Werner Herzog (2011)
It’s hardly a modest title and Werner Herzog’s attitude to his subject verges on the Olympian. Michael Perry and his friend Jason Burkett were accused of the murder of three people in Conroe, Texas in 2001 – Sandra Stotler, her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson. They were tried separately: Perry, who confessed to but then denied the crimes (claiming his confession was coerced by the police), received a death sentence for the killing of Sandra Stotler. Burkett, who pleaded guilty to the murders of Adam Stotler and Richardson, was given life imprisonment. In an early exchange with Perry in his cell on Death Row, Herzog informs him: ‘I think you’ve been dealt a bad hand. I don’t have to like you to conduct this interview. But I respect you as a human being – I don’t think the state has the right to take your life’. (Or words to that effect.) Herzog’s tendentious, strong-arming interviewing style is in evidence from this documentary’s opening sequence, in which he talks with the Reverend Richard Lopez, the chaplain who’ll officiate at Perry’s execution and who clearly takes his responsibilities conscientiously and feelingly. ‘Why does God allow capital punishment?’ demands Herzog. Lopez, his voice breaking, says he doesn’t know but that he believes in a God who is just and good. He might well have said the same if the question had been why does God let individuals, rather than the state, carry out murder but his lack of an easy, confident answer seems meant to confirm the case against capital punishment – this before Into the Abyss is five minutes old.
Herzog has been quoted as saying that, although he opposes capital punishment, ‘this is not an issue film; it’s not an activist film against capital punishment … it has an issue, but it’s not the main purpose of the film’. The closing dedication – to members of the Stotler and Richardson families and to the families of murder victims generally – might seem to confirm that yet the dedication comes across as little more than an official confirmation of Herzog’s high-mindedness. The heavily accented English doesn’t help. Herzog’s form of questioning is at worst almost a parody of a vee-have-vays-of-making-you-talk German interrogator. (And we never see his face so the effect the voice is unmodified.) At best, he’s like a stern professor who demands a reasoned articulacy from his students as a means of justifying their opinions. Yet nearly every one of the people in the film is a compelling witness. By the end of Into the Abyss, you have to admit that Herzog has either made brilliant choices and the interviewees are impressive in spite of him; or that there’s more to his interviewing technique than meets the ear and he really does bring people out.
Herzog is right to imply that Michael Perry is a dislikeable personality. It’s not just that he continues to deny the crime that put him on Death Row (he claims Burkett killed all three people although there’s no support for this in what anyone else says). Perry’s professed Christian convictions give him an almost smug sense of martyrdom and he’s not expressive enough to suggest that this is a facade and he’s scared inside. (The interviews with Perry were filmed just a few days before his execution on 1 July 2010.) Perry is so unappealing that Herzog might almost be using him to test a liberal audience’s aversion to capital punishment but his effect on me was rather different. Sandra Stotler was the first victim in the Conroe killings; the two young men came later. To that extent, Perry was the prime mover in the destruction of lives that this film describes, including the lives of survivors, yet he becomes almost a minor character – in the sense that he’s less remarkable than the other interviewees and the feelings he stirs up are less complicated. What’s depressing about Into the Abyss is the overwhelming impression you get of existences so variously blasted that ending these too might almost seem a mercy: Lisa Stotler Balloun, whose mother and brother were killed by Perry and Burkett (and who suffered a terrible sequence of family bereavements even before the Conroe murders); Jeremy Richardson’s brother Charles; Jason Burkett’s father, who’s also in jail for life and talks painfully of the shame he feels about setting a lousy example to Jason.
The chaplain Richard Lopez isn’t the only memorable Death Row ‘official’ to feature in Into the Abyss. Towards the end of the film, Herzog interviews Captain Fred Allen, who oversaw executions in Huntsville (some forty miles from the prison in which those awaiting the death penalty are held, and where all Texas executions are carried out). Allen supervised some 120 executions. His attitude towards his job changed the first time he executed a woman. He left the service (and lost his pension as a result). Allen talks vividly about how he’s now ‘living my dash’ – the ‘dash’ being the mark between the two dates on a gravestone. The implication is that his years in Huntsville were wasted ones because he was carrying out work that was morally indefensible. Although Herzog may want us to see Allen as, in the director’s terms, simply a reformed character, he’s impressively complex. The ‘tale of life’ in this film is extraordinary too. Melyssa Thompson wrote letters to Jason Burkett and fell in love with him. They’re now married and, with careful encouragement by Herzog to say more, Melyssa claims to be carrying Burkett’s child. (The suggestion is that she was artifically inseminated after Burkett’s sperm had been smuggled out of the prison.) The vivid Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who looks like Juliette Binoche, tells us that she thinks her husband is innocent (her theory is presumably that Perry did the lot) but, for the most part, she’s bright and aware. She makes clear that she knows about, and what she thinks of, celebrity prisoner groupiedom before Herzog reminds her that Jason Burkett is ‘not an ugly man’.
The interviews with Melyssa are a main feature of the last of the four chapters of Into the Abyss and Herzog entitles it, rather cheesily, ‘A Glimmer of Hope’. The preceding chapter titles aren’t anything to write home about either – ‘The Crime’, ‘The Dark Side of Conroe’, ‘Time and Emptiness’. Perry and Burkett shot Sandra Stotler in order to steal her red Chevrolet Camaro. After disposing of her body in a different vehicle, they wanted the car again. They lured Adam Stotler and Jeremy Richardson into nearby woods and shot them because they needed the access key to re-enter the gated Stotler home. Herzog gives an odd emphasis to this shocking fact. Questioning one of the policemen on the murder investigation about it, he says, ‘So two boys died simply because a gate was locked?’ – as if the fundamental problem here was installing a domestic security system rather than homicidal violence. All in all, though, Into the Abyss is an imposing film – even if Herzog never gets into what’s surely one of the worst aspects of the capital punishment system in America: the years that people spend on Death Row and the consequent impossibility of closure for the people bereaved by their crimes. This must be the worst of both worlds for the condemned man (or woman), their families and the families of victims. (There was a relatively very short interval – a few weeks – between the end of a capital trial and the date of execution when the death penalty was still in force in Britain.)
Postscript
Herzog shot a good deal more than interviews with Perry and Burkett and those linked to their crimes. Over the last three weeks, Channel 4 has screened Death Row, his ‘portraits’ of condemned men. Hank Skinner and the twosome George Rivas and Joseph Garcia, the subjects of the first and third films respectively, are in the same Texas prison where Herzog met Michael Perry. James Barnes, the subject of the second film, is awaiting execution in Florida. I missed the Skinner film but, once I knew I was going to see Into the Abyss, I recorded the other two and watched them today. Each of the documentaries begins with statistics from Herzog: thirty-four US states still have capital punishment; the form of death is now in every case ‘legal injection’ (until recently, Utah uniquely still allowed death by firing squad). The films include the same opening shots from Into the Abyss of the gurney on which the prisoner will eventually be strapped for injection, of a counter on which Bibles in different languages are set out. Mark DeGli Antoni’s sinister but melancholy score is again in evidence. Herzog explains that ‘as a German, coming from a different historical tradition’, he opposes the death penalty. This isn’t the best choice of words: Herzog was born in Munich during the Nazi regime.
The film about James Barnes is in some ways the polar opposite of Into the Abyss. Barnes, who is still alive, is a complex and dominant presence in the film. He received a life sentence for the murder of his wife. Several years into his sentence, he converted to Islam and decided to admit to an earlier – and particularly appalling – murder of a woman. In one of his interviews with Herzog, Barnes talks cryptically about other crimes and says that he’s thought a lot about confessing to these immediately before he dies. Then he writes Herzog a letter, indicating that he’s prepared to say more about them now, which he duly does. Herzog is pretty sure he’s being exploited – that Barnes is hoping that investigation of these other crimes will provide a stay of execution. This involvement of the sternly objective Herzog is powerful in itself but Barnes’s intelligence has already made their conversations more gripping than those between Herzog and Perry. Barnes not only expresses himself clearly but is very thoughtful. When Herzog interrupts (as is his wont) to say, ‘You mean …’, Barnes more than once takes his time to explain what he really does mean. Barnes’s twin sister Jeannice is an affecting witness. When she gets out a photograph of them as young children, with their three siblings, it’s desperately sad; when she turns to a later photograph, also including the children’s parents, and explains what their father did to the young James when he misbehaved, your sense of James Barnes as a victim becomes so strong that it complicates your condemnation of what he grew up to do to others. It’s hard to describe the confusion of emotions in Barnes’s eyes when Herzog tells him that his crew have made contact with his long- estranged father – who has asked Herzog to pass on the message that ‘He loves you and hates the crimes you’ve committed’.
As with Perry, Herzog tells Barnes at the outset that he doesn’t need to like him. He doesn’t do that in the last Death Row film with either Joseph Garcia or George Rivas, both of whom have been sentenced to death for the killing of a Texas policeman during a robbery that went wrong, on Christmas Eve 2000, two weeks after they and the five other members of the ‘Texas Seven’ escaped from custody in the John B Connally Unit. This jail break was thoroughly masterminded by Rivas, who was serving successive life sentences for (lone) armed robberies which didn’t result in homicide. Garcia was doing life for the murder of another man. While Rivas and others in the gang fired the shots that killed the policeman, it seems likely that Garcia did not; yet all six surviving members of the Seven were sentenced to death (the other man, Larry Harper, shot himself in a stand-off with the police before he could be arrested). Herzog seems sympathetic towards Garcia, not only because of his lesser involvement in this death but because of the circumstances which led to the murder of which he’d previously been convicted. As he asks Garcia to explain what happened to bring about this earlier killing, Herzog implies it stemmed from a minor incident that ‘could have happened to anyone’. Once you hear Garcia’s account, you may think this is pushing it. Herzog’s view of him as an unambiguous victim of the Texas legal system may be coloured by how uninteresting and helpless a character Garcia now seems to be. That’s certainly not the case with George Rivas, who has a self-possession and a half-smiling professional pride about his career as an armed robber and as the intelligence behind the successful prison break.
The four interviewees in this last film are the two men awaiting execution and the prosecution and defence attorneys at Garcia’s original murder trial. The greater concentration on the details of the crimes and the absence of any backstory or relatives – either of the murderers or of their victims – combine to give the piece a smaller field of vision and a thinner texture than Into the Abyss or the portrait of James Barnes. But, as with Barnes, it’s the way that a condemned man starts getting to Werner Herzog that takes the film in a new and fascinating direction. From what he says early on here, Herzog started talking with Garcia after his interviews with Perry – I assume the exchanges with Rivas therefore came later still. By the end of his conversations with Rivas, you feel that Herzog – who seemed to be urging greater articulacy from witnesses in Into the Abyss – has become angrily aware of how inappropriate and offensive it can be. He keeps his temper but his antipathy towards the measured responses of George Rivas is palpable. Garcia is still awaiting execution. Rivas was lethally injected on 29 February 2012.
3 April 2012
