Into the Abyss

For a filmmaker who stocks and trades in strangeness, Werner Herzog has developed a form of documentary that is beginning to feel increasingly familiar. Caves, captured pilots, woodcarving skijumpers, all receive more or less the same wondrous, wondering treatment: beautiful images, haunting soundtracks, and of course a lyrical, philosophical series of questions and answers, provided by a voice that could have cornered the audiobook market long ago.

The subjects of Herzog’s latest documentary—a 28 year-old on death row, his executioners, his crime, and a handful of the people affected by it—seem tailor-made for the Bavarian director’s tried and true approach. What’s more, the film’s title, Into the Abyss, would probably feel appropriate attached to any of the movies he’s made over the last 40 years. But fifteen minutes in, I suddenly realized that this film would be very different from what I had come to expect. It dawned on me while I was looking at crime scene footage of the cookies Sandra Stotler had been baking when Michael Perry and Jason Burkett blew her away with a shotgun: Herzog was not narrating. He had not been narrating. And he clearly had no intention of doing so.

Most of us do not experience the world the way that Werner Herzog seems to. But his documentaries allow us to catch a glimpse of the surreal, bizarre, otherworldly planet he lives on. He picks out the details he notices with the camera. He exposes us to his feelings with the score. He immerses us in his thoughts with the voiceover. Abyss, however, has been stripped of these elements. It consists primarily of interviews, mixed with a few minutes of crime scene footage captured by local police and an occasional shot of the story’s key locations. All in all, the presentation feels a lot more like “Dateline” and “Cold Case Files” than Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Grizzly Man.

Nevertheless, Abyss is still, ultimately, a Herzog film, complete with revelations of beauty and absurdity. But this time, without the director’s constant presence, we get to discover those revelations for ourselves. This approach makes perfect sense for a documentary about a pressing social issue--rather than saturating us with his own perspective, Herzog wants to encourage us to look at the American death penalty with our own eyes. He is smart enough to know that even his eloquence can’t possibly dig out America’s deeply entrenched opinions, so he’s attempted a conversation-starter instead of a mind-changer.

He succeeds. By choosing an inmate whose guilt is undeniable, Herzog ensures that we don’t get caught up in the horror of executing an innocent person. Instead, we have to deal with something that he considers just as unacceptable: the horror of executing a guilty person. As we listen to Perry and Burkett lie about their crime, as we watch the brother of one victim and the sister/daughter of the other two control their tears, as we reel at the thought of a woman marrying one of these criminals and inseminating herself with his child, we realize that these people are all incredibly bizarre, damaged, unique human beings. Once it sinks in that Perry, executed eight days after his 30-minute interview with Herzog, has now been dead for months, we have to come to grips with the simple fact that one of those fascinating people no longer exists.

It is this realization at the heart of the Abyss. Herzog could certainly have laid out some heavy, mindbending thoughts on the subject—but those would only affect the people already receptive to his ideas. The decision to withhold his guidance forces all who see the film to grapple with Perry’s death on their own terms. A heavy burden, to be sure, but one the filmmaker unloads on us quite deliberately and straightforwardly, confident that we can handle it. I hope we prove him right.

                                             Gus Spelman