Kevin,

You raise a lot of intriguing points. Unfortunately I haven't seen "The
Fog of War," but I have a chance to see "Elephant" soon that I'm
planning to take advantage of, so perhaps I'll put off a full response
for ten days or so. But here's one thought: "Capturing the Friedmans" is
a kind of journalism. Jarecki is telling a story. And since I've written
journalism as well as criticism, I know one thing for sure: that the
journalist is always sorely tempted to tell an interesting story.
Editors, and the public, are often more interested in a well-told
entertaining story than in the truth. And so the temptation is always
there to embellish in one way or another, or to tilt in one way or
another, as the mom quoted by the Times suspects. One of my
disappointments with "Friedmans" is that it didn't seem all that
profound an investigation of the "process," though I do suspect all such
investigations are slanted one way or another. Vertov's "The Man With a
Movie Camera," which is a profound investigation, certainly is also
slanted. I suspect that every film, especially every film that's any
good, somewhat "disables" (your word) the viewer, because every film is
skewed somehow. I take that skewing to be an inevitable result of human
subjectivity, not a necessary product of the investigative process,
except insofar as that process depends on humans.

But the Vertov film is honest in its way. It espouses a certain
ideology, and tries to be true to that ideology in its choice of subject
matter, framing, and especially in its editing. "Capturing" purports to
be an objective investigation, and it apparently was not. The Times
article had two real red flags for me. One was that Jesse flunked a lie
detector test. I'd want to learn that from the film, and what his
"excuse" was, and also hear from an expert on how reliable such tests
are. I know they're not reliable enough to use in court, but I suspect
they are reasonably reliable. The other was the interview Jesse
supposedly gave from prison in which he admitted he molested and also
said his dad had molested him. If his guilty plea was the lie that he
now claims it was, what reason did he have for continuing that lie in
prison? There may be a good rebuttal to both of those pieces of evidence
against him, and he should also be allowed to give it. I can see how a
viewer of the film might be left wondering if some kids had been
molested by Jesse's dad, but I can't see how a viewer would seriously
believe that Jesse too had done it -- I certainly didn't.

- Fred