Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

He seems to be concocted by a joint effort between Flannery O'Connor and Philip Roth: Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. builds more humane death technology. He brings electric chairs into the twentieth century and suggests that TV sets be brought into the killing room for the victims of lethal injection. For a while, the director Errol Morris is fascinated by the visual properties of geeky, big-gummed, brown-suited Fred, who reveals his churning interior self in only one way: he confesses to consuming forty cups of coffee and six packs of cigarettes a day. He seems like the obsessive, narrowly niche-defined folk of Morris' FAST, CHEAP AND OUT OF CONTROL--AI geeks and topiary gardeners. Then history intervenes.

A Holocaust denier on trial for libel in Canada calls Fred as his star witness, proclaiming this mix of Babbitt and Kevorkian as a world-class expert. And so Fred takes his bride (the waitress who served him his daily forty cups) on a honeymoon to Auschwitz, where, in an almost comic act of desecration, he hacks chunks of brick from the deathhouse walls to prove they contain no Zyklon B. After pride cometh a fall, and Fred is ruined--and in the process Morris has minted a meditation on the roots of evil that joins together "Twin Peaks" and Sophocles.

The most tightly focussed and probably the best of Morris' documentary features, MR. DEATH is probably the most eloquent spokesman of Morris' continuing theme--the metaphysical delusions ordinary mortals use to get through their very mortal days and nights.

Errol Morris has certainly 'injected' (pardon my contextural

pun) a bit of energy into the documentary form, even if the

films he makes lie somewhere outside its confines. Mr Death,

with its characteristic visual flourishes and tangents, is no

exception to this, though it does contain excerpts of a 'true'

documentary of Leuchter pilfering 'evidence' from Auschwitz.

Morris' film refutes Leuchter's findings to the point that the

only viewer who would give tham any credence would have to be as

biased as Ernst Zündel, the revisionist publisher whom

Leuchter's testimony defended. One detail of the film sticks out

in my mind... the home movies of young Leuchter accompanying his

father to work at the local prison, where he pals around with

the convicts, and explains how he learned at this tender age to

pick locks, pockets and safes... and with audible smugness

relates that these skills have actually aided him later in life.

The image of this boy nebbish, undoubtedly an outcast and loner

at school and socially, gaining acceptance amongst the convicts

helps to explain why such an intelligent and resourceful person

could be duped by the likes of the pinheaded, hateful Neo-Nazi

Revisionists. Here's a group of 'bad guys' accepting, applauding, listening and agreeing to Leuchter. Of course this

is because his undeniably faulted research supports their own

misguided conclusions. But it mirrors his experiences as a boy

among the convicts and provides a strong psychological

foundation for Leuchter's downfall into his delusional world. I'd recommend this film to anyone who enjoys thought-provoking

cinema, realizing that they are sadly in a minority amongst

filmgoers.

Leuchter is an expert in execution technology (designer of electric chairs, gas chambers, etc.), whose career was wiped out when he got swept up in the Holocaust revisionism movement (he testified, as an expert witness in a defamation suit, that the Auschwitz crematoria could not and did not serve as gas chambers). In this vivid documentary, Morris lets Leuchter speak for himself (which reveals him to be a man of limited horizons with a - let's say - quirky moral code, likely undone by hubris rather than evil [although Morris may deliberately be making that as far as possible an eye-of-the-beholder issue]), while providing a blizzard of visual accompaniments that emphasize the lurid raw material of Leuchter's life (a strategy indicated by the B-movie undertone of the title), and flirt with his obvious sense of his own heroism. Leuchter has more than enough rope here to hang himself, and pretty much gets the job done. Morris doesn't try to explore the issue of Holocaust revisionism generally, pretty much taking our revulsion on faith: if anything, from my limited previous reading on the subject, that's doing Leuchter a favor. Anyway, revulsion or not, it's hard not to be fascinated by a man who can calmly chatter about his value-pricing approach to selling death machines (although custom made, he tells us, they're sold at "off the shelf" prices).

In Errol Morris's film, "Mr. Death", Fred Leuchter Jr. comes across as a passionless, mechanical robot, fitting the engineering profession that he devoted his life to. Leuchter, the innovator of many death penalty devices and subsequently the only scientist willing to testify favorably in a celebrated Canadian trial that questioned the existence of the Holocaust, is either a hero to some or a villain to many. Morris, except for a Frankenstein-inspired opening and closing set in the film, prefers to let Leuchter be Leuchter rather than adding more contempt to a decidedly pitiful figure. The one time Morris does appear to interfere is when he asked Leuchter point blank if he could have been mistaken in any of his analysis. There are also camera tricks which render what Leuchter did as malicious, such as the split screen between what was Auschwitz and now, the slow-motion as Leuchter is chipping away at sites many Jews consider holy ground, and the phasing in and out of color and black and white film as we see Leuchter demonstrate his electric chair. The motivation behind what he did lies at the heart of "Mr. Death". He aspired to perfect the most humane killing machine because he said he believed in capital punishment, not capital torture. He cared that prison guards who knew the death-row inmates well would not have to suffer cleaning up the morbid residuals of those electrocuted. Yet he tried to carry this same mind-set in understanding the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In his mechanical mind, he asked how he could have done a better job of extermination. "Mr. Death" is an unpleasant but needed lesson about the mosaic people who live and work with each of us everyday - a people who seem anti-social yet amoral and who seem to be guided by that inner light that we can barely know or understand.

MR DEATH is one of my favourite types of documentary: those that tell a story you're completely unfamiliar with, but which turn out to be extremely compelling and indeed gripping thanks to the stuff being presented. In many ways, this is a simple story of one man's fame and later infamy, although director Morris uses it as a springboard to embrace some wider concepts, such as capital punishment and the Holocaust.

One of the important things that I took away from this was that Leuchter is no villain: just a misguided man who didn't necessarily deserve all the hatred aimed at him. Yes, he made a grievous mistake, but to destroy his life as a result of that error? "Let he who is without sin...", etc. The political side of the documentary is especially interesting as a result.