Saw Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's look at capital punishment. The film revolves around a central crime where two boys murdered a woman for her car and then her son and his friend. One of the boys got 40 years in prison where he lives a strange sort of half-life. He gets married, for example, but has never hugged his wife. The other boy gets death row and when he is interviewed he is days away from execution. Consumed by his imminent demise, he is utterly uninterested in introspection or repeating the crime once more. So, without this central object for the documentary, Hetzog goes wider, interviewing the woman-victims' only surviving relative, probing her about what the boy's death will mean (and later on in the film) had meant to her. He interviews a state executioner who had killed hundreds of people, by his own admission. He recounts a sort of emotional breakdown he underwent when one of the death-row inmates thanked him for his service.
The film is troubling and interesting, full of little glimpses into lives. One of the people who are interviewed has two tear-drops tattooed by his left eye. He is interviewed in a playground and speaks movingly about the wasted life of his brother and of his own life which is being wasted. One man recounts his friendship with one of the boys (this friendship ended up in several fights to near-death, btw) spits constantly with a sound like a fist hitting a thick book. Herzog is showing us ugly people, but people indeed, Herzog seems to say, as deserving of life as anyone else. Later, Herzog shows us the car which was the motive for the murders. It sits mouldering in a police evidence lot, falling apart next to other cars which are bullet-riddled, torched, or otherwise destroyed. Each of these cars represents a story as rich and as fraught as this one.
The film has the feel of a This American Life episode only even more wandering and discursive. The central crime is told in a rapid, confusing manner, leaving only young criminals and grieving women talking about death. Their interviews have an isolated feel, not illuminating the central crime as I had expected, but illuminating the more general reaction of humans to death. Specifically, to deaths which have been planned out in advance, in cold blood.
I don't really know all that much about Mr Herzog, but from what I hear of his philosophy this sounds like par for the course. I get the impression that Herzog sees life as horrifyingly meaningless, which explains his lack of interest in creating a comfortingly structured narrative here. Maybe I should actually watch some of his movies sometime.
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