My Mom Herzog, Part 2

In a gated community in Texas in October 2001, a fifty-year-old nurse named Sandra Stotler was found floating in a retention pond wrapped in the duvet from her own bedroom. The bodies of her son, Adam, and his best friend were found in the woods nearby. The convicted killer, Michael Perry, was sentenced to death for the three murders, while his accomplice Jason Burkett was sentenced to life in prison. The motive was theft. The boys had wanted to steal the Stotlers' red Camaro. Werner Herzog's documentary Into The Abyss documents the last eight days of Michael Perry's life.

As Herzog interviews the shellshocked survivors of the ordeal -- Stotler's daughter, full of grief and anger, Burkett's father, serving a prison sentence himself and wracked with guilt, and Burkett's wife, who married him while he was in prison and remains convinced of his innocence -- it becomes quickly apparent that we, the arthouse audience, are seeing a part of America that we normally get to look past. It is astounding how many people touched by the murder have been in prison, suffered violence, or faced homelessness. Burkett's sobbing father informs Herzog that he is currently facing his fifth prison sentence, and believes that his addictions to drugs and alcohol are primarily to blame for Burkett's crimes. The brother of one victim broke parole to attend his brother's funeral (he was arrested at the service) and lost his other sister in an accident when she was walking on the freeway. Burkett's brother is serving a prison sentence as well, and a bar full of witnesses heard Perry bragging on the night of the murder about shooting someone to steal a car are barely ruffled. Violence, loss, waste, and harm seem to be part of the daily rhythm of life for these people. They are up to their eyes in it.

Which is why it is all the more jarring when we hear Herzog's genteel German accent from behind the camera, asking a grieving man about his tattoo. "What does that tattoo on your arm say?" he asks, politely.

"Brandy," says the man. "My girlfriend."

And just like that, Herzog channels the spirit of my midwestern suburban mother, and says, "You got your girlfriend's name tattooed on your arm? What if the relationship dissolves?"

Herzog wants you to think about the consequences of your actions. He feels strongly about your bad habit of texting and driving, and now he wants you to think about your tattoo choices. A tattoo is forever, right?

Which begs the question: can you make a documentary that treats its audience, and its subjects, like peers?

Herzog is a master-class documentarian and overwhelmingly, Into the Abyss is spectacular. It suspends judgement about the guilt of Michael Perry (Perry himself maintains his innocence) and avoids political conversation about the death penalty in favor of storytelling. It's a long, meditative look at the victims and perpetrators of violence themselves -- whether the perpetrators be homeless car thieves or employees of the state. It allows the subjects to tell, in their own words, what the homicide and its aftermath has meant for them. A prison guard who executes two prisoners a week for a year finally breaks down and quits his job when he realizes he can't do such work any longer. The daughter of Statler, whose life story is one long chronicle of disaster, shares her anger at Perry and the closure she got from his death. A chaplain opines that he can swerve his golf cart to save the lives of squirrels, but can do nothing to save the inmates he ministers to every day.

But you can never shake the feeling, when you hear Herzog's voice, that Herzog, and by implication us, are horribly out of place. Herzog asks questions that have apparently never occurred to these people. He tries to draw out the metaphysical side of a prison guard ("Do you think that there was a part of you, a part of your personality deep down, that believed this was wrong?") only to be looked at with confusion and stammering. The guard is practical, and concerned with consequences. Herzog is an abstract artist. The two are talking past each other. Herzog also has a hard time hiding his outsider's fascination with Burkett's wife, and her choice to marry a convicted felon. While his interest is understandable on several levels (the couple has never been permitted a conjugal visit, but Mrs. Burkett is pregnant with her husband's child), the questions he asks about their relationship seem a bit wide-eyed, and forward to the point of being rude. Mrs. Burkett is a kind of zoo animal to him, whose actions and desires are completely foreign to the filmmakers and audience.

For all its strong moments, those weird tonal moments of Into the Abyss, when Herzog shows off just how out-of-place an old liberal white man is in this world, make the experience of watching this documentary feel occasionally like cultural tourism. We interact with the people on and around Death Row, who are profoundly unlike us, and then we watch another Sundance movie while we drink a dry Cabernet and have quinoa salad for dinner. The people in this documentary become the objects of our study, and interest, and pity. They do not become our peers.

Herzog served as the quintessential suburban mom when he warned young motorists not to text and drive, and I stood by him in that film. I'm a cyclist and I like my brain where it is. But the tone that Herzog kept slipping into in this film reminded me of another kind of suburban mother: the kind who goes out of her comfort zone to volunteer at homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and, no matter how well-meaning she tries to be, just can't help but alienate the people around her. She's not like the people around her, and she knows it. The result is, despite the best intentions, a deepening of the gulf between two groups of people that ultimately does more harm than good.

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