The Thin Blue Line

The Thin Blue Line is a documentary that was released in 1988 and directed by Errol Morris. We have not really talked about documentaries in class, but I'm going to go ahead and write about this one because I think that it is both a piece of art, and a really powerful movie. It tells the story of a man who was convicted of killing a police officer in Texas, despite very minimal evidence that he was guilty. The district attorney and police force of Vidor, Texas, the town where the officer was killed was desperate to close the case. There were two suspects. David Ray Harris was  seventeen year old boy who actually did do the killing, after stealing a car and a number of guns and running away from home. Randall Adams was a 28 year old man drifting through Texas looking for work who David Harris picked up. Even though there was little evidence, Adams was charged and convicted because they could sentence him to the electric chair or life imprisonment. They could only try Harris as a minor, so they did not want to pursue him and only get a minimal sentence.

Originally Morris was planning on shooting a documentary on "Dr. Death," a psychiatrist who specialized at being an expert witness for the prosecution and testifying that defendants where incurable psychopaths. He had been a part of a huge number of death penalty convictions in Texas. However, after talking to him and hearing about the Adams case, Morris thought that Randall Adams sounded innocent, and decided to shoot the documentary about the trial instead of the psychiatrist.

Morris tells the story of the shooting and trial through interviews with those who were involved and recreating scenes from the shooting using actors. These re-enactment scenes became commonplace in later documentaries, but this was one of the first ones in which this technique was employed.

Morris used a non-linear method of storytelling to explain what happened. There are individual interviews with the people involved in the case. Morris used a new method of interview style that was termed, "interrotron." This places Morris, the interviewer behind a curtain, staring into a camera that transmits into a teleprompter sort of device that the interviewee can talk to. So the interviewee is looking at both Morris and the camera.

Morris uses photos of the crime scene and paintings of the courtroom as a sort of slideshow that he plays during interviews. So the interviewee will be talking about how he was feeling during the time, and the audience will see these photographs as he talks. Morris makes particularly good use of the bracketing technique when Adams talks about how he felt when the DA spoke about the electric chair and how people died in it. Morris kept shooting photos of electric chairs and the audience gets a really good feel for how terrifying and awful they are.

After the film was released, it was successful in garnering enough support and was convincing enough that Adams was released from his life-time sentence in jail, after 12 years of being incarcerated.