A little over five years ago, Court TV decided to do a program called “Confession” that would run videos of actual interrogations, provided by the Manhattan DA’s office. I was invited to watch the pilot (I had just published a book called “Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law & Literature”). Court TV aborted the program after only two episodes, I believe: it was judged to be somehow too horrible, obscene, degrading.
Too much reality, perhaps? What struck me in the confessions I watched was less the reality than the theatricality: these characters were clearly in some sense enjoying their moment before the camera. They appeared to be beyond the reach of any standard notion of morality. One, I recall, told in precise detail of “dissecting” the corpse of his girl friend, whom he had killed in a beating for which he apparently took no responsibility. The program more and more came to resemble a monster show. And I imagine that was what the DA’s office intended: show the public that there is no reason for sympathy with those the police take into custody, and every reason to be grateful to the NYPD and the DA for putting such monsters behind bars.
It was the opposite of a look at the reality of criminal interrogations and confessions: it wholly lacked context. Who were these people? What led up to their decision to spill the beans? (the Court TV videos only showed the climax of what may have been a protracted interrogation—or maybe not). What triggered this simultaneous display of abjection and self-aggrandizement? If the horrendous acts confessed to were accurate (we assume), what was the larger truth of the person?
I left feeling that only Dostoevsky could do justice to the question of truth in and of confession. I suggest rereading Dimitri’s trial in “The Brothers Karamazov.”
Peter Brooks
Wish they'd bring that back. It's just too fascinating.
Posted by: nunzias | February 03, 2006 at 02:20 PM