errol morris: the thinking man's detective | arts & culture | smithsonian magazine

8/13/2019 Errol Morris: The Thinking Man's Detective | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

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Errol Morris: The Thinking Man's

DetectiveThe documentary filmmaker has become America's most surprising and

provocative public intellectual

By Ron Rosenbaum

Smithsonianmagazine, March 2012,

My favorite private-eye trick is the one I learned about from Errol Morris.

You probably know Morris as an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. Roger Ebert called his first film, Gates of Heaven, one of

the ten greatest films ever made. With The Thin Blue Line, Morris dramatically freed an innocent man imprisoned on a murder ra

In The Fog of Warhe extracted a confession from Robert McNamara, getting the tightly buttoned-up technocrat to admit [we] we

behaving as war criminals for planning the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which burned to death 100,000 civilians in a single night.

You may also know that Morris is the author of the recent massive, fascinating book calledBelieving Is Seeing: Observations on th

Mysteries of Photography, which won rave reviews for the way it looks not just into the frame of a photo but behind, beneath itth

way truth is framed in every sense of the word.

You may even think, as I do, that Morris has become one of Americas most idiosyncratic, prolific and provocative public intellectua

But whats less well known about Morris is that he brings to his work the invaluable experience he picked up working as a private eAnd hehasnt given up the private-eye impulse: Hes back on the case, two cases actuallytwo of the most electrifying and

controversial cases in the past half century.

Born in suburban Long Island, Morris graduated from the University of Wisconsin. After a stint of cello study in France, he talked h

way into the Princeton graduate philosophy seminar of Thomas Kuhn, an icon of postmodernism, the man who coined the term

paradigm shift. It wasnt exactly a meeting of the minds. In fact, it almost cracked Morris skull, which is what Kuhn seemed to be

aiming to do at the climax of an argument when the esteemed philosopher threw an ashtray at Morris head.

The Ashtray, Morris five-part, 20,000-word account of that episode and their philosophical clashover the nature of truth, is a go

introduction to the unique kind of writing hes doing now. (Dont miss the section on the obscure Greek philosopher of irrationalism

Hippasus of Metapontum, a digression worthy of Jorge Luis Borges.)

After the ashtray incident, Morris eventually did two stints as a private eye. If there is one subtext to all of Morris subsequent films

and writings, it is the private eyes creed, the anti-postmodernist belief that the truth is out there. Truth may be elusive, it may eve

be unknowable, but that doesnt mean, as postmodernists aver, that reality is just a matter of subjective perspectives, that one way

seeing things is just as good as another.

Im amazed, Morris said when we spoke recently, that you still see this nonsense all over the place, that truth is relative, that trut

subjective. People still cling to it. He calls these ideas repulsive, repugnant. And whats the other word? False.
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But I digress (something impossible to avoid in writing about Errol Morris). I wanted to tell you about his private-eye trick, which h

learned from a hard-bitten partner.

It wasnt a blackjack-, brass knuckles-type thing. It went like this, Morris explained. Hed knock on a door, sometimes of someon

not even connected to the case they were investigating. Hed flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, I guess we dont have to t

you why were here.

And more often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, How did you find out? And then disgorges some shameful crimina

secret no one would ever have known about otherwise.

I have a feeling about why Morris likes this. Theres the obvious lessoneverybodys got something to hideand then theres the

subtle finesse of the question: I guess we dont have to tell you... No water-boarding needed, just an opening for the primal force o

conscience, the telltale hearts internal monologue. Its one of those mysteries of human nature that private eyes know and Morris h

made his mtier.

For three decades Morris has painstakingly produced brilliant documentaries on subjects ranging from pet cemeteries (Gates of

Heaven) to jailed innocents (The Thin Blue Line) to lion tamers (Fast, Cheap and Out of Control) to cosmologist Stephen Hawking

Brief History of Time) to Holocaust deniers (Mr. Death), Vietnam War architects (Fog of War) and Abu Ghraibs bad apples

(Standard Operating Procedure). And more recently, in 2010, a long-forgotten, insane tabloid war over the manacled Mormon s

scandal in Britain. This film, Tabloid, is a strange, delicious documentary that uncannily anticipated the current tabloid scandal theAnd (like Gates of Heaven) Tabloid is really an investigation into the nature of perhaps the ultimate mystery: love.

He hasnt stopped making films; indeed, hes making one now with Ira Glass of This American Life dealing with cryogenics, of all

things. But films take time, so in the past five years, Morris has turned to writing, developing a unique new genre that combines

philosophical investigation with documentary transcripts and inventive graphics.

It began with a three-part, 25,000-wordNew York Timesseries on the question of the arrangement of some rocks in the road in tw

150-year-old photographs taken during the Crimean War. (The rocks were actually cannonballs; they just looked like rocks in the

photos.) I know: Youre running for the exits. Twenty-five thousand words on some rocks on a road?! But believe me, it becomes an

absorbing intellectual adventure story.

I suppose I should disclose that I make a brief appearance in what became the first paragraph of the first chapter of the book,

Believing Is Seeing. Wherein I ask Morris incredulously, You mean to tell me that you went all the way to the Crimea because of on

sentence written by Susan Sontag?

To which he replied: No, it was actually two sentences.

Sontag had implied that the rocks in one of the photographs had been posed, and this lit a fire under Morris, who believes that

everything in photography is posed in one way or another, not merely by whats put in the frame, but by whats left out.

To illustrate the near-impossibility of establishing veracity in photography he engaged in what might seem like a mad, hopeless

enterprise: to see whether the cannonballs were initially onthe road orplacedthereposed for ideological impact. An investigation

that involved him going halfway around the world to the Crimea to find the road and subsequently interviewing shadow experts o

the time of day each photograph might have been shot.

As one commenter wrote:

Dont miss the excursus on the use of albatross eggs to provide the albumen for photo emulsions in early film developing. Or the

meditation on DescartesMeditations. Or the succinct and devastating deconstruction of deconstructionists dim witted view of tru

(just because we cant necessarily know it, they rashly conclude it doesnt exist). This leads to his critique of the correlative misread


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of the filmRashomon[its not an all points of view are equally valid manifesto] and his desire, expressed in a footnote, for a

RashomonaboutRashomon.

OK, that was me, writing back in 2007 when the series first appeared.

One of Morris advantages in his investigations is his disarming personal style. Hes a friendly, genial-looking, unpretentious guy, w

reminds me of the old Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Alec Guinness amazing, offhandedly profound portrait of the disarmingly

unassuming, apparently empathetic George Smiley. And it occurred to me that in his own way, Morris is ourSmiley. Robert

McNamara, for instance, thought Morris understood him. And he didjust not the way McNamara understoodhimself.

But as wily as Morris is, I was worried when he told me about his latest obsession: the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. Oh my God

no, was my measured reaction, Not that!

For the past four decades the MacDonald affair has been a toxic swamp that has drawn in some of journalisms best and brightest

writers.

Yes, that, Morris replied, telling me that MacDonald is the subject of his next book, titledA Wilderness of Error. In fact, he said, t

book is the culmination of 20 years of fascination with the case, going back to a time in the early 90s when Morris and his wife visi

wig shops in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to investigate the wig-fiber evidence at the MacDonald crime scene. He is not a MacDona

partisan in that he doesnt necessarily believe prosecutorial errors are proof of innocence, rather evidence of uncertainty.

If Errol Morris is that excited about the MacDonald case, its a sign we cant say Case closed.

It is, youll remember, one of the past half centurys most controversial murder mysteries. The central question remains in dispute:

MacDonald an innocent man wrongly convicted of murder or is he the ultimate con man?

It began in 1970 and soon became a national scandal widely known as the Green Beret murder case. MacDonald, then a Green Ber

doctor with an unblemished record, was accused of murdering his wife and two young daughters in his home at Fort Bragg, a key

Green Beret base. MacDonald blamed the crime instead on a band of hippiesincluding a woman in a floppy hat and blond wig

whom he claimed he unsuccessfully fought off as they invaded his home chanting, Kill the pigs!...Acid is groovy!

From the beginning the case was fraught with cultural implications. Who was guilty: a Green Beret or Manson-like hippies? After

being exonerated at an Army hearing, MacDonald was convicted by civilian prosecutors and given a life sentence that hes still serv

while spending every waking moment proclaiming his innocence.

Youve probably heard of how two big-name journalists got involved in tormented relationships with MacDonald, then in fractious

relationships with each other. First Joe McGinniss (of recent Sarah Palin biography fame), who seemed to intimate to MacDonald t

he believed in his innocence but then came out with a book (Fatal Vision) that sought to nail him. MacDonald sued McGinniss for

breach of trust.

Then theNew Yorkers Janet Malcolm produced a book,The Journalist and the Murderer, which accused McGinniss of treachery a

became a huge media-ethics kerfuffle because of Malcolms dramatic opening sentence, which still echoes in the dusty classrooms o

schools throughout America: Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that wha

he does is morally indefensible.

I had thought the case was finally dead.

Its not dead! Morris exclaimed, Hes got another appeal coming up (most likely in April).

On what? I asked, unable to believe there could possibly be a scintilla of evidence or testimony that hasnt been combed over in th

past 40 years.


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Two pieces of new evidence, Morris replied. One involves this federal marshal, James Britt, who was with Stoeckley [Helena

Stoeckley, supposedly the woman in a floppy hat and blond wig] and who says that he heard the prosecutors threaten Stoeckley wh

Stoeckley said that she was going to insist that she had been present in the house that night. (Stoeckley herself is now dead.)

The other piece is the DNA evidence of an unsourced hair [untraceable to MacDonald or anyone else in the family] under the

fingernail of one of the murdered children.

Which means...the possible presence of another person at the scene of the crime.

Morris claims he has uncovered more Helena Stoeckley evidence on his own.

There are too many coincidences, Morris says. For instance, it just so happens that the first officer, the officer who heard

[MacDonalds] statement [about the woman in the floppy hat], noticed on his way to the crime scene a woman who answered to tha

description standing in the rain and fog at 3 in the morning. He couldnt stop because he was answering an emergency call, but the

minute he heard the description, he made the connection.

Are you saying that MacDonald could be as innocent as Randall Adams in The Thin Blue Line?

I think so much of the evidence has been lost, Morris said wistfully. Lost too, perhaps, is any hope of certainty.

This is one of Morris greatest strengths, what Keats called negative capability: the ability to hold conflicting perspectives in the m

without irritable reaching after certainty. (So many conspiracy theorists just cant bear the irritation of living with uncertainty.)

Any entanglement with the Jeffrey MacDonald case is risky, if you ask me, but Morris is not afraid of risk. As if to prove it, Morris t

me hes considering plunging into the most dangerous labyrinth of them allthe Kennedy assassination. Abandon all hope ye who

enter there.

Last November 22, theNew York Timesposted a six-minute mini-documentary Morris carved out of a six-hour interview with Josi

Tink Thompson, the author ofSix Seconds in Dallas.

Another remarkable coincidence: Thompson was my philosophy professor at Yale, a specialist in the works of Soren Kierkegaard, t

gloomy Danish proto-existentialist best known for the leap of faith notionthe idea that to believe in God one must abandon the

scaffolding of reason for the realm of the irrational, even the absurd. The Lonely Labyrinth, Thompsons book on Kierkegaard, is st

widely admired.

At the same time he was leading students through the labyrinth of Kants Critique of Pure Reason, Thompson worked as a consulta

forLifemagazine on the JFK case and wrote his influential book on the ballistics evidence in Kennedys assassinationan attempt

prove through pure reason (and science) that the Warren Commission was wrong. That Oswald could not have fired the number of

shots attributed to him in six seconds from his antiquated Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Which meant there had to have been at least on

more gunman. (Others have since claimed to have disproved Thompsons contention.)More coincidences: Thompson eventually quit his promising academic career to becomeyesa private detective working with DaFechheimer, a legendary investigator who had also employed...Errol Morris.

After reading a story Id written that discussed Thompsons arguments, Morris called him and arranged an interview. He drove fro

Northern California to Florida, where I filmed him, recalls Morris. I wondered why [he drove] because we offered to fly him in. So

Im interviewing him. He gets up. He walks off. He comes back. And he has a Mannlicher-Carcano, just like the one Oswald used.

Thats why he didnt fly?

Exactly. He wanted to demonstrate for me the enormous difficulty of firing those shots in rapid succession.


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My feeling is that the real JFK mystery is what was going on inside Oswalds head, not inside the chambers of the Mannlicher-

Carcano. Why was he doing it? What was his motive? Were others involved, even if they didnt fire a shot?

But if anyone can solve it...

I have a fantasy that someday Errol Morris is going to show up at the door of some old guy no one has connected to the Kennedy

assassination before and say, I guess we dont have to tell you why were here.

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