Mr. Death - Grandeur et décadence de 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.

Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the subject of this documentary, is a lonely man, and so a man of narrow acumen, because he's just appreciative to be liked, even by Nazi sympathizers. Errol Morris conjoins montages and music into a movie that is more reflection than subjective report. Fred Leuchter, the son of a prison warden, relatively floundered into the Death Row business. An engineer by training, he was inspired by the urge for more competent and compassionate execution apparatuses. He'd seen electric chairs that fried their sufferers without killing them, poison gas chambers that endangered the witnesses, gallows not efficiently constructed to break the neck. He went to work fashioning better versions of these devices, and soon prisons throughout the US were taking his council.

Notwithstanding his advance in trade, he was not, we understand, particularly well-received socially, though he does come to marry a waitress he meets owing to his habit of more than forty cups of coffee a day. We hear her offscreen voice as she balks at Fred's belief that their trip to Auschwitz was their honeymoon, where she had to wait in a freezing car, looking out for guards. Leuchter's visit to Auschwitz was the crossroads in his work. He was asked by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier to provide a professional opinion at his trial. Zundel financed Leuchter's 1988 trip, where he chiseled off chunks of brick and mortar in buildings used as gas chambers and had them examined for leftover cyanide. He resolves that the chambers never had capacity for gas.

There is a fault in his report, needless to say. The lab technician who analyzed the samples for him protests that cyanide would sink into bricks but to the measure of one-tenth of a hair. By chiseling large bits, Leuchter had eroded his sampling by several thousand times, not even taking into account the ravages of half a century. To find cyanide would have been supernatural. No bother. Leuchter became a darling after-dinner mouthpiece in the neo-Nazi circle, and the camera captures how his face illuminates and his whole body appears to embrace their cheers and ovations, how thrilled he is to shake hands with his new friends. Other people might recoil from the derelict position of a Holocaust denier, to say the least. An executioner is a derelict anyway and finds his friends where he can.

No filmmaker can be accountable for those reluctant or unfit to take in his or her film with a discerning view. Anyone who leaves this deeply unsettling film concurring with Leuchter lays claim with him on the verge of psychosis. What's unsettling about the film is the way Leuchter is fairly honorable up till the point at which the neo-Nazis sink their talons into him. Those who are revolted by ethnic cleansing and other forms of government-sponsored genocide sometimes have no pangs when the state executes them one by one, testing them on elephants as is appallingly shown early in this film through dog-eared stock footage. One can even be a two-term president after governing the most restless American Death Row on record.

In cinema, the Holocaust intensifies melodrama in that the conquest of the soul never struck so victorious against atrocity, because the atrocity is so confounding. Morris's haunting documentary tries to do something distinct. It's to attempt to penetrate the thought process of denial. You meditate on the general concept of denial, not as some postwar sensation but as something that was intrinsic in the undertaking itself. Those people did those things. The mystery is how. It's about deciphering why Fred Leuchter holds these beliefs.

There is paradox in of so many U.S. states heaping tax money on this guy's work, just to oust him because of his distasteful affiliations. The capability of so many people to live contentedly with the notion of capital punishment may be a hint to how so many Europeans could live with the Holocaust: When you swallow the idea that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to decide what is a cardinal wrongdoing, you're nearly there. Mr. Death offers no complacent position of judgment. He doesn't make it obvious for us with light ethical categorizations, because people are formidably paradoxical and can get their minds around fearsomely peculiar notions.

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.

This is the story about how the world's foremost authority on gas chambers and all methods of executions proved that the Nazi "gas chambers" could have never operated the way historians claim. It completely destroyed his life, proving that Jews control the world. I assume Errol Morris wasn't intending on letting his feelings be known but it seems like he tries hard to make Leuchter look like a bad man and he consistently fails. It's really strange that he would make dramatic recreations of stuff that happened. That has no place in a documentary. The most interesting thing about the movie is that everyone who tries to discredit or insult Leuchter has absolutely no facts or real argument. They can only say things like he "desecrated a holy land" or "wasn't qualified". After the Jewish man who did the tests on the concrete samples and then testified that his results and report were 100% accurate and true, found out what the trial was about, he quickly says that he performed the wrong tests. The only argument anyone can muster is "you have to be crazy to say this". They claim Leuchter just wanted the spotlight but it's very clear that's not true. He was dragged into a court case and provided expert testimony, without bias. The only accurate statement his detractors made is that he came from nowhere and returned to nowhere. It's not only true, it's all he wanted and it doesn't even matter. This movie proves he is right.