Reenactment as Untruth: Errol Morris and the Thin Blue Line

As a Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow, Errol Morris ranks among the most academically-minded documentarians. His films explore difficult philosophical issues of truth and meaning, which he is always eager to discuss at length in interviews and in his high-profile New York Times column. In all of these venues, he frequently returns to a question of great interest to cognitive scientists: to what extent does the mind construct reality rather than capturing it as it is? This question is also at the heart of the way Morris distinguishes his philosophy of documentary film-making from the cinéma vérité movement. In this paper, I first establish the terms of the question itself and then review the film The Thin Blue Line, especially its use of reenactment, in the context of Morris' career-spanning attempt to answer it. Morris' primary influences were not from inside the documentary establishment: " the documentaries I saw were by Buñuel, Herzog, and Georges Franju – not the Maysles or Leacock and Pennebaker " [1]. Early in his career, he spent a great deal of time at the Pacific Film Archive, where he subsisted on a diet of Dreyer, Hawks, Renoir, and Nicholas Ray, who are known for their classic fictional films: The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Big Sleep, Grand Illusion, Rebel Without a Cause. Through these experiences, Morris came to believe that fictional stories can draw our attention to essential details or themes that factual accounts cannot. As Tim O'Brien wrote, " Our myths are stories or images that are not always true in particular but entirely true in general " [2]. This stands in stark contrast with the ideals of cinéma vérité, which sought truth by pure, unadulterated replication of reality through the lens of a camera. All the rules are set up to minimize interference: " No lights, no tripod, no microphone boom or pole.. . never ask anyone to do anything