Subject: Fred Leuchter, constructor of execution equipment
I don't know how Errol Morris finds these fascinating subjects, and I know even less about how he gets them to appear in his documentaries. The story of Fred Leuchter is a great study in epistemology - how what we know can very often mislead us if there's one key fact we're omitting. We can be even more misled if we are purporting to use rigor - our rigor may lead us right off a logical cliff.
I won't spoil what this documentary eventually turns into, but it's completely unbelievable. I wish I hadn't spoiled it for myself by looking at the Netflix movie jacket. A must-see for fans of Morris.
I love this one. Though I understand that Morris showed his first cut to a film class at Harvard, and all they wanted to talk about was what a bad case Leuchter was making against the gas chambers, and how they couldn't believe that Morris was airing these claims without refutation, as if he endorsed them. So the cut that we have includes stuff about how wrong Leuchter is (I'm thinking the interview with the guy who runs the lab was added at this point). A little bit of a shame, no?
ReplyDeleteI'm a sucker, though - I kinda needed that part. Obviously I know that the Holocaust happened and was horrible, but Leuchter is set up in the beginning as a kind of well-meaning, misunderstood guy. As he begins to explore deeper into this Holocaust 'mystery', I just got really confused. I think, as a viewer, I've been trained too well to trust what I'm being shown. Obviously the white supremacists come off as laughable and ridiculous, but Leuchter comes off more as a well-meaning dupe. My trust in him being well-meaning would erode by the end of the film even without the rebuttal, but I'd still be really confused if Morris made a documentary about a guy whose views he doesn't endorse or rebut. I think ultimately it would be distracting to not have a rebuttal. My sense before the reasoned rebuttal was that Leuchter, as a proponent of humane execution, couldn't really grasp that something like the Holocaust could happen.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny that Leuchter's wikipedia article also claims that he was basically a charlatan wrt execution equipment also.