I haven't seen it, but I it got good reviews from what I did see:
Durst will go to Los Angeles to face murder charges
Oddly, the printed version I received was was different from the web version provided above, as well as several other NYT pos.
"Was ‘The Jinx’ a piece of responsible journalism?" by Ty Burr, Globe Staff March 16, 2015
Look who's asking!
No two ways about it: “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” wasn’t merely great TV and riveting entertainment, it was brilliant pop culture theater. But does that in itself disqualify the HBO documentary series as responsible journalism? In other words, are we losing something — and if so, what — when we shape facts to fit a multichapter narrative? Is the most compelling story necessarily the most accurate?
The only difference is the newspaper doesn't contain facts in most cases.
If you’re coming in late, I’m sorry to have to tell you that the party’s over. “The Jinx” is a true-crime investigation of whether Manhattan real estate scion Robert Durst murdered three people: his wife, Kathleen, in 1982, his friend Susan Berman in 2000, and a neighbor, Morris Black, in 2001. (Durst was tried and found not guilty of the last crime, despite admitting to dismembering Black’s body.)
A big part of the thrill in watching the show was having the first five episodes under your belt in time for the knock-out punch of the finale when it aired this past Sunday night. I watched the first episode last week and was halfway through a Sunday afternoon binge of the next four when reports came in that Durst had been arrested in New Orleans on charges relating to the Berman murder in Southern California.
If the last episode of “The Jinx” hadn’t already been must-see TV, it became so with a vengeance. Was the timing awfully convenient for director Andrew Jarecki, his producing partner Marc Smerling, and Home Box Office? On Monday Jarecki maintained in interviews that the authorities were always working on their own timetable and that it was coincidence the arrest came just hours before the big reveal of the show’s finale. (That was confirmed later in the day by a Los Angeles Police Department officer speaking to the Los Angeles Times.)
But what does it say about the state of our culture when the news of Durst’s arrest was greeted with dismay in various online outposts as a “spoiler” — as if “The Jinx” were the latest “Star Wars” movie and Durst had turned out to be Luke’s father?
Jarecki, whose first feature film as a director was the Oscar-nominated “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003), is a talented filmmaker and a dogged investigator; he played his audience of millions like trout, building over nearly five hours of television to the moment when he confronts his subject with what seems to be incontrovertible proof that Durst murdered Berman. The clincher came in the show’s very last minutes: Durst, alone in a bathroom and seemingly unaware that his clip-on microphone is still recording, appears to confess to himself that he “killed them all, of course.”
The timing involved in everything in and around “The Jinx” seems . . . remarkable. The arrest, the finding of a letter from Durst to Berman with handwriting that matches that of an anonymous letter sent to the Beverly Hills police in 2000, that confessional audio at the untranscribed end of a long interview session (discovered two years after it was recorded in 2012, according to Jarecki in a Monday New York Times interview).
Even the Times’ reportage — it went up online immediately after the show aired and was given front page, above-the-fold placement in print the following day — seems curious, given that the story’s coauthor, reporter Charles V. Bagli, is interviewed extensively in “The Jinx.” To coin a phrase, what did the newspaper’s editors know, and when did they know it?
But, hey, why complain when everybody wins: HBO, the filmmakers, the Times, viewers who had been following from the start and could partake in the ecstatic online water cooler conversation that began the second the screen went to black. Everyone but Durst, that is, and any old-school cranks concerned with what happens to news when it gets turned into entertainment.
On the other hand, how fair is that when news always has — always has had — a storyline. We’re a narrative species; connecting individual events into a timeline with a flow and a purpose is how we make sense of reality. It’s how journalists arrange the world’s chaos for readers and viewers to understand, and, one hopes, effect change. We look for human drama in everything, and we carry classic story templates in our heads: The innocent assailed, the lovers tested, the wicked exposed and punished.
Why did 9/11 just flash through my mind?
He just admitted to being an agenda-pushing flak.
Above all, we crave the satisfaction of closure — a balanced narrative that matches the way we think reality should work rather than the way it often does. This is why the NPR podcast “Serial,” another true-crime investigation about a 1999 murder in Maryland, was, for many listeners, so addictive and ultimately so infuriating: We put in all that time and never got a payoff?
The shaping is everywhere but mostly in our minds. With cameras banned from the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse, we look to courtroom sketches of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev by Art Lien or Jane Flavell Collins to provide suspense through colored pastels. I follow my Globe colleague Maria Cramer’s live tweets from the Aaron Hernandez murder trial as if they were sentences in a novel-in-progress, one that coalesces further every time I hit the update button. The Whitey Bulger saga wasn’t enough of a movie while it was happening; now it’s becoming two.
The problems begin when those who claim to act as reporters — i.e., straight-up conduits of information — give in to the temptation to play to an audience. In a society in which the most successful story is the most profitable story and the most profitable story is the one that’s most excitingly told, where are the ethical guardrails?
It’s a question that has taken on more importance with the rise of online reporting and the arrival of a new generation of journalists for whom the rules are often muzzy. I and other reviewers first expressed some of these concerns when the truth-is-stranger-than-Facebook documentary “Catfish,” about a woman who masqueraded as several fictional people online, came out in 2010 — a film produced by, among others, Jarecki and Smerling. (It’s now a TV series.)
But you could arguably follow the bread crumbs all the way back to the true-crime documentary that started the trend: “The Thin Blue Line,” from Cambridge’s own Errol Morris. That film, which focused on the wrongful murder conviction of Randall Dale Adams, caused a stir in 1988 for its use of dramatic reenactments and its speculations on the nature of truth and witnessing. As Jarecki has openly acknowledged, “The Jinx” is consciously built on the earlier movie’s bones, from the burbling minimalist soundtrack music to the hyperstylized recreations of events.
On the surface, the only difference is that “The Thin Blue Line” freed an innocent man, while “The Jinx” may help to convict a guilty one.
But Morris used reenactments to illustrate the sometimes wildly differing scenarios of the people he interviewed, whereas “the Jinx” uses them to bolster the filmmaker’s case against his subject — a case he already made in fictionalized form in the 2010 movie “All Good Things,” starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.
“The Thin Blue Line” presents the “facts” as given to the filmmaker by other people, while “The Jinx” lets Jarecki direct the movie the way he wants it to play — the way we want it to play. One is, at heart, a documentation, even if it’s of someone else’s false testimony or hazy memory. The other is . . . I’m not sure what we should call it. But it’s everywhere and there’s more of it with each passing day. It can be spectacularly engaging; it can make money and make careers. And it should be tested at every juncture for soundness and truth.
Do I believe Robert Durst killed three people? I do. Is “The Jinx” terrific filmmaking and a good show? Absolutely. Is the second question dependent upon the first? Less than we’d like to think.
Durst wouldn't happen to be Jewish, would he?
Is that why he got away with the murders for so long in the AmeriKan JU$tu$ $y$tem?
--more--"
Buying and reading the Boston Globe is my curse.
Until next time....
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
I watched the last three parts of the chilling series last night. What a creep. Came off as cold-blooded and crazy, and maybe that was part of the act.
Nothing from the Globe today, as far as I could tell from print.
Also see: Man Charged with Food Network Star's Murder
It really is a self-centered ma$$ media these days, and why not? Of and for them. No longer any doubt.
