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In 188 Errol Morris released the Thin Blue Line, a provocative documentary that indirectly pushes the audience to question the relationship that exists between objectivity and justice in the face of an overtly bureaucratic and biased legal system. Morris orchestrates an overarching film that explores the innocence of one falsely convicted murder suspect, Randall Adams, without ever directly commenting on his guilt or innocence (remarkably the film avoids voice-over narration completely). The film takes bold and innovative steps in the territory of re-enactment and staging, venturing beyond the confines of traditional documentary into a story-cum-dreamscape. The result is a movie that was denied entry into the documentary category at the 188 Academy Awards, yet displayed a level of persuasiveness that eventually led to Randall Adams retrial and release from prison.
Although Errol Morris subterfuges a direct opinion about the case on screen, there is no doubt that he is representing Randall Adams side and a great deal of the movies power stems from the directors restraint to explicitly state the films judgement. It would be extraneous for Morris to openly authorize his objective; his film is carved, edited and manipulated into such a finely tuned argument, that the final conclusion stands strong, concise, and significantly fresh as is. The Thin Blue Line is a story that exposes the mistaken conviction of Randall Adams and substantially more; implied is the dissection and dissertation of the nature of objectivity in justice. The film is a medley of ambiguities, conflicting opinions, and surreal repetition that brings into question the subjectivity of truth. Morris is not only campaigning for Randall Adams, he is defending the role of justice that seems to exist within a faulty system of impartiality. The Thin Blue Line advocates Randalls innocence by going beyond the debatable facts of the case and into the poetics of persuasion. Morris does this with three abstract yet overall convincing techniques, which include the use of malleable re-enactment, an iconoclastic and unsettling manipulation of editing and sound, and thought provoking devices of the absurd.
The Thin Blue Line was originally set apart from its documentary predecessors because of the films use of dreamlike sequences that highlighted the ambiguity of memory. Interjected throughout the movie is the repeatedly staged murder scenario. However, each time the scene is played differences begin to emerge as each witness in the case supplies his or her own version of what happened the night of murder. In the spirit of Akira Kurasowas Roshomon, each character in the movie supplies different and often conflicting details that make any attempt at reconstruction essentially futile. The product comes off like a bad dream in which no matter how hard one strain for a solution, the outcome is always murder and mystery. The recurrence of the same scene contending for veridicality essentially nulls the audiences trust both in the witnesses telling the story and in Errol Morris who is directing the story.
In one of the films more poetic reenactments, Morris shoots a scene where the female police officer throws a pink colored milkshake out the window of the squad car in slow motion. Due to the intentionally prolonged shot of what seems to be a trivial part of the murder case, coupled with the strong visual presence that the pink fluid has against the black back drop, the scene resonates especially strong. Yet, almost directly ensuing the milkshake shot, Morris includes a drawn police diagram of the murder scene that clearly labels the milkshake the female officer had thrown was of a chocolate (not pink, which is presumably a berry flavor) variety. The incongruity of the flavor of a milkshake may appear to be inconsequential, but Morris is very intentional about such an inclusion. The film bombards the viewer with the ever-changing memory of the female officer, who cannot tell the difference between a Mercury Comet and Ford Vega. But Morris is careful to highlight that she is not the only character whose testimony cannot be trusted; one has to be suspicious even of the director. The reasoning for The Thin Blue Lines ambiguity is to highlight the subjectivity that is present in all documentaries. By calling attention to this inherent characteristic the viewer must assume a responsibility for his or her own conclusions about the movie and not just accept that of the filmmakers, which in the end makes the viewer hold a much stronger stance on the issue being presented.
Errol Morris has obviously taken painstaking exactitude in arranging and ordering his scenes, but he draws specific attention to the decorative aspects of editing and sound in order create a jarring and haunting atmosphere within his film. His use of abstract stills and a positively hallucinogenic original score by Phillip Glass renders an impending and drastic significance to the films subject. No matter how cold and concise the murder may appear, Morris does not want the documentary itself to be clinical in its observation of the crime.
The enlarged newspaper pictures of a wild-eyed Randall Adams that appear numerous times throughout the film capture a sense of the horrific. The pixilated images draw attention to the medium of newspaper replication, which attempts to highlight the notion of murder not as a crime but as a spectacle. The audience must question the fascination culture has with the iconoclastic celebration of murderers. Because Randall Adams is caught on camera with a feral intensity, distilled through the eyes of a newspaper, he is viewed as murderous without having been proven guilty of murder. The viewer must challenge these postmodern notions that have been socially instilled and search for the objective; The Thin Blue Line asserts this is a task that the judicial system is not capable of.
This sense of a Kafka-like conundrum is highlighted by the foreboding music of Phillip Glass, which runs for almost the entire length of the movie. The premonitory atmosphere Glasss music creates could be described as a post-apocalyptic sound, a distinctively minimalist compositional style, consisting of hypnotically repetitious circular rhythms. There is urgency in Morris use of image and sound that compels the viewer to dispute the self-evident facts that are presented in media and particularly in the judicial system as a whole. The minimal yet dramatic music overlaid with the non-contextual images of Randall Adams consistently attempts to suggest that even though a direct solution is not available, the viewer needs to be at least aware of the grave injustice that is being done to Randall Adams and to the cultures unquestioning sense of security in law.
In the techniques that Morris uses there begins to develop a pattern where he draws his audience to question and make assumptions about Randall Adams through consistently making them reposition themselves in the film. He does this quite perceptively with the use of interspersed scenes of what can be termed as the absurd. By drawing out interviews into illogical digressions and splicing them with old stock footage of black & white cinema, Morris is methodically drawing the viewer away from the crime only to lead the viewer back in order to highlight the importance that this is in fact a movie about murder.
The scene in which Emily Miller, who herself is quite an eccentric character, describes her fascination with the Boston Blackie mysteries and how they trained her to have a keen eye for the suspicious is rather bizarre. Juxtaposed with the solemnity that the police and lawyer interviews had, Millers comments are based in fantasy and they are not a part of a logical assessment of the crime committed. Augmented with the fact that Morris cuts in frantic clips of the Boston Blackie show itself (impeccably companioned with the surreal music of Glass), there is a distinct displacement in the films tone and course of events. This serves the purpose of continually making the viewer readjust back to the films main subject, which intrinsically also demands a reassessment on the presented murder case; similar to remembering one's place in a book after a brief interruption.
Another example of anomalous scene selection is Morris extended shot of a drive-in movie theater (Beer-drinking movies according to Adams) showing the soft-core pornography film Swinging Cheerleaders. Morris did not simply show a shot of a drive-in or have Adams state the nature and name of the feature, he selects an almost two minute long passage from the movie (including a sex scene) being screened from the back of the theater. By showing a movie being watched within a movie he utilizing a reflexive device that reminds the viewer they themselves are watching and assessing The Thin Blue Line. These individual selections that seem to be irrelevant to the films topic serve as a synopsis of the absurdity of the film as a whole. In an almost existential platform, these tangential scenes represent the illogicality of a justice system that appears to be prosecuting Randall Adams in light of all the contradicting evidence that he did not commit the crime.
The Thin Blue Line is not a movie that espouses a heros plight to absolve himself from tyrannical persecution. This is not the story of an African American being arrested for the color of skin, or Jew being imprisoned for religious beliefs. It is the story of a character that the viewer is not expected to relate with; Randall Adams is a drifter and drug-user that questionably was in the wrong place at the wrong time. While Morris goes at length to show the impossibility of objectivity in a judicial system run by a mass of individuals all with different agendas, he is careful not to abandon the film in pure nihilism. The final scene, arguably the most disturbing, is a mechanical cold tape recorder playing David Harris confession to the murder. The only part in the movie to use subtitles, Harris remorselessly, in a distorted filtered voice, explains that the wrong man is in prison for murder. The use of written subtext and the image of a tape recorder (which suggests a type of rigidity, a statement that can not be altered) signify the fact that despite the entire subjective narrative the truth is out there. The viewer, who most likely presumed Adams innocence before the actual confession without the explicit confirmation of Morris, is in the end rewarded with a concrete conclusion about the murder case.
By untraditionally eschewing narration and applying rhetorical, if not abstract, techniques usually reserved for fiction films, The Thin Blue Line powerfully represented Randall Adams innocence and exposed the flaws in the present judicial system. However, there is not a sense of vindication at the end of the film, David Harris is on death row for an entirely different murder and Adams is still in prison (ignoring the fact that he was later released, which for the direct implications of this film is irrelevant). Morris does not present solutions, but hints at the greater nature of the problem. There appears to be an underlying fallibility in mans ability to exact justice. What Morris is suspicious of, David Harris chillingly describes in his confession, If it werent for bad luck, [Randall Adams] wouldnt have any. The Thin Blue Line flitters with the notion that in the absence (and perhaps impossibility) of an impartial judicial system, perchance it is fate that determines ones lot.
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