MISTER DEATH
Implausible Deniability
The documentaries of Errol Morris are hallmarked by the wildly eclectic, eccentric range of his subjects' occupations and preoccupations. Morris's perceptive camera has scrutinized the grief stricken patrons of pet cemetaries (Gates of Heaven [l978]); compulsive wild turkey hunters (Vernon, Florida [l98l]); a sinister homicidal psychopath and the innocent naif who almost died for his crime (The Thin Blue Line [l988]); the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawkings -- luminous intelligence seqestered within a relentlessly withering body [l992]; (A Brief History of Time); Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control's (l999) gonzo vocational quartet of a lion tamer, a topiary gardner, an expert in mole rat behavior, and a pioneering inventor of robotic contraptions.
Morris's oeuvre is informed by his background in philosophy and previous employment as a private investigator. His devotion to truth is passionate -- even as he appreciates the inherent fallibility of perception and subjectivity which render its elucidation problematic. Morris' aesthetic -- all the more potent for its seeming artlessness -- is wedded to a poet's sensibility, a quirky wit, and a profound humanism.
The director is always exceptionally respectful towards his subjects, no matter how odd or distasteful their fixations. In his latest feature, Mr. Death, Morris' mindfulness throws into even more repellent relief the career of Fred Leuchter, a self-proclaimed expert in state-sanctioned murder, who -- unwittingly or otherwise -- became a spearcarrier for the contemptible Holocaust revisionist movement.
Leuchter's father worked for the Massachussetts Department of Correction; frequently took his son to local slammers. Fred was clearly delighted with the visits; became intimate with prison life on both sides of the bars. He learned how to pick locks from inmates; visited death row; sat equably in the electric chair. He graduated from Boston College with a degree in history. Without a formal engineering background he commenced redesigning antiquated electric chairs.
A passion for the death penalty was exuberantly flourishing across America in the context of the prevailing conservative political climate. Fred Leuchter proved the right man in the right place for a rightish time. After he had demonstrated his prowess in the electrocution line, state after state called upon him to construct improved or new lethal injection systems; gas chambers; even a gallows or two.
To each deadly employment Leuchter rose with alacrity. He became successful in his macabre profession, surely a limit case of the Yankee take-charge/know-how/can-do spirit. He would probably still be prospering -- notably in Junior George Bush's Texas -- had he not succumbed in l988 to the siren song of a nefarious Canadian neo-Nazi, Ernst Zundel. Zundel was facing trial for his hate-mongering, and sought Leuchter out in aid of proving that Jews had never been systematically gassed. Enchanted by being elevated to the status of an expert witness, Leuchter accepted the commission; travelled to Auschwitz and Birkenau with Zundel's camera crew and his new bride -- a waitress from the local Dunkin' Donuts.
During his grim honeymoon, Leuchter illicitly entered Auschwitz and Maidanek; chipped out pieces of the crematoria; then delivered his samples -- source undesignated -- to an American laboratory. No traces of cyanide were found, but the Canadian court refused to credit Leuchter's "research", and found Zundel guilty.
Zundel nevertheless jubilantly declared himself vindicated by Leuchter's findings, which the latter shortly published as "The Leuchter Report". It went on to become the bible of Holocaust revisionists. Lauded internationally by Zundel and his repugnant fellow true believers for his zealous pursuit of (their) truth, Leuchter now thought the world was his oyster.
Then that world fell apart. After an appearance on ABC's PRIME TIME he found himself ubiquitously denounced by Jews and nonJews alike. Massachussets prosecuted him for practising engineering without a license and he soon lost his lucrative out-of-state contracts.
While he continued to deny anti-semitism or any political bias whatsoever, he responded even more eagerly to the blandishments of Holocaust deniers; relished making keynote speeches at neo-Nazi "scholarly" conferences, where kook science vied with phonied-up history. Eventually his wife kicked him out, attempts to resurrect his career in California failed, and he became a lonely pauper, abandoned by the rabid ideologues who continued to canonize the Report as enthusiastically as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Errol Morris found Fred Leuchter in semi-seclusion several years ago. Piquantly, Leuchter agreed to become the first subject of a unique interviewing machine Morris had invented. The "Interrotron" intensifies a subject's natural eye contact with the questioner -- hence with the camera -- to create an impression of extraordinary intimacy. One theorizes the inventor in Leuchter was enraptured by Morris' ingenious gizmo. In any case, he needed no encouragement to tell his history over many hours, virtually without the director's interruption or guidance.
Mr. Death seamlessly interpolates
Leuchter's autobiography with observations of his relatives, supporters,
and critics; with excerpts from home movies, archival footage, scenes shot
at Auschwitz by Zundel's cameraman; and with Morris' oneiric, astonishing
visual riffs, free associations and re-creations.
The film's Death's virtuoso
establishing sequence introduces Leuchter as a tiny figure, grinning loopily,
dwarfed by the huge futuristic apparatus of a Van De Graff generator behind
him. Mighty bolts of lightning crash and sizzle to the accompaniment of
composer Caleb Simpson's derisive send-up of Ride of the Valkyries.
One associates to the Thirties Universal classic Frankenstein, specifically
to Colin Clive's/Dr. Victor Frankenstein's cracked joy as his monstrous
Karloff creation is jolted into being during a violent electric storm.
The mad scientist fancied himself the master of life. In one witty stroke
Morris intimates Leuchter's absurdly grandiose self-image as the master
of death, and implies a frightening resonance between Leuchter's icily
conceived terminal devices and the material/mental architecture underpinning
the "final solution".
In subsequent close-ups, Leuchter appears a dweeb incarnate, wearing thick glasses, his teeth in horrid need of cleaning. He talks with the same equal reasonableness on an assortment of transgressive, or merely grotesque topics: his early interest in torture; the meat-like smell of the incompetently electrocuted; an astonishing daily consumption of coffee (40 cups) and cigarettes (six packs).
His mock-modest reportage about his gruesome job is replete with stilted obsessional locutions: he calls his clients "executees"; charges a "twenty per cent markup... which is more than fair" for dispatching them; declares that the improvement of gas chambers is "not a major market". His relentlessly mundane rhetoric creates an eery sense of distanced disavowal; it's if speaking in so hundrum a fashion about the unthinkable renders it more thinkable to him.
A staunch death penalty advocate, Leuchter asserts his chief job satisfaction is sending off the condemned with maximum dignity and comfort (he'd put TV in a gas chamber if he could). He believes his contraptions sooth the troubled sensibilities of prison officials by robotically taking the "human factor" out of executions. His ideal is a quick, efficient death (he'd personally chose electrocution) which protects the well being of all concerned -- including the victim who, he asserts, were it not for his efforts might be turned into a mindless vegetable, useless to himself and a continued burden to society. He proudly declares that his vocation has never cost him an hour of lost sleep, nor a single pang of conscience.
On Morris' adroit edit of the videotape comissioned by Zundel, Leuchter ludicrously acts the cooly detached, intrepid scientific "expert". Garbed for a Chernobyl, he takes obscure measurements, speaks in portentous technish like an astronaut transmitting from the moon to NASA, summons up absolutely fictitious dangers: "I will ascend to the surface...I am moving behind the alleged pillar..."
Holocaust scholar Robert Jan Van Pelt describes the Auschwitz crematoria to the director as "the holy of Holies...an absolute center of suffering". Morris makes one painfully aware of Leuchter's callous violation of this dreadful place through a arresting surreal recreation of Leuchter at his appalling labors. A chisel repeatedly appears in closeup, a remorseless icon, descending in relentless slow motion upon an undesignated surface, the clang of each strike hollowly amplified. One has the disturbing sense of flesh being gouged out, not brick and mortar.
Even before his samples were analyzed, Leuchter had convinced himself that Auschwitz and Birkenau contained no "competently" constructed gas chambers. Van Pelt acerbly comments that Leuchter's conclusion proceeded from dismal ignorance about the devastating distortions wrought by a half century of erosion and pilferage upon the camp sites.
One speculates Leuchter was also lead down the slippery slope by a narcissistically driven projection of his dubious "expertise" upon the Nazis. He presumed if Hitler's willing executioners wanted to build gas chambers, that they surely possessed the proficiency to manufacture their version of his own specifications -- which he didn't find -- therefore no gassing occurred. His admiration for Nazi "competence" is unpleasantly evident.
Leuchter still firmly believes that Auschwitz and the other camps were used for slave labor. In the context of his conviction, he asks Morris why the Nazis would go to the trouble of assembling a work force only to slaughter the workers. And, if murder were to be committed on a monumental scale, why wouldn't the Nazis use bullets or hanging -- in Leuchter's opinion, always more efficient and less dangerous "methods" than gassing?
I deem Leuchter hasn't made such statements disingenuously, although many Jewish activists believe he is, and always was a rabid anti-Semite. It's vastly more frightening to apprehend that questions of good or evil simply didn't seem to come into play for him in his zeal about getting the job done for Zundel -- hearkening back to his untroubled conscience about designing his own death machinery.
Leuchter's ultra-utilitarian, cog-and-wheels reasoning seems almost autistically divorced from any reflection on the horror of the Holocaust. He can't or won't understand that it was absolutely logical within the context of the insane hatred borne by the Nazis for the Jewish, Gypsy, or homosexual "other" for them to enslave some, murder others, with the ultimate intention of exterminating all, by whatever means -- including bullets and hanging, in and outside the camps.
To carry out their genocidal aims, the Nazis erected more and better execution systems bigger and better than anything Leuchter's narrow imagination could ever invent. (At one point, he wonders if "3000 electric chairs" might be buried in a secret chamber beneath Berlin, presumably to dispose of the Nazi 'executees'.). He could have gained immediate proof had he legally visited the Auschwitz archives which contain readily available, meticulous documentatation of every aspect of camp life. Morris exhibits letters related to the construction and maintenance of the crematoria; uncannily, they are couched in a German version of that same mundane, euphemistic language of disavowal in which Leuchter discussed his lethal business.
The German word for "gas chamber" appears only once, an oversight underlined in red to ensure it won't happen again. Van Pelt reminds one that the first Holocaust deniers were the Nazis themselves, from the top downwards. Hitler assiduously sidestepped admission of the camps' foul purpose. Yes, he averred on one occasion, Jews deserved to die, but his minions had merely relocated them "to some swamp in Russia..." Active murderers and passive bystanders were quick to follow the Fuhrer's duplicitous lead.
Leuchter came and went from Auschwitz with wearing own peculiar set of blinders. His staggering cluelessness underscored the validity of his findings for Zundel and the notorious British historian David Irving. Irving says rather snottily that the very fact that such vital evidence for the revisionist cause had been gathered by such a "mouse of a man..." converted him into the foremost scholarly Holocaust denier.
Having unobtrusively provided an arena for Leuchter to reveal and defend himself, Morris then quietly explodes the crucial "proof", skewering the craven likes of Zundel and Irving in the process. No one had ever thought to contact the laboratory where Leuchter's samples were analyzed. Its' unassuming director explains with Leuchter-like matter-of-factness that cyanide gas binds itself to only a few microns of any surface. Leuchter's findings had literally, if inadvertently, been chiseled.
Not only did he fail to provide the origin of the samples, Leuchter had thoroughly mixed surface with deep material from the crematoria, thereby creating an enormous dilution factor which essentially rendered the tests meaningless. Morris' stunning ethical coup is all the more devastating for being pressed home so unpolemically, set against the revisionist's inflammatory rhetoric. One comes away from Mr. Death haunted by two summary images: of Leuchter, walking along the shoulder of a busy California highway, his image blurring as he passes from view; and strapping himself into an electric chair in hieratic slow motion against a blaze of refulgent light, his face wearing the now familiar goofy smile. Morris is telling us his subject is a cipher, returned to the obscurity from whence he arose -- but a far from harmless one.
In gripping cinematic language, Morris argues that Fred Leuchter, Jr. is an extreme illustration of the all too common human potential for denial in the naked face of evil, whatever its cast. Leuchter's grandiose fascination with death and the exercise of deadly power was rationalized into cruel service to an inhumane state's overweaning authority. However writ small, he manifests the malignant mindset which made the vile work of the death camps feasible -- indeed palatable -- to its creators, to its executioners, and to the multitude who simply watched from the sidelines in tacit approval.