Into the Abyss
Directed by Werner Herzog
2011
As a documentary title, Into the Abyss sounds like it should be about deep-sea diving rather than the death penalty; it emphasises the metaphysical issues around execution when the expectation is for the film to take a moral standpoint for or against. I didn’t like it when I first heard it, thinking it sounded a bit dramatic and ominous; obviously the expectation was for it to be against the death penalty (can you imagine how grim a documentary with an enthusiasm for it would be?), but you want a certain level of restraint or objectivity even if it’s just so you don't feel like a sheep for agreeing with it. Having seen the film, however, the title seems far more appropriate. This is a Werner Herzog documentary, after all, and the usual standards don’t apply.
When I wrote about Girl Model, I mentioned how documentaries need to perform a balancing act in presenting a coherent argument without being overly manipulative with the material. Here we see Herzog dodge around that problem, as he approaches his subject not as an investigator or an activist, but as an artist. We don’t see him once during the film, but he is a constant presence behind the camera. Very early on he states his own views against execution, but in the grand scheme of the film this serves as a perfunctory statement; more to get an inevitable question out of the way than establish any intent. Beyond that, the film is a series of interviews, crime scene videos, and environmental footage, split into six chapters, each addressing a different aspect of the death row experience. Herzog focuses on a single crime – an awful mess of stolen cars and pointless killing – which took place in October 2001, and the people involved as they are today: the two convicts, one on death row, one serving a life sentence; the police officers who investigated the crime; the victims’ families; people who know or knew the felons. Although care is taken to describe what happened the night of the crime with as much detail as is available, as an interviewer Herzog is less interested in facts and statistics than bringing out people’s reactions to the murder and the impending punishment. His questions, genially probing and direct, sometimes speculate or focus on odd details in an interviewee’s story, like the hands of a father and son touching in a police van, in a way that sounds like he’s figuring out how to portray it in a movie, but which also coaxes out new levels of emotion and introspection on behalf of the subject.
While the overall tone is critical of capital punishment, this is a very philosophical and open-ended work. In looking at a specific case instead of bombarding us with statistics and social commentary, Herzog has made an unpoliticised, artistic study of loss and waiting for death. In doing so he’s also made a powerful condemnation of a system in which nobody really benefits. No punches are pulled in portraying the criminals and the crimes they committed: their actions were cruel, stupid, and they were still attempting to offload as much blame possible onto the other even during the documentary. But the emotional, arbitrary (although touching) way in which one’s life was spared while the other condemned, and the blank fact that nothing will be achieved through murdering them in turn except for a vague sense of justice for some tragically damaged people, is far more articulate a criticism than any amount of arguing. This film works not through rhetoric but through the sadness of an irreversible mistake. Herzog has succeeded where the makers of Girl Model stumbled, and captured a sequence of events that represent far more than the sum of their parts.
Tom
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