Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. - 1999
Directed by Errol Morris
Produced by Dorothy Aufiero, David Collins, Errol Morris & Michael Williams
Featuring Fred A. Leuchter
Contains some spoilers
Man. You can be so intelligent in one small field of enterprise or knowledge, and completely lacking and naïve in others - which I think is one of the lessons of
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. I had no idea of where this film was going to go, so when we segued from Leuchter's repair and design of various execution equipment to the Holocaust I became particularly uncomfortable. That discomfort got a lot worse as Leuchter's clumsy experiments and general lack of historical awareness led him down a very narrow road to nowhere (that nowhere being encamped with Holocaust denialism.) To tell you the truth, I didn't mind that man until that point, and even after he ended up amongst a bad crowd, his personality kept making him sympathetic. He didn't seem like a bad person - just misguided, a little narcissistic and somewhat silly. He shouldn't have gone anywhere near this field of study, even with his scant experience with gas chambers. Footage of him chipping away at bricks in Auschwitz was particularly painful.
So, with the general way this documentary was presented, I found the opening credits to be headache inducing and a little disorientating - the flashing lights and blue colours kind of aggravating. I had no problems after that - and the photographic and video stuff shot inside execution chambers had my morbid curiosity going. That "ghost photo" of the electric chair in Tennessee was a definite sign that Leuchter is willing to put his scientific mind on pause for flights of fancy - but I love "ghost photos" even though I'm never convinced by them. I just love to be a little spooked - so there must be a percentage of me that does allow for the supernatural. Leuchter narrates his own story, and he has plenty of rope with which to hang himself with, which is kind of fitting really. When students first watched this film by Errol Morris they thought it was espousing a Holocaust denial point of view - but Morris though Leuchter's flaws were self evident. I think you have to factor in for people who aren't really intelligent - because I can imagine others taking the wrong message away from it without the extra emphasis Morris put on the disproving of Leuchter's theories.
There was one short film included in this documentary that I'd seen once before, and thank goodness I had, for it allowed me to cover my eyes so I didn't have to witness it again. I find
Electrocuting an Elephant, from 1903, pretty distressing - but it does confront you with the naked truth of execution through means of electricity and how horrifying it really is. I'm sickened by the film, and although the elephant in question, named "Topsy" was a troublesome beast in captivity, I still don't think it deserved to be the subject of such an unusual method of being put down. To me, when I watched the video, it seemed that it suffered - but I might be wrong. I hope I am wrong, and Topsy was rendered unconscious immediately. A short warning before we see the footage might offer some of us animal lovers a chance to choose whether we watch it or not, but I guess if we're watching a film about execution methods and the Holocaust that was made in the '90s Morris may assume that we have the constitution to handle it.
So, all in all, a film that really gives us some insight into Fred Leuchter's thought processes - the part where he delivers a speech to a bunch of Holocaust deniers - obvious pride on his face - is pretty damning. Like Prince Andrew, he probably walked away from his interviews thinking he'd done a good job and that people would see how persecuted he was. In the same kind of way he has a blinkered view of history, he also doesn't realise that what he's said is pretty damning. As I think about him, any sympathy I may have had initially is draining away. This is exactly the kind of guy who would have risen to a high level within the SS during those dark days in Germany - somebody who doesn't flinch when it comes to execution, and somebody who approaches the subject in a very analytical manner, without any empathy. Oh sure - he's against torture, but he seems to lack that feeling most of us have when it comes to taking another life. Good for executions on a technical level - but bad for virtually anything outside of the lab or engineering office. What Morris does is allow us to see that very clearly, with Leuchter's own words.