I finally caught up with The Jinx, and even with the spoilers (thanks for nothing, New York Times), wow was that ending riveting! What an amazing documentary, and what an amazing scene!
But though the final revelations of The Jinx (spoilers from here on out, people) were mostly about Bob Durst and whether he indeed killed three people, much of the chatter even a week later is about Andrew Jarecki, the series’ maker: what he knew, when he knew it, and whether he honestly represented the actual timeline of his discoveries in the documentary.
At Badass Digest, Devin Faraci has a concise rejoinder to the people worrying over these issues: Who cares? Here’s Faraci:
The boring worker ant of the culture can sift through timelines and makes sure that cause and effect line up. But Jarecki has found, in this remarkable mini-series, an ecstatic truth, a larger truth about Robert Durst and who he is and what he has done. What’s more, it has communicated it to us in a way that is thrilling and engrossing, that allows us to journey and understand, that isn’t just a Wikipedia summary of a series of facts.
Faraci’s right about at least one thing: in The Jinx, Jarecki has managed to craft, from real events, a thrilling and engrossing story that brings its audience to an ecstatic truth about Robert Durst and about human nature. The final scene of Durst cooly denying evidence that he had killed Susan Berman while his body rebelled against him with a series of weird burps (seriously, WTF was going on there?), together with the coda in which Durst seemingly whispered a confession into a hot mic while in the bathroom, was more illuminating on the nature of evil and self-deception than a dozen philosophical treatises and psychological studies put together.
But where Faraci is on shakier ground is in the implied assertion that the ecstatic truths of The Jinx effectively erase any concerns about the facts, and that the only people who could care about such things are pedantic dullards. It smacks somewhat of the argument (which, to be fair, Faraci did not make) that the behavior and crimes of artists do not matter next to the work that they create. That’s wrong. Art matters, but so does life—and the cold hard facts of The Jinx matter at least as much as the larger truths that the series unearths.
I don’t care any more than Faraci does about whether or not Jarecki fudged the timing of that climactic interview—if he bent the truth to make it appear as though he was using Durst’s arrest to get him back on camera and to make the last episode more suspenseful, so be it. But if Jarecki and company withheld information or were slow to disclose information to the police, allowing this probable murderer to remain on the street for longer than he might have been otherwise, then that’s a problem for me. (Even if it isn’t a crime.) For instance, Jarecki claims that he and his crew didn’t discover the climactic audio until a year after it had been recorded—a plausible enough claim, as Faraci points out, given how much excess footage documentary crews amass and never bother to listen to. Except that Durst, in an earlier interview, had already shown a penchant for whispering relevant information into a hot mic when he thought no one was listening. The notion that Jarecki and company, moments after the big interview they’d been working months to get, wouldn’t notice that Durst was going to the bathroom with his mic still on or listen in hoping that he made the same mistake again is dubious at best.
But that’s just nitpicking. A more important issue that Faraci fails to acknowledge is that these questions about whether or not the filmmakers always acted ethically are not actually extraneous to The Jinx as a work of documentary filmmaking. They’re central to the text. In fact, there’s a strong case to be made that Jarecki takes pains, in the last two episodes especially, to establish himself as a compromised figure willing to take ethical shortcuts in pursuit of a great story, an Ahab-like character who does whatever it takes to get his white whale.
Early on, Jarecki is barely present in The Jinx—if my memory serves (and I trust readers will correct me if it doesn’t), he doesn’t speak or appear on camera until the third episode. The filmmaker’s early absence give these episodes the illusion (and it is an illusion; it’s always an illusion) of journalistic objectivity. Midway in the series, Jarecki begins to appear more on camera, and by the last two episodes he’s a full-fledged character in the film alongside Bob Durst: human, imperfect, subjective, and possessing his own reasons for being interested in this story, not all of them pure. Jarecki himself admits on-camera to having been compromised by Durst on some level: he likes the guy, and wants to believe him. Later, when Jarecki gets evidence suggesting Durst’s guilt, he’s compromised by something else entirely: an obsession with getting a final interview and a killer ending for his documentary.
Jarecki’s emergence as a character in his own documentary destabilizes the relationship between art, artist, and audience. It calls attention to the subjective, constructed nature of the series, and calls the reliability of the storyteller into question. It raises the very questions that those nitpicking the documentary’s timeline are concerned about. And it does so organically within the work itself. When Jarecki and his crew discover the letter that finally incriminates Durst in the death of Susan Berman, the audience doesn’t have to wonder whether they withheld the evidence from police—because they are shown deciding to withhold the letter and put it in a safe deposit box instead in the very documentary they are creating! And the finale episode, in which the filmmakers try to pin down Durst for the final interview, actually creates the impression that Jarecki and his collaborators withheld the key evidence from police in order to give themselves time to get that final, epic sit-down.
Jarecki may have acted perfectly ethically behind the scenes—it’s entirely possible that the documentary makes him look worse and more compromised than he really is. Whether Jarecki is conscious of portraying himself in this way, I don’t know. It would almost be more interesting if it weren’t conscious: the story of a possible murderer becoming a covert confession of the moral compromises inherent in trying to make good art. I’m reminded of the Eels’ song “Fresh Blood,” which began every episode; the lyrics “sweet baby, I need fresh blood” could just as well apply to Jarecki as they could to Durst. What, after all, does every artist seek if not fresh blood, fresh material, fresh subject matter for a new work?
The point is that while The Jinx successfully marshaled the facts in service of an “ecstatic truth,” the idea that great art comes at a cost is itself among the truths that The Jinx explores.
We’re meant to be wowed by the last scene. But if the next thought in our minds is to wonder about the process of getting there, about the cost of art—well, that’s probably intentional too.
