Truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable

 THE THIN BLUE LINE (1988)

An Appreciation by Jerry Saravia

Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line" may appear like something you might see on any forensic crime TV channel but look closer. "The Thin Blue Line" is unlike any crime documentary I've ever seen and it is just as powerful and riveting today as it was in 1988. It is considered rightfully a landmark documentary that used reenactments to decipher the truth - boy, have reenactments been done to death ever since. More tellingly, they serve a very direct purpose and it is their repetition from different angles that show how truth can be obscured by eyewitnesses whose identification of a shooter is less reliable than anyone imagined. 

Seeing it again recently, I was reminded how flimsy the eyewitness accounts really were, particularly their observation of a late night suspect in a car on a deserted road. Not any of the three eyewitnesses could positively identify the alleged suspect yet they claim to know what the suspect looked like - all eyewitnesses, including a woman named Emily Miller who says murder is rampant in her town and around her house! She has her reasons for declaring one man as the culprit, the shooter of a Dallas police officer who died at the scene - she is something of a criminal herself. 

The alleged murder suspect was Randall Adams who was at a motel the night of the murders with his brother. He was fingered as the murderer by a 16-year-old named David Harris, an explosively violent kid who kept getting himself in trouble throughout the years of Adams' incarceration including having killed a man whose house he invaded! Adams says Harris must have killed the officer, driving a blue car whose make is not made immediately clear even by the slain officer's partner - she sat in the vehicle and shot at the car yet had no memory of the license plate number. Suspicion arises from all different sides of the coin - could it have been a set-up? No, not at all (unmentioned in the doco but it occured to me). Did David Harris actually shoot the officer and blame it on Adams? A more likely scenario when you consider how Dallas's justice system and the D.A. just wanted capital punishment to run its course - the rationale being they didn't want to ruin a young man's life but an older man, sure why not. 

Murder and death are key factors in "The Thin Blue Line" - they run more rampantly than even Emily Miller claims in Dallas, Texas. Fashioned as a deconstruction of a wrongly convicted man tale using every cinematic tool in the book that went beyond normal documentaries (including Philip Glass's evocative musical score), Morris' "Thin Blue Line" establishes truth as its only asset but the justice system is still blind to it or doesn't care. The only expression of emotion is ironically from David Harris, separate from the crime he later admits to committing, as he tells the story of his older brother who drowned in a neighbor's pool when they were younger. You know the story is true because the details flow easily and disturb him. Truth can sometimes stare at you straight in the eye and not flinch. "The Thin Blue Line" is one of the more revelatory documentaries ever made about the justice system and the environment surrounding it. A true landmark in cinema history.