The Thin Blue Line

            The Thin Blue Line is an interesting case of a documentary that expresses various modes. Its heavy use of  “talking head” interviews borrows from the expository and is reminiscent of maker Errol Morris’s later films like The Fog of War. It has a number of re-enacted scenes that evoke the performative mode, played and replayed again and again from different stories and perspectives. It is poetic as is pairs shots of the Dallas skyline with  Randall Adams’s assertions that Dallas is like “hell on earth.” It is perhaps the participatory mode, however, that The Thin Blue Line most closely follows.

Blue Line does differ from other examples of participatory documentary. He is not featured prominently in the film as Michael Moore is in his, he doesn’t seek sensational or publicity-seeking tactics (another signature Moore trait.)  Instead, he sits behind the camera and is for the most part neither seen nor heard.  Nor does Morris visibly engage with authorities trying to break a strike as does Barbara Kopple in Harlan County, USA. Nevertheless, he is invisibly poking and prying at something he is struggling to understand and strongly despises: the lifelong imprisonment of an innocent man for a murder he did not commit.

            Here, we watch him not just observe the situation and tell us what occurred. Instead, Morris is constantly grilling different interviewees about their alleged stories, asking them again, then exposing inconsistencies in all accounts by matching stories of the “same” events together. He isn’t just listening, but urging viewers to become aware of what he perceives as a staggering injustice.  Says Nichols, “Participatory documentary gives us a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result.” We suspect Morris’s involvement runs deep but we don’t really get the aforementioned sense in The Thin Blue Line until the film’s last chilling sequence when we hear Morris on tape interviewing David Harris. Morris asks a question, receives a vague response, asks a clarifying question, receives a clearer, more troubling response, probes, gets what is nearly a confession, and so forth.  We can feel the tenseness of the encounter, and are left to draw our own conclusions about which of all the versions of truth presented is the most true.

           

            The participatory nature of Blue Line is perhaps clearest when its distribution and exhibition are taken into account. Less than a year after the film was first shown, Randall Adams was freed from a life in prison. Viewers had not only seen but acted, and the world was a different place—if only for one man—as a consequence.