A Wilderness of Error

 A Wilderness of Error is a 2020 crime documentary amplifying some of the points made in Errol Morris's book of that name published eight years earlier.  Morris appears as a person interviewed at length in the documentary although he is not its director or producer. The show is directed by Marc Smerling.  Morris' appearance acknowledges that he has now become part of the story, the saga of gruesome murders in 1970 that have been litigated, more or less, continuously during the last fifty years.  A Green Beret doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald was accused of killing his wife and two children in their home at Fort Bragg.  MacDonald said that he was innocent and claimed that the killers were a group of crazed hippie-junkies led by a blonde woman in a floppy hat who scribbled "PIGS" on the wall in the blood of the butchered victims.  Although the story seemed implausible, it had resonance with crimes committed by the Manson family in Hollywood, and, in fact, there were witnesses who had seen a blonde girl in a floppy hat that night near the scene of the crime.  This woman turned out to be Helena Stoeckly, a drug addict and lost soul who repeatedly confessed to the crime during the twelve years leading up to her death (by pneumonia and cirrhosis) in 1983.  Stoeckly's confessions were complicated by the fact that every time she admitted the crime, she changed the details and, when called upon to testify at trial, completely recanted.  MacDonald was preliminarily tried in the context of an extended evidentiary hearing under military law -- the Judge dismissed the charges and determined that there would be no further military prosecution.  MacDonald's father-in-law, a man named Kasaba, testified enthusiastically on behalf of the accused at the military hearing.  But over the next decade, Kasaba undertook additional investigation on his own, carefully studied the transcript of the military proceedings, and concluded that MacDonald was guilty.  Kasaba, then, became a kind of avenging angel, his rage triggering a trial in 1982 in a civilian court in which MacDonald was convicted.  The case was the subject of a famous book and TV mini-series called Fatal Vision, works that originated in a stunning betrayal of the imprisoned MacDonald by his erstwhile friend, the journalist Joe McGinnis.  McGinnis' account became the official narrative and it was damning to MacDonald.  A mind-numbing series of appeals followed, all of them founded, at least, in part on Helena Stoeckly's alleged confession.  But Stoeckly was dead a year after the trial in which she had disavowed earlier confessions and the appeals became increasingly attenuated -- based on hearsay evidence of what Stoeckly had allegedly said and efforts to corroborate those admissions through other testimony.

Errol Morris is a brilliant investigator -- his documentary The Thin Blue Line about a convicted cop-killer led to a successful appeal and the reversal of the defendant's conviction after the man had spent many years on Death Row.  After some initial idiosyncratic (if brilliant) documentaries in the mode of Werner Herzog, Morris has become a champion of a sort of a film that might be characterized as the epistemological thriller -- at issue is what we believe, how we come to our beliefs, and the consequences of those beliefs which Morris reveals to be provisional and, often, deeply flawed.  The Thin Blue Line exemplifies the film-maker's philosophical inclinations and show how the application of his aesthetic of doubt can be fruitful -- in that case, a man wrongly convicted of a murder and sentenced to death was shown to be innocent and released from prison.  In more ambitious later films, most notably The Fog of War, Morris has shown how unquestioned assumptions and error can lead to policy catastrophes -- The Fog of War is about Robert McNamara's prosecution of the disastrous war in Vietnam; 2013's The Unknown Unknowns is about Donald Rumsfeld and the conflict in Iraq; American Dharma in 2018 is about Steve Bannon.  (Morris has also written several remarkable books, again on the subject of photography and epistemology -- are photographs "true"? and, if not, how do they lie?  Morris isn't the director of A Wilderness of Error, a movie that follows closely his 2012 book of the same name about the MacDonald murders.  But he could have been.  Smerling follows Morris' methodology, constructing the film from a collage of dramatically filmed objects comprising the evidence in the case, interviews, and dream-like reconstructions showing shadowy figures moving about in blue, murky half-light.  Smerling goes so far as to use Morris' trademark device, the Interrotron, an  apparatus in which the person interviewed interacts not with the questioner but with a live video of the questioner -- Morris believes that this device somehow enhances the truthfulness of the testimony provided to it.  The program is fascinating, but difficult to watch due to innumerable commercial interruptions.  The show is six hours long as aired on FX, but, in fact, at least, anhour-and-a-half is eaten up by commercials -- the same irritating advertisements shown over and over again.  Morris' great subject is the hubris of knowing -- we all assume that we know things and can prove them, but it is this latter proposition, the actual proof of our convictions. that turns out to shockingly difficult.  Morris' book A Wilderness of Error systematically destroyed the factual premises on which McGinnis' canonical account of the murders had been based.  But as the documentary shows, Morris then succumbed to the epistemological pathology that he critiqued in others.  Morris convinced himself that MacDonald was innocent and gathered proof to demonstrate that the man's conviction was, if not obviously erroneous, at least, subject to multitudes of reasonable doubts.  As in the Texas case overturned in the aftermath of The Thin Blue Line, Morris brought his proof into Court where it was tested by cross-examination.  (Spoiler alert!)  And, as it happened, Morris own evidence turned out to be riddled with errors, implausible, and, ultimately, unpersuasive.  MacDonald was not released on the petition founded upon Morris' investigation.  In fact, at the end of the long program, Morris concedes that "(he) is as fucked up as the next person" and that he doesn't know whether or not MacDonald committed the murders.  Smerling dramatizes the demolition of Morris' purported proof by showing persons and witnesses with evidence that MacDonald is innocent and, then, running the shot again, a few minutes later, with the witness suddenly turning ghostly and vanishing like vapor.  Smerling's point, which is clearly shared by Morris, is that we are too readily convinced of the truthfulness of the opinions that we assert and, even the most skeptical of us (in this case Morris himself) can delude themselves into error.  In the last ten minutes of the show, Morris tells his own Interrotron that he was mistaken, probably self-deluded, and that, at this vast remove from the actual murders, the narrative has ossified into various forms of error so that the truth will never be known.  "Maybe MacDonald killed his family, maybe, he didn't -- we will never know."  In fact, the eerie aspect of this despairing conclusion is that MacDonald, who was likely high on some form of speed when the killings occurred, doesn't know himself exactly what happened.  

If any of this interests you, I recommend Morris' summary of his epistemology of doubt in the book The Ashtray, the man who denied Reality.  The Ashtray is about Morris' college interactions with the famous Thomas Kuhn, the man who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and who invented the notion of the "paradigm shift".  Unlike some philosophers, Morris believes in objective reality and that the truth can be known -- his criticism of Kuhn is that the philosopher of science seems to have denied that there is an objectively knowable reality.  But the book also shows the pitfalls of belief and credulity -- in the end, Kuhn is like Morris in Smerling's Tv series, hoisted on the petard of his own skepticism:  there are many kinds of credulity and radical skepticism may be as delusional as its opposite.