Weapons, Massacres, Death Penalty: God Save the US

Whether we like it or not (call it voluntary devotion or cultural colonialism), our imagination has been shaped by North American popular culture; it’s an influence that those of us born in the 20th century cannot deny. Yes, we the people of Buenos Aires like to put the Francophilia on the table that we grew painstakingly (and in which Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan coexist). But let’s compare that to the influence of those names with the big American cultural class from the past century: the music (blues, rock, pop, punk, grunge); the modern art (do we really need to mention anyone other than Warhol?); the cinema (Hollywood’s industry, but also the independent cinema, and anywhere in between: Coppola, Scorsese, Eastwood, Jarmusch and Tarantino); the television (from the sitcoms to “Lost,” “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” “CSI”); the literature (projecting its influence since the 19th century with Poe and Melville, throughout the 20th with Hemingway, Cheever, Faulkner and so on and so forth all the way to Dick, Roth, DeLillo and Carver). It’s an awkward and heavy heritage for the majority of us of European descent. And maybe with the beginning of the new century things will change. But now, despite the political slogans and the rejection generated by years of carnal relations with the financial credit agencies, the truth is that we owe our ways of dreaming, wishing and imagining largely to the U.S.

We know, of course, what fuel the machine that generates cultural symbols runs on: money and natural resources. That is to say, the assets captured by the territorial expansionism and the production of new markets by brute force, in years of war and invasions (the policy implemented by and for the empire). All of this has a set of consequences all its own. At the same time, this is how that dream factory produces its nightmares. This is where commercial jetliners come in colliding with symmetrical towers, the Ku Klux Klan, the assassinations of public figures, the massacre of civilians in remote territories and the slaughter of civilians within their own borders, especially in overcrowded movie theatres and high schools.

Last Friday’s murders during the premiere of the latest and final installment of the Batman trilogy put some aspects of the American reality again in the center of public discussion. It seems that one of the immediate effects of that fact was the rise in the sale of firearms in the state of Colorado. It doesn’t come across as strange, with this type of reaction, that several documentary filmmakers have devoted the past few years to studying this society’s behavior. Hence the visual leaflets, attractive and simplified (“Sicko,” “Farenheit 9/11,” “Bowling for Columbine”), from a guy like Michael Moore, to whom Jorge Lanata owes more than he would like to admit. And Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictions (“Borat”), which are much more intelligent and fun. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, eternal foreigner in the world and author of films like “Fitzcarraldo” and a series of awesome documentaries (“Grizzly Man,” “The White Diamond”), premiered a film last year that portrays one of the most awkward sides of this culture: how the death penalty is legal in the majority of the country.

“Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life” can be seen on the Internet and is structured as if it were a book (as a matter of fact, the case that it narrates is incredibly similar to the one that inspired Truman Capote to write “In Cold Blood”), with a prologue, five chapters and an epilogue. It describes, in its entangled complexity, the case of a triple homicide that took place in Texas in 2001, for which Jason Burkett was sentenced to life imprisonment and Michael James Perry to death by lethal injection. Herzog shows his hand from the beginning: He disagrees with the death penalty and his movie tries to portray a plea against this lethal anachronism so deeply rooted in the U.S., but he isn’t going to feel any sympathy toward the alleged killers or take any of Moore’s shortcuts around it. That is why he decides to start with the crime, reconstructing it meticulously, showing the horror and the absurdity of the murders: some kids wanted to steal a car, a red Camaro, to go out for a ride and brag to their friends. As things became increasingly complicated, they ended up killing three people that got in their way. Herzog uses police footage and interviews with the investigators, the convicted criminals and the victims’ families, leaving capitalism naked in its stupid violence: from private property to physical annihilation in just one step.

But not everything is as simple as that; it’s through the engaging characters that earn testimonies of how Herzog illuminates the dark side of the beast, which in this case is the town of Conroe, where almost everyone has a relative that has been killed or that is serving time. In this movie there is a woman who lost both her mother and her brother in the massacre, and ended up disconnecting her phone because every time it rang a voice told her that someone else had died. There is a father serving 40 years in jail who also has two of his sons imprisoned in the penitentiary across the street. There are also words from the man formerly in charge of the executions, a guy that supervised the death of 125 people (at a rate of two per week during the ‘90s) and who all of a sudden started seeing ghosts and quit. There is a woman who fell for a man convicted of homicide, who managed, somehow, to smuggle her husband’s semen out so she could inseminate herself in vitro. There is a map in a sheet of paper with Perry’s death sentence that shows the time he was removed from the cell, was injected, said his last words, and died: all within 17 minutes.

Herzog takes a detour from the main story, falls in love with the accessory stories and always leaves the camera an extra second to capture the true reactions of those interviewed. Even when he over-editorializes, he’s so honest that it doesn’t influence the conclusions of the spectator. It’s rare when there are two people that see “Into the Abyss” together and arrive at the same conclusion. How much does the ease of access to firearms influence the inherent violence of American society? Does it change anything in the victims’ relatives to see how the person that killed their loved ones dies strapped to a stretcher? Isn’t the obligation of coming back again and again to these questions what every great documentarian should keep in mind while making one of their movies?