Fate, Mr. Death, and The Man Who Wasn't There

Tonight I went to see a free concert at the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Landmarks Orchestra played Walter Kim's world premiere Soaring Over the Vast Expanse, and Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D minor, concluding with his 4th Symphony. Mt musician friend who I met there pointed out a Fate motif in the first and last movements of the 4th Symphony, expressed in an A flat chord, something like Beethoven's 5th. According to my brief research, I gathered that the composer's expression, as a Romantic, was more personal and relational than fits my imagination at the moment, but the simple statement, "Fate," got me thinking.

I also recently watched a film and documentary that were oddly connected by the topic/event of capital punishment. In the first, we follow a character who is lead through a chain of personal decisions that cause his world to gradually explode in his face, capitulating in a final flash in the electric chair. The film is the Coen brother's The Man Who Wasn't There, and Ed Crane fits very neatly into the titular description. He is largely ignored or unnoticed by the people he interacts with--and this is a man who hardly ever talks, played by Billy Bob Thornton--and as a result, dealing with a more active, albeit criminal, man turns his life upside down. While it affects his life, the most poignant point is that his decisions impact the people around him, but they hardly know how or why. He makes a few decisions, and the way they knit into the rest of the story--the things out of his control--lead to, in short, his Fate. The man who was hardly noticed is finally and completely removed from society when he is accused of a murder he did not commit, but cannot own up to in order to cover up the murder he did commit. In short his decisions catch up with him, but not in a way you'd expect them to, which is the artfulness of the writing and direction of the film.

On the other hand is Mr. Leuchter, of Errol Morris' Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., who designed and improved instruments of various state capital punishment facilities, as a proponent of capital punishment, not torture. He is more known for his involvement in the Canadian trial of a Mr. Zündel, who questioned the legitimacy of claims about the Holocaust. Morris does an effective job of neither supporting or outright damning Leuchter's work, although he clearly demonstrates the folly in Leuchter's persistence in his beliefs--he gives the viewer reasonable doubt, in a sense.

I'd recommend, with discretion and a cup of tea, both of these films, for their evocative narrative and their clear portrayal of the human condition. Ed Crane has hopes and morals, but they are crashed in on by the world around him when he thinks he might be able to get away with it. In the end, he was outdone by others' evil on top of his own. You sympathize with him, because you don't think it was all his fault--he made some bad choices, but only because others messed things up for him. You can see that he had pure intentions, and was only okay with hurting people who had done him wrong first (it's a start, I guess). It's something you can still be hopeful in, in away, despite its tragic elements. Leuchter, on the other hand, seems to fall prey to his own ego, having started with a dignified basis on his morals and beliefs. Once he decides to become an anti-Holocaust proponent, his world crumbles around him, and he is a broken man, Morris points out. While we aren't told directly that he is right or wrong, we are given enough reason to understand how he might be wrong. But since his life is destroyed, all he has left to live for are other Revisionists magnifying his single study, whether he was qualified to assert his findings or not. In both cases we are given the picture of a simpleton, to quote their detractors. They seem to be in over their heads, and their own decisions have spun out of their reach, out of their control. In short, they are lost to Fate, and can only await whatever Fate has in store for them.