Warner Herzog’s newest documentary Into the Abyss is less about whether capital punishment should exist and more about why it does. Herzog’s opinion on lethal injection is no mystery. Within the first ten minutes of the film, he denounces the practice, but doesn’t stoop to demagoguery. Rather, Into the Abyss is a resonating documentary seems to focus on man’s futile penchant to control chaos.
The opening scene alludes to our need to create an illusory control over nature as Father Lopez, the Death House Chaplain, relays his role in a typical execution: he visits and prays with the inmate, walks behind the guarded prisoner on his way to the chamber, and, “with permission,” places his hand on the inmate’s right ankle as the lethal injection is administered. Currents of emotion writhe beneath the surface of Lopez’s face as he explains his duties. By his own admission, he has no idea why people condone capital punishment – and it seems he is one of the detractors – but he rationalizes it through his faith that “God has prepared” the inmate and the world for what takes place. Because he is a “loving, caring, merciful God,” there must be rhyme and reason to these actions. In other words, there is a purpose to the process, and this process – apparently – is necessary.
For starters, “process” creates the illusion of order, something that Herzog has tackled before in previous documentaries like Grizzly Man. The main subject of that film, Timothy Treadwell, is certainly different from Michael James Perry or Jason Burkett, the two men convicted of murdering Sandra Stotler, her son Adam Stotler, and his friend Jeremy Richardson in October of 2001, but the overall examination of the narcissistic belief that we can control the natural disorder of the world is quite similar.
While God’s “actions” have prepared Lopez for his duty, they also absolve all other participants – and the legal system for that matter – of guilt. The arrest, the trial, and the sentencing phase are all part of a process as are the events within the execution chamber, a room that hardly resembles a death quarter: a gurney replete with straps resides in the center, a microphone hangs from the ceiling, and a “camera on/off switch” takes up a two-inch-by-two-inch space on the wall adjacent to the door. A window sits on the left-hand side of the gurney. The curtains are drawn, and anyone within can see those without and vice versa. By design, this chamber seems to speak less of death and more of a performance or an operating theater. More importantly, this room visually euphemizes “state-sanctioned murder” and transforms it into “justice.”
And what’s a theater without its performers? As told by Fred Allen, a former Death House Captain, each person in the “execution process” has a role, starting from when the prisoner arrives in the cell block. He’s offered a pair of “real-world clothes,” any feasible request (turns out “smoking a doobie” is a common petition, but one that’s “not gonna happen”), and a last meal of his design. In a sense, the inmate is comforted before death. It behooves the system to comfort the prisoner before death. Strangely enough, if the prisoner is “sick, he can’t be executed.” After a meeting with a doctor and a chaplain, the inmate is then led to the chamber. Two men lead him and three men bring up the rear. The first man in (Fred) takes the left leg, the second takes the right, the third the left arm, the fourth the right, and the fifth stands at bay to secure the prisoner’s shoulders in case his adrenaline impels him to sit up or lunge from the table after his limbs has been strapped. As Allen notes, “Once you’re up there, you’re up there.”
I’m not knocking this procedure as it has to be done to ensure some sort of fair treatment of the prisoner, something that could be added to the list of ironic “absurdities” within the prison system, but I digress. However, the minutia of this process also culminates in something even more obfuscating: the transformation of death (or more hauntingly, life) into paperwork that itemizes the last few actions of a death-row inmates life from “checked on by physician” to “administered third shot.” Each moment is annotated with its time of occurrence, and all cumulative moments are tallied into a metric that quantifies the efficacy of the process. For Perry, it was nine minutes.
Into the Abyss doesn’t conjure remorse for Perry. The fact that Jason Burkett avoided capital punishment and is serving a life sentence doesn’t make the crimes any less heinous, and Herzog avoids leading us down the route. However, in a sense, Perry, Burkett, and all those in jail or facing capital punishment exemplify our desire to order chaos, unaware of what we can and can’t control. If nothing else, Herzog illustrates humanity at its best (the victims’ family persevering) and at its worst (Perry and Burkett), and by doing this, he shows us the impossibility of control while simultaneously showing our desire for it.
Prior to their convictions, Perry and Burkett were transients, something that conflicts with a grand notion of order: a subject in motion does not remain long enough to contribute meaningfully to society. I don’t mean to suggest that they died because they refused to settle down, but their nomadic lifestyles seemed to have aided their reputations for delinquency well before the murders. In addition, Burkett was from a broken home and Perry just didn’t want to live in his anymore, citing the need to “do what I wanted to do.” Throughout the film, Herzog spends a fair amount of time interviewing Delbert Burkett, Jason’s father. As a career criminal, he was mostly absent from his son’s life, and, heartrendingly, his shining moment is when he testified to the court during his son’s sentencing, begging them “not to kill my son” because he was given a crap life.
Perhaps the most sobering moment occurs in Delbert’s subsequent tale of what happens after the sentencing: both he and Jason are placed on the same bus back to their prison, sitting next to each other, cuffed on opposite wrists, and he remembers holding this newborn in his arms twenty years prior, but now instead of a tiny hand grabbing his father’s finger, both mean are bound by steel, and perhaps both are reflexive actions: It’s in these moments that Herzog illuminates both a sad, hereditary culture of incarceration, but also the humanity that exists beneath the stigmatization of heartless, inhuman criminals destined to be executed and buried with “no names on the crosses, only numbers,” so much better to keep them neatly ordered.
