealousy. Sometimes the criminal justice system itself suffers from some or all of these vices, condemning the innocent, freeing the guilty, or making bad actors even worse. Civil societies will always need brave police officers and fair-minded attorneys, judges, and juries, but addressing the largest social, economic, and political ills in advance of criminal activity is more likely to keep the larger population of good, cooperative people safe and sound both on screen and in the real world.
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