I watched this: Into the Abyss

Into the Abyss doesn't even want to convince, either, even though it is ostensibly about capital punishment. Herzog, during one of the interviews with Perry, in passing says that he doesn't agree with the death penalty. It's less an argument than something polite to say to the prisoner behind the glass, to the doggy in the window. Only one person in the film argues unequivocally against: a former leader of a death team who supervised the process of execution. Twice a week, for years, he'd lead prisoners through fingerprinting, showering, dressing in work-clothes, and eating last meals. Eight hours of informality. He even remembers when a female prisoner thanked him for all this. Thanked him before he rigged her with seven straps to the gurney and before he disposed of her body. Eventually, the twice-a-week for years caught up with the guard and he found himself shaking at a radio report of one of the executions. "No one has the right to take another's life," he says in his living room. But he has the air of a rattled mind. He isn't particularly articulate and he sounds clinical and robotic in his post-trauma. He isn't in this movie to convince.

Into the Abyss does look like other true-crime documentaries I've seen like Paradise Lost or The Thin Blue Line. There's the police footage, the revisiting of the crime scene, and, of course, the interviews with experts, victims' relatives, and the killers. But, I left those movies impassioned, furious at injustice. Into the Abyss, not being about the system or the wrongly convicted, arouses a much different reaction. After the last shot of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there's a feeling of incredulity. Into the Abyss doesn't provoke that stark a feeling, but one of quiet bewilderment. 

In certain interviews, Herzog gives us an extra few moments with the interviewees after they've finished talking. For instance, a police lieutenant at Crater Lake describes the discovery of one of the bodies. "Seems like they tried to back-up and eject the body," he explains. Here, the camera lingers for an extra moment and it gets a little awkward as the lieutenant doesn't know where to look as he waits for a "Cut!" from Herzog. It's feels like something from a home video, a kid during his 6th birthday who wants to be looked at, but who doesn't seem to know how to react when it's time. I wondered, if this documentary isn't solving or convincing or advocating, what it is about. Herzog's interviewees are fairly un-extraordinary residents of Conroe, Texas. Yet almost each major player comes up with something off-beat, and therefore fascinating, about his respective life. Something that Herzog didn't expect, specifically, even if he expected something, in general.

Michael Perry is both the most articulate and, maybe not suprisingly, the most off-beat. With his slanted bangs and chipped tooth he resembles a more functional Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber. Only appears more functional. When the guards bring him to the visiting area, before he's mic'd up and we have sound, we see him giggling as he sticks his hands backwards through a hole in the locked door to get his cuffs removed. He cleans the soundproof glass between him and Herzog. There's something eerie in how calm he is days after his dad has died and days before he (Michael) is facing execution. "There's an immense weight on my shoulders, what they call clinical depression," he explains. "I can't think about how many days I have left. One guy was doing that and he hung himself." A strong argument, perhaps even thoughtful, if he had more than a week's worth of days to get through. He has a major filmmaker in front of him, someone who in a sterotype would get him freedom, yet Perry can only give stereotypical answers. 

That is, until Herzog probes deeper, chaming in his misuses of American figures of speech ("You've been dealt an unfortunate deck of cards"). As an example of his rebelliousness, Perry eventually describes a summer-camp he'd attended, on parents' orders. It was a place that choked him with rules. For instance, he zoned out during the instruction to keep his bag zipped. So when it fell into the water, his belongings got soaked. Such trivialities, he explains, when the real dangers were the alligators during the canoe outings. How are these rules going to keep him from getting eaten? Then he talks about the monkeys jumping from tree to tree, how he wanted to take one home but couldn't because of their diseases. Monkeys and alligators at a Florida summer camp for kids. Perry speaks as assuredly about these animals as of his own 'innocence'.

Michael's fantasies are just some in a pastiche of nuance. There's the prison reverend who holds the ankle of the dying prisoners and who tears-up at the memory of two squirrels he almost kills during a round of golf. "All life is valuable," he says, "squirrel and human." There's the woman who professes her love to Jason Burnett even before meeting him. She says she's no death-row groupie, though. She also describes the rainbows over the prison gate after her first meeting with Burnett. Herzog has a particular affinity for an old acquiantance of Burnett's who spits over his shoulder between questions. The man describes a fight where he took a 5-inch screwdriver, a Phillips, to the ribcage just under his arm. "Just a bit of pus and blood." He went to work 30-minutes after, not the hospital. It wasn't this story that amazed Herzog, but the revelation that the young man, who just told the camera about the tattoo of the name Bailey on his forearm ("If we break-up, I guess I'll have to get 'Bailey sucks'"), learned to read as an adult in prison. "You're so much more connected to the world now," Herzog gushes. "What an achievement."

  

The film emphasizes the nonsense of the crime. Three people died so that a couple boys could have a car for less than three days. Three people died for a theft. The relatives of the victims, in particular, struggle to find sense. The daughter and sister of two of the victims, for instance, refuses to get a phone because it's always bad news. She says that her biological father and her brother died in an automobile accident. An aunt hung herself. Her stepdad died months before her wedding. "I'm glad I went to his (Perry's) execution," she says behind photos of her then-alive family members. "There's less pain now." She doesn't take that next step in the logic, doesn't explain that the death penalty is, most simply, a coping mechanism. Three people died for a theft doesn't make sense. A man dying for killing three people seems to make sense. A futile attempt when there's so much nonsense, mostly ugly but sometimes beautiful. In the old police footage, one of the bodies lays in a bundle in some high grass. "We don't even know how he got in there," the police lieutenant says, "we had to chop at the branches with machetes." In the foreground of the footage, in front of the pile of limbs, are bunches of bright red berries that the police on scene just couldn't ignore.