1. But it happened. It happened.
—Randall Dale Adams
Texas in early winter, a bleak and remorseless season. A guy drifts into Dallas. He has bushy hair and a singsong voice and a curiously piercing way of speaking. He gets a job working construction and lives in a motel with his brother. Driving home, he runs out of gas. A stranger stops to give him a ride. He’s a 16-year-old runaway in a stolen car, and a sociopath. The two bum around the city. They drink, smoke some weed. Catch a double-feature at a drive-in. A cop gets killed that night.
A few weeks later, the guy gets arrested. Charged with the murder. Dallas County sets out against him—the whole prosecutorial apparatus. They are not just convinced of his guilt; his guilt is their truth. The bushy-haired drifter turns into a killer unburdened by conscience. Why’d he get picked up in the first place? Why, after so long? Why him and why then? Because of the runaway. The kid in the stolen car who stopped to help. The kid who smirks at existence—his own and everyone else’s—had gone home after the drifter told him he couldn’t stay at the motel. Gone home and gone on a crime spree and told everyone he’d killed the cop in Dallas. When he’s finally arrested, Dallas prosecutors urge him to give up on saying he killed the cop. It wasn’t you, was it. You’re just a kid. You wouldn’t do anything that awful, would you. No, it wasn’t me. I was just bragging to sound big. But I know who did do it. The guy you’re looking for is in a motel in Dallas. The guy who did it is Randall Adams.
2. Murder comes to seem moreover in its very essence accidental and without meaning.
—Fredric Jameson, The Detections of Totality
The setup of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) sounds like something hard-boiled. If Jim Thompson hadn’t been in end-stage alcoholism during the mid-70s, he might have written it. The film is awash in moods, and not good ones. There is an atmosphere of desperation around everything. The recession that began in 1973 and throttled the West was only beginning to wane. The Dallas skyline is slate gray and filled with pale blinking lights and always just about on the verge of full dark. Everyone in the film—the accused, the police, the attorneys, the witnesses— all seem stranded, lost in the wrong part of the Texas cosmos. These are prime conditions for the taking of life but not necessarily for explanations. Crime is often an outcome of desperation and desperation can sometimes be its own justification. Atomized and blind, people float about until they happen to collide. Sometimes collisions produce violence. The accused careen between bewilderment and disbelief. The glib and ponderous prosecutors smile and present their case and do not come across as parts of an organized system, but instead as lonely fanatics. The anomie that binds.
3. I said, ‘Thank God I don’t have to be a private detective anymore.’ I was wrong.
—Errol Morris, October 23, 1988
The Thin Blue Line (1988) is a documentary. Errol Morris, the famous documentarian, famously hates documentaries. He has railed vocally against stodginess, humorlessness, the zealous adherence to an empirically oriented belief system that is sometimes called nonfiction and sometimes truth. The truth, per Morris, is malleable, slippery, dangerous, possibly a myth. Just ask Randall Adams if there is a Single Abiding Truth (though it would need to be via séance: Adams died in 2010). The Thin Blue Line is not a newsreel. The action is not limited to the movements of mouths or the unobtrusive following of people. There are reenactments of the central murder—actors and narrative edits and sound and what have you. They morph and mutate as the story of the murder morphs and mutates. No voiceover, no onscreen text. Morris never identifies any one of his eighteen interviewees. Who each of them are is left to suggestion, or self-identification, or the word of somebody else. As well as dispensing with convention, this adds an air of uncertainty to identity itself. Who are these people? Who are these people?
Call it documentary noir. Detective stories, mysteries, policíers, crime tales, romans durs—the stuff that typically constitutes film noir—are all deeply interested in the gradual accumulation of facts. Understanding is revealed and revealed until its seekers either use it to save themselves or are crushed by it. The Thin Blue Line is a mystery story—but one that’s already done. Randall Adams was convicted of killing Officer Robert Wood and sentenced to death. David Harris, the teenage runaway who’d once picked him up, was on death row as well, for a different murder. People can’t stop getting killed.
4. It just can’t be.
—Judge Don Metcalfe
The Thin Blue Line came about after Morris went to Texas to make a documentary about James Grigson, a psychiatrist who prosecutors employed in the sentencing phase of murder trials. He weaponized expert opinion. He had a knack for testifying that if the convicted person were released, bloodbaths would follow—they called him Dr. Death. Grigson’s expert testimony got Randall Adams the death penalty and diverted the course of Morris’s project. (Morris would have to settle, a decade and a half later, merely for Mr. Death.)
It took Morris years to track down the assorted parties in Adams’s case. They all talked. When you find people, they often talk, to unburden themselves or because they simply can’t shut up. At times, Morris’s movie feels like being stuck in a very sad bar (Blood Simple, but everyone’s ravaged by isolation): losers who have stories and Lord help the first open ear they find. Except. Except that this is an investigation. We start at the end. Morris doesn’t have to build anything. In theory, all the facts have been accumulated. The pieces point down, not up. Since we already know what there is to know, a counter-mystery emerges.
How do we know what we know?
We start at the end. Begin where we are: in prison, on death row. Adams is condemned, waiting to die, and we’re going to go backwards, first to Grigson’s testimony, then to the trial, then to the police investigation, then back to Robert Wood’s killing, to those cold days after Adams and his brother got into Dallas. Morris is his own unseen and (save for one seismic scene) unheard detective. These losers and weirdos who can’t stop talking were the cast of Randall Adams’s trial. They’re the ones who provided these facts. (Randall Adams: “My mom had a good phrase… [S]he said if there was ever a hell on earth, it’s Dallas County. She’s right. She’s right.”) What they said to the police, to the jury, what went into the official record, what became evidence—a lot of those things get taken back in front of Morris’s camera. Retracted. Amended. Abjured. Remembered again. Differently than before.
5. What we all dread most… is a maze with no centre.
—GK Chesterton, The Head of Caesar
We are going to unravel a non-truth.
Late in the film, Dennis White, one of Adams’s attorneys says, “Prosecutors in Dallas have said for years, ‘any prosecutor can convict a guilty man: it takes a great prosecutor to convict an innocent man.’”
“It wasn’t very long until I realized that what he knew was the facts of the case and it matched perfectly with what we knew. And it had to be right.” That’s Gus Rose, a Dallas homicide detective, talking about David Harris. “Once David Harris had told his story, Randall Adams’ life was obliterated.” That’s Terrence Rafferty in his review of the film in the The New Yorker. An entire edifice of antilogic was built around Harris, the witness. Three more eyewitnesses materialized to corroborate his stories. It’s clear they are rank perjurers and generally disreputable people. If you say “three day running knife fight in their apartment” about someone, it’s possible this is a questionable individual. As bought voices, they haven’t had to adopt the state’s reality, that Adams was guilty. They aren’t true believers and they come across as hollow knuckleheads. In the film, that is—not to Adams’s jury. And that—to the state, to Dallas County—is what mattered. There were two clear, driving forces behind the desperate need to convict. One is that the killing of a police officer in Dallas County had never taken this long to crack. Optics are a harsh taskmaster. Two, a sixteen-year-old kid isn’t as impressive an offering as a drifter with bushy hair and a singsong voice. Even if the sixteen-year-old is a sociopath, he’s not old enough to be given the death penalty. What use is a sacrifice who sits in a cell?
“I can understand why the heroin addict needs heroin. But it’s very hard to understand why anybody has to kill a police officer,” Don Metcalfe says in the film. The judge in Adams’s trial. And, “I do have to admit that in the Adams case—and I’ve never really said this—Doug Mulder’s final argument was one I’d never heard before: about the ‘thin blue line’ of police that separates the public from anarchy. I have to concede that my eyes kind of welled up when I heard that. It did get to me emotionally, but I don’t think I showed it.” And, supposedly, “What do you care? He’s only a drifter.” The actuarial logic that values one life above another. That renders death a necessary response to death.
The conceit of any mystery is that there is a solution. Just like the dead man trying to solve his own murder (Edmund O’Brien in Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A.) Adams’s assertion of his innocence after the codification of his guilt is a dismantling of prevailing logic. To rephrase someone smart, the case is everything that is the world. When an arrived-upon solution is proven to be wrong, a mystery goes from figuring out motive and what happened to a matter of the logic and morality of systems. The railroading of an innocent man is nothing new. No Way Out. In a Lonely Place. The Wrong Man. Fury. It’s almost as if there is a human need to blame the blameless. (“It’s as if I was meant to be here,” said Randall Adams.) To sacrifice someone who has done nothing wrong is to play-act as a universe governed without reason. Man constructs chaos to show the universe he understands its incomprehensibility.
If you want to believe something badly enough, you’ll figure out a way. Find some lowlifes and feed them a story. Words are spoken into the world and then are. If no lowlifes are available, write the story yourself. The trick is to keep it simple.
6. Sir, in honor of a true American hero Let’s roll. Lord Jesus receive my spirit.
—David Harris, final statement before execution by lethal injection, June 30, 2004
An essay on false history. What Morris once called The Thin Blue Line.
Randall Adams was innocent. The evidence dug up in The Thin Blue Line was the center of the argument that got the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to throw out his conviction. The same court had earlier voted 9-0 against overturning his conviction. Dallas County didn’t bother trying him again. They just let him go. Adams went home, and sued Errol Morris over the rights to his story. “After being a prisoner of the justice system for 12 years, Mr. Adams should not have been required to be a prisoner of Errol Morris for life,” Adams’s lawyer said.
Adams is his story. This would seem to be the legal argument. Texas locked up the story of him. Morris rewrote it. The man was freed. The space Adams occupied—guilt—was empty again. Into the space comes the false Adams. Into the space comes a shard of a boy. The one who vandalizes reality for the hell of it. The fog of dread hanging over the film belongs to David Harris. He is as menacing as the state and their witnesses are clownish. He is so relaxed speaking to Morris. His body is loose. He’s conversational, a little humble, even. The things he has done don’t seem to weigh on him at all. Nothing troubles him. Nothing but one perceived slight at the door of a motel. One wrong move Randall Adams didn’t know he was making. The drifter is his story and the kid is the voice. So much comes down to so little: tiny actions, decisions forgotten as soon as they’re made, so much and so very little. A couple small words are the fissure of true and false history.
Because I’m the one that knows.