In support of TDAR’s plans for a summer camp devoted to reenactment, I’m continuing to consider the different uses of recreating the past. Today I write about Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. Many people, including Morris himself, have already addressed the role of reenactments in this and other of Morris’ documentaries. I focus on resonances between Morris’ technique and the psychoanalytic process, and what this means for how we write history. 

Spilled Milkshake in The Thin Blue Line

For a movie about a police shooting, The Thin Blue Line spends a lot of time considering spilled milkshakes. The primary subject of Errol Morris’ documentary is the murder of a Dallas policeman, who was killed while making a late night traffic stop. The movie successfully illuminated that the wrong man was convicted of the crime and ultimately led to his exoneration. Morris mixes incisive interviews with a series of artful reenactments of the crime scene. He films these reconstructed interludes in a strange manner, focusing our attention on, among other things, the milkshake that the police officer’s partner dropped during the shooting. Some have criticized Morris’ use of reenactments in The Thin Blue Line, saying their highly stylized and directed nature sully an otherwise unvarnished documentary. In a series of blog posts for the New York Times, Morris argues that these recreations allow him to direct our focus to the details we ordinarily ignore. When we do pay attention to them, they can unsettle our understanding of the larger events around them. Through reenactments, the Thin Blue Line gives us a “history from below”, an illustration of how minutiae can stand for big things.

The Thin Blue Line plays with the instability of information. We can have accounts that just don’t match, but we still try to make sense of them. The partner of the slain officer reported that the killer drove a blue Chevy Vega, but the leading suspect was in a blue Mercury Comet. Still, we can easily explain away the inconsistency, emphasizing the similarity of the blue vehicles to the degree that the evidence seems more consistent than contradictory. Hayden White writes wonderfully about this process in discussing how we create history. Writing about the past involves putting facts into a story. The facts come from the past, but the story emerges in the present. History lives with us, it doesn’t die with the events it addresses.

But Morris doesn’t let us smooth over the differences, reminding us that our understanding of the crime lives with us. He repeatedly shows the car pulling away, alternating between the two different types of vehicles, zooming in on their distinctively different taillights. The gesture seems strange considering that this particular disparity in evidence was not actually significant–both the wrongfully convicted man and the actual assailant were driving a Mercury. But the gesture brings history into the present, showing how any account requires emphasizing some facts and diminishing or dismissing those that don’t quite fit.

How much do the taillights matter?

The stylized reenactments of The Thin Blue Line don’t look anything like original crime footage, but that makes them more effective at unsettling our relation to our initial reading of the crime. Cinematic shots of taillights, license plates, and milkshakes all further the sense that assembling evidence is a directed act. They lay bare the same processes that were implicit in any previous narration of the murder. Morris writes:

The kind of re-enactments I have in mind are not based on trying to fool you into believing that something is real that is not. Nor are they based on the suspension of disbelief. They are not asking us to suspend your disbelief in an artificial world that has been created expressly for their entertainment; they are asking the opposite of us – to study the relationship of an artificial world to the real world.

But how does an artificially recreated piece of entertainment make us consider the way a similar process exists in the seemingly more objective endeavor of giving testimony?

The Thin Blue Line may be most effective when it goes through a process closer to remembering than reenacting, trying to fit evidence together without conflating it with the actual event. In “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”, Freud discusses a similar method in psychoanalysis:

In these hypnotic treatments the process of remembering took a very simple form. The patient put himself back into an earlier situation, which he seemed never to confuse with the present one, and gave an account of the mental processe belonging to it, in so far as they had remained normal; he then added to this whatever was able to emerge as a result of transforming the processes that had at the time been unconscious into conscious ones.

Just as Morris insists on a temporal distinction between his reenactment and the actual crime, Freud emphasizes that the patient separates remembering from the situation being recalled. In cases of great trauma, Freud argues that this distinction becomes difficult to maintain. He draws a distinction between remembering and repeating, saying that remembering involves a conscious awareness of constructing the past, while repeating simply leads to reliving and reproducing an existing trauma.

The Thin Blue Line rewrites history through seemingly minor details that only become apparent through a process of remembering, not repeating. In his reenactments, Morris brings us far enough away from the original crime that we are able to change our understanding of it. Staying closer to original testimony and direct interview footage could have easily reinforced our existing view of the murder. Perhaps reenactment can teach us about the past precisely because it remains decidedly in the present.