If you’ve seen a Werner Herzog documentary before, then you should pretty much know what to expect going in. He’s going to pick a subject, and he’ll dig up some interesting footage exploring said subject, but the real attraction of the film is going to be the bits of himself that he injects into the narrative. His points of view, his asides, his tangents; everything he adds to the movie that a more disciplined filmmaker would leave out. Sometimes Herzog goes off on a run and the sheer absurdity of what he’s doing crumbles the whole production around him, but other times he stumbles into transcendent bits of artistic brilliance. Into the Abyss finds the filmmaker reigned in maybe more than I’ve ever seen him before, but it ended up being an intriguing and affecting documentary regardless.
Herzog’s subject here is a triple homicide that happened in a small Texas town. Over the course of the film he studies the murder itself, how the family of the victims responded afterward, and what happened to the two young boys who committed the crimes after they were convicted. A large part of what Herzog is trying to do by looking at this tragedy is use it as a framework for an argument that makes a stand against the death penalty and how prevalent state sponsored murder is in the state of Texas. But, on another level, what he’s doing is taking you through a nightmarish vision of what life is like in the Hellish, dystopian world that is the rural United States. Those are the bits of the film where you get the real Herzogy goodness.
Herzog starts things off by interviewing a religious authority who counsels death row inmates in their dying days. The guy plays like a bumbling fool, who the gravity of murder by state is lost on completely. By the end of Herzog’s questioning the man squirts out a few crocodile tears, but before that he’s regaling us with stupid metaphors about golf and squirrels that he uses to try and explain away what he does and make it seem not so horrific. At this point it was hard to tell if Herzog was making fun of the man or not, but soon after it becomes clear that he was just exploring the confliction and confusion that people experience when they’re involved in something as traumatizing as systematic murder. The second thing Herzog shows us is footage of the room in which these people put inmates to death. The camera moves slowly, lingering over the empty cells where they’re kept before hand, the gurney where they get strapped down, and the clock where their final seconds tick away. The music is subtle, but effectively doom and gloom, and the whole scene really hammers home the gravity of what it means to condemn a man to death and then carry out his execution. With these opening scenes the filmmaker isn’t just setting a mood, he’s getting us in the right mindset to explore this story. He doesn’t want us to treat these murders as thrilling, or mysterious. This isn’t a movie murder mystery to be puzzled over. We’re looking at real life events with deadly consequences, and we’re asked to decide where they fit into our morality, how complicit we are in the death row executions that take place, and whether or not those who support the death penalty would actually be able to be the ones who hit the switch when it comes down to those final seconds.
Herzog is up front and clear about his anti-death penalty position, but he’s not afraid to go all the way in presenting how grizzly and awful the triple homicide that his two main subjects committed was. We get extensive footage of the crime scene, a real blood bath. We get details about the killers’ motives, which were astonishingly, soul crushingly petty and juvenile. And we get details about what the boys did while committing the crime and in the days after, which shows how unthinking and inhuman they were. These boys were complete animals, immoral monsters, and clearly they don’t deserve to live. But Herzog contends that this still doesn’t give us the right to say that they have to die. It’s a complicated issue, but the filmmaker is able to support his position very powerfully because he very fairly looks at the situation from every point of view and still sticks to his guns.
His one big (inevitable for Herzog) digression is a chapter in which he interviews a local roofer who knew the murderers and the victims only casually, and a bartender at a local pub who the murderers took on a joy ride after they stole their victims’ car. Here he finds a couple of characters that he likes and he just lets them go in front of the camera. The man casually tells the most hillbilly story I’ve ever heard about getting stabbed by a screwdriver while in a fist fight, he reveals that he never learned to read until recently when he did a turn in jail, and he displays a penchant for periodically turning and spitting on the ground while giving interviews to legendary documentarians. He’s Grade A local color. The bartender, for her part, mostly just comes off as a real life version of Parker Posey’s character from Waiting for Guffman, and it’s pretty amusing to watch her airhead reaction to joyriding in a stolen car that was littered with guns and driven by crazy murderers. This sequence added quite a bit of entertainment value to the doc, but for a story that has both a prologue and an epilogue, it probably could have been excised for brevity’s sake. I did find myself looking at my watch every couple minutes by the end.
Overall, this is an effective film though, especially for those who are fans of Herzog already. He gives us a real awful story, colors it with depressing details about the lives of all the people involved, adds complications when he reveals that some of the victims weren’t really great people either, adds further complications when he reveals that the police surely used excessive force and created a dangerous shootout situation when apprehending the boys, and he even manages to bring things around full circle at the end of the film by giving us some indication that another generation of ignorant hillbillies is being reared to someday take over the Hellscape of this rural community. On the surface Into the Abyss is a documentary about the death penalty, but in its heart it’s actually the most effective horror movie set in conservative Texas (a place with a rich tradition of chainsaw massacres) that’s come out in quite a while. There’s no need to create fictional movie monsters when the things that we do to ourselves and the people who live on the fringes of our society are scary enough already.
