Introduction
Documentaries are non-fiction movies created with the intention to document real events, people, and phenomena for instruction or maintenance of historical records. As a genre, documentary films have been around for quite some time; however, recently, they have arguably started to gain more traction than ever. The present paper discusses Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line – a documentary revolving around the life of Randall Dale Adams. This essay provides an analysis of the most prominent themes in The Thin Blue Line. In particular, the essay delves into the nature of justice: it argues that indifference for the human condition are not necessarily characteristics of exceptional evil. On the contrary, depending on the upbringing and life circumstances, anyone may be cruel to their fellow humans.
The Thin Blue Line
In 1976, Randall Dale Adams, a 27-year-old American, and his brother left their home state of Ohio moved to California. On the way there, the two brothers stopped at Dallas to celebrate Thanksgiving night. The following Saturday, Adams went to work that he had been offered recently, but no one else turned up. As Adams was driving home, his car ran out of fuel. On that fateful day, David Ray Harris, a juvenile who had just turned sixteen, spotted the man stranded on the road and offered help. Little did Adams know that despite his young age, Harris had quite a problematic legal history. He was driving a car that he had stolen in Texas; besides, the teenager kept a loaded pistol and a shotgun for which he did not have a license.
Adams and Harris got along and spent the next day together: they were heavily drinking, smoking marijuana, and watching movies at a drive-through theater. At night, Harris took Adams to his motel, parked the car next to a graveyard, and was soon approached by Woods, a police officer on his night shift. The teenager did not want to risk being revealed and arrested, so he shot Woods twice before he even had a chance to start a conversation. The injury was lethal: the police officer died on the spot, and Harris disappeared into the night.
The Dallas Police Department investigation led to Harris: the teenager was reckless enough to not only leave the telling evidence at the crime scene but also tell his friends about the murder. Very soon, Harris was arrested and interviewed, and during the police interrogation, he accused Adams of the crime. Throughout the court hearing, Adams insisted on his innocence, but the odds were against him. Harris was able to convince the court that Adams was in the car with him on that night, and moreover, that he was the driver and the shooter. Adams was assessed by a psychiatrist who concluded that the defendant was too dangerous to be set free. Eventually, the man was sentenced to death and sent to prison to wait for the execution.
The Thin Blue Line is organized as a series of interviews about the investigation of the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood. The documentary employs a rather interesting style of interviewing people: each subject stares directly into the camera. Morris’ wife even coined a term for this uncanny and even terrifying method: “interrotron.” Aside from the interviews, the crime itself was carefully re-enacted based on the testimonies and recollections of the main convict, Adams, Harris, the actual murderer, the judge, and the witnesses. The Thin Blue Line features two attorneys (Edith James and Dennis White) who represented Adams in court. Both James and White point out that charging Adams with the crime was borderline deliberate and not an accident. The court held evidence against Harris but it has never been put to use, probably, because Harris was underage.
What makes the documentary special is the producer’s actual experience in investigation. He does not merely narrate the past events: he is relentless and unstoppable in search for truth. At the time of shooting The Thin Blue Line, Morris was working as a private investigator for a detective agency. The producer was earnest in his efforts, and eventually, the documentary played a significant role in Adams’ exoneration. Namely, Morris as able to capture the prosecution’s witnesses constantly contradicting themselves, undermining the case against Adams. Besides, the producer recorded Harris’ nonchalant, eerie confession about murdering Woods.
The Theme of Truth
Probably the most important topic that Morris approaches in The Thin Blue Line is that of truth. When creating the movie, the producer was both seeking the truth and showing the truth. In the first case, as it has been mentioned before, Morris had a detective background and actual investigative skills. As much as he was reportedly obsessed with true crime and novel methods of narration, truth was his end goal. As a cinematographer, however, Morris was confronted with a whole different challenge, namely, showing the truth in a way that would attract the viewer, start a dialogue, and bring about a change. Now, it needs to be said that when discussing documentary films of the 1980s, one should put cinematographic methods and approaches in the historical context. The solutions that Morris has chosen for The Thin Blue Line might seem straightforward now, but back then, they were not.
Morris was creating The Thin Blue Line a few years after the peak and decline of the so-called cinema verité. The adherents of cinema verité were committed to showing people in the immediacy of their lives, without embellishment or exaggeration. This was around the peak of the popularity of this kind of cinematography when producers started to use handheld cameras and natural lighting. Most of all, cinema verité proponents despised the scripted nature of action films. What they sought to accomplish in their works was to capture truth in the making. For instance, in cinema verité, it was especially valuable to catch a subject off-guard or show the viewer real raw emotions.
While Morris drew on the philosophy of cinema verité, he did not want to stick to the style and the subgenre completely. The producer thought that this type of cinematography was even backwards in a way because it undermined the progress made by other prominent figures in the industry. In the pursuit of truth, Morris struck a balance between cinema verité and action movies. The influence of the latter is evident through such elements as music (scored by Philipp Glass) and dramatic exaggerations. Glass’ haunting, captivating musical pieces were used as a background to the interviews. One may say it is an emotional manipulation seeking to make the viewer feel a certain way – something that is frowned upon in the world of documentaries.
Aside from the musical accompaniment, Morris ignored the traditional signs of authenticities typical for the genre. For example, when demonstrating excerpts from documents and newspapers, the producer used heavy editing for aesthetic purposes. In this mix, crime reenactments are outliers that do not belong neither to cinema verité nor to action cinematography. The method required both artistry and precision and became another way to document and demonstrate real-life events. Some think that by relying on aesthetic embellishments, Morris transgressed the norms of documentary cinematography. However, the novelty of The Thin Blue Line can be approached in a different way. The producer did not undermine the distinction between truth and fiction: instead, he revolutionized the genre by giving it more vigor and vitality.
Besides, The Thin Blue Line can be considered a cinematographic breakthrough for Morris himself. It was not his first documentary, but it was the first one where he truly found his voice and language. Surely, the previous attempts were nothing short of compelling characters and storylines. 1978 Gates of Heaven revolved around the pet cemetery business, its advantages, pitfalls, and shortcomings. In 1981 Vernon, Florida, Morris explored the phenomenon when people in impoverished counties would injure themselves to receive more social benefits. Both documentaries were characterized by irony and absurdist humor. While these characteristics made them enjoyable, they could not be transferred to a documentary as serious as The Thin Blue Line. The latter has become the first movie where Morris minimized the shock and entertainment value and focused on the issue at hand.
Based on the artistic method of The Thin Blue Line, it is safe to assume that Morris wants to show the viewer that finding truth is an independent, unaccompanied process. Surely, before embarking on the creation of the film, the producer was already steadfast about Adams’ case. He was convinced that Adams was mistakenly accused and needed justice. In The Thin Blue Line, however, Morris does not impose his opinion on the viewer straight away. He does not point fingers, telling who is the good guy and who is the villain. The narration in this documentary is non-linear and non-chronological: all the interviews and reenactments are parts of a bigger jigsaw that the viewer needs to put together.
Interestingly enough, Morris even refuses to provide the names and the titles of the interviewees in the lower third of the screen. On many occasions, the viewer has to make guesses and come to their own conclusions based on the milieu, clothes, and other visual and verbal clues. Surely, this discontinuity of narration and other cinematographic particularities make watching The Thin Blue Line more challenging. At the same time, it makes the movie more rivating since it allows the viewer to become an accomplice to finding the truth – or not finding it at all. After all, Morris himself famously remarked that “truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by anything (Musser, 2015).”
The Theme of Death Penalty and Justice
Understanding the importance of The Thin Blue Line as a cultural and social phenomenon is impossible without learning about its historical context. The movie raised fundamental questions about the death penalty just around the time when the issue became urgent. In the first half of the 1970s, capital punishment was suspended by the Supreme Court (Scherdin, 2016). However, shortly after Woods’ murder in 1976, the death penalty was resumed, and the number of executions started growing nationwide. If the year 1981 was marked by only one execution, in 1987, 25 people were put to death (Scherdin, 2016). The tendency continued to be on the rise throughout the 1980s and 1990s and declined by the 2000s when several states abolished the death penalty.
The Thin Blue Line helped the opposition that has become especially outspoken during the rise of the death penalty. The movie has left the realm of art and went political, starting a trend of the courtroom documentary. What is important is that The Thin Blue Line not only raised awareness about the faults of capital punishment but also indirectly led to the exoneration of more innocent people held hostage by the system. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have admitted that The Thin Blue Line served as an inspiration for their Paradise Lost trilogy (Musser, 2015). Eventually, the trilogy helped to free one of the West Memphis Three who were on death row at the time.
A few years after The Thin Blue Line was launched, the criminal justice system started using DNA evidence that revealed that many more people were unfairly convicted of crimes they did not commit. Those incidents served as a further proof of the faultiness of the system. The death penalty in The Thin Blue Line makes the viewer wonder whether the existence of this phenomenon can be ever morally and practically justified. Morris himself approaches the subject from the feasibility standpoint: he argues that capital punishment does not merely allow for fatal mistakes, it enables them. Adams’ case is a perfect example how the possibility to send a person to death row created a dangerous mindset in legal workers. For this reason, they unanimously decided that he was guilty despite the conflicting evidence.
The Theme of Power
Lastly, with The Thin Blue Line, Morris starts a conversation about power and powerlessness. The horror that Adams had to live through is hard to imagine: he was a young man swallowed and damaged by the system that had him completely at its mercy. Here the power dynamic is exhaustively straightforward: Adams was defenseless and alone in that terrifying situation. The Thin Blue Line acknowledges this abuse of power but also reverses the dynamic. By inviting and interviewing actual legal workers, Morris made them vulnerable and exposed to the public opinion. If previously, the public sentiment would revolve around the suspect, now people who often work behind the scenes occupied the central stage.
One of them was Doug Mulder, the prosecutor who used the phrase “the thin blue line” when he was making his closing argument in court. Mulder stated that the thin blue line represents the police that separates society from dangerous individuals. The thin blue line holds back the chaos and prevents the entire structure from crumbling down and turning into anarchy. Yet, given the contents of the documentary, the viewer might sense a certain ambiguity. In actuality, the “thin blue line” did not protect Adams from injustice and many years wasted in a maximum-security prison. For the main character, the said line has become a separation between his life as a free man and his life as a convicted criminal. Upon further reflection, one may realize that the justice system has enough leverage to turn its privileges against people and defeat its main purpose – their protection.
Interestingly enough, the phrase itself was not authored by the prosecutor: it comes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Tommy Atkins.” In this piece, the poet and the writer refer to British soldiers as the “thin red line” due to the color of their uniform and their formation. “Tommy Atkins” addresses the lives of soldiers in a sympathetic manner: it acknowledges that they are often misunderstood (Kipling, 2015). However, Rudyard Kipling never picks one side in the argument: he concludes that soldiers are neither heroes or villains. In reality, military and law enforcement structures consist of ordinary people.
The situation described by Kipling in which individuals working in law enforcement get a bad reputation is still relevant today. In the case of Adams, it is possible that not a single person who influenced the initial court decision was a psychopathic, evil mastermind. The court ruling that took away twelve years of Adams’ life and almost killed the innocent man was made by ordinary people. Some of them were pursuing convenience; others were following what others have said, probably due to the fear of being judged for straying away. In line with what Kipling wrote, legal workers were neither monsters or angels: they were ordinary people capable of making mistakes.
Yet, even one can admit and accept the fallibility of an average person, it does not mean that mistakes should go unnoticed or that the issue can be swept under the rug. The question arises as to what could be made in Adams’ case to make sure that justice prevails. Morris’ documentary is especially thought provoking because it does not let the viewer enjoy a happy ending that one might have expected from an action movie with a similar storyline. It is true that exoneration was the best case scenario for Adams. Yet, no one can make up for the twelve years that he has spent in prison. What is even worse, the man did not receive any reparations from the state upon his release from prison. Besides, after exoneration, Adams started a legal feud with Morris on the subject of exploitation. He felt that the producer was not entitled to his story, and given that Adams planned to become an activist, he needed the full freedom to share his experiences. Taking these facts into account, it is only natural to wonder whether justice is ever achievable.
Conclusion
In today’s post-truth world, many viewers feel at sea about what resources they should trust if they want to stay critical and on top of the most relevant events. Documentaries offer an in-depth and informative source that is not only educational but also creates a platform for starting a dialogue about important issues. The Thin Blue Line is a 1988 documentary film about Randall Dave Adams, an American who was convicted and sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. As a result, he spent 12 years on death row before he was finally exculpated and set free. The movie’s producer, Errol Morris approaches the themes of truth, death penalty, power, and justice with artistry and consideration. In The Thin Blue Line, Morris uses the novel methods of revealing the truth, constructing a thought-provoking narrative. He advocates for the abolishment of the death penalty, proving its ability to engender mistakes. Lastly, Morris demonstrates the twisted power dynamic where a single person can end up defenseless against a biased system.
References
Kipling, R. (2015). Stories and poems. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Morris, E. (Director). (1978). Gates of heaven [Video file].
Morris, E. (Director). (1988). The thin blue line [Video file].
Morris, E. (Director). (1981). Vernon, Florida [Video file].
Musser, C. (2015). The Thin Blue Line: A radical classic. Web.
Scherdin, L. (2016). Capital punishment: A hazard to a sustainable criminal justice system? Abingdon, UK: Routledge.