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No system of justice is fool-proof. No human institution is fool-proof. In France, in the UK, we can find numerous examples of judicial error and of wrongful conviction. But although such errors may cost the innocent dear, they do not take their lives. Randall Adams came within three days of execution, and spent over three years on Death Row. It was because Adams was sentenced to death that Errol Morris came to meet him, and it was because he was on Death Row that Morris made the film.

The United States is often regarded as being something of a stand-out, its retention of the death penalty an anachronism, an American peculiarity. The reality is that state executions still take place in many parts of the world. For example, the killing of criminals is current in China: no-one knows how many people are put to death by the state every year, but a recent estimate was of 5,000 in a single year.

China is, of course, an authoritarian régime. But there are democracies that also use the death penalty: India is one example – although, like other countries that keep the penalty on its statute books, it uses it very rarely. Japan and South Korea also have it. However, there does seem to be a general movement towards its abolition. Often a nation will simply stop using the punishment for some time before they actually strike it from the books.

As the sociologist David Garland points out, we cannot conclude from this that the USA is a special case. To begin with, the USA is a federation of states, and not all of them have maintained the death penalty. The state of Michigan was one of the earliest judiciaries in the world to abolish it, and did so in 1847. For comparison, France abolished the penalty in 1981: the last person executed there, a Tunisian named Hamida Djandoubi, died in 1977. In England, the last two people were hanged in 1964, accomplices in a robbery and murder. The penalty was abolished in the following year, for a trial period of five years. Abolition was later confirmed.

In the United States, the death penalty was suspended in all states for a period between 1972 and 1976, the Supreme Court having found that the laws as they stood could not guarantee equitable trials. The system was, they found, arbitrary and capricious. The different states reformed their statutes, and the Supreme Court was satisfied with the new laws; executions could begin once more.

However, as we have seen, not all US states have death penalty statutes. Of those that do, not all of them make great use of the penalty, and, to all intents and purposes, we can say that the death penalty at present is a phenomenon that is concentrated in the Southern States. Among those states, Texas is the one that executes the greatest numbers – there were 17 executions in the state in 2010.

Randall Adams and his brother Ray were making their way across the United States from Ohio, heading for somewhere warm to spend the winter. Adams suffered from arthritis, and this was particularly troublesome to him in the winter months. They were on their way to California. Ohio is a death penalty state, but actually executes very few murderers. California has more people sentenced to death than Texas, but executes less of them. One evening during their journey, stopping in Nashville, the two brothers decided not to continue to California, but to try their luck in Dallas.

The film-maker had come to Texas to make a documentary about the notorious Dr. Grigson, often known as ‘Dr. Death’. Grigson was a psychologist who was regularly called to testify as an expert witness by the prosecution in capital cases. He was renowned for always advising that the condemned prisoner was certainly dangerous, and likely to kill again. This he did, once again, in the case of Adams. This testimony, added to the fact that Adams had killed a policeman, for no comprehensible reason (the prosecution argued that he had been trying to impress the 16-year-old David Harris), persuaded the jury to condemn Adams to death.

Because juries decide the penalty, prosecutors ask judges to exclude from death-penalty case juries anyone who has a principled objection to the death penalty such that they would be refuse to condemn someone to death. The Supreme Court has accepted such jury seeding, but does not allow the exclusion of jurors who, although they might be against the death penalty, nevertheless agree that they will abide by the present rules. It was this fine distinction that was to save Adams, for the prosecution in his case did not differentiate between those who were willing to apply the penalty, even though they objected to it, and those who would be unwilling to apply it.

The practice of jury seeding is, however, in itself problematic, for it has been shown that jurors who favour the death penalty are also less likely to be skeptical of the prosecution case, and more likely to find the accused guilty than are those who do not favour the penalty. People who are accused of capital murder, and whose juries have been seeded in the usual way, have a greater difficulty in convincing the jury of their innocence than do the accused in non-capital cases, where more liberal-minded jurors, less disposed to accept the voice of authority, are more likely to be present.

(see On the Fairness of Death-Penalty Jurors: A Comparison of Bayesian Models with Different Levels of Hierarchy and Various Missing-Data Mechanisms, by Elizabeth A. Stasny, Joseph B. Kadane, Kathleen S. Fritsch, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 93, No. 442 (Jun., 1998), pp. 464- 477

Vidor has a population of some 11,000, most of whom, says Dave Anderson, a photographer whose book Rough Beauty  is set there, are extremely poor. In the recent past, it was indeed a centre of KKK activity, and it was one of the many small southern towns that actively discouraged black people from settling. Such places were known as ‘Sundown towns’, as many of them would have signs telling all non-whites to be gone by the time the sun set. Today, it is still largely a white town.

Vidor is a town where most of the people hunt, and own guns. David Harris will have grown up knowing how to use them, and he also knew how to take care of them: Sam Kittrell recounts how the boy had wrapped the murder weapon up so well that it survived being sunk in water for a fortnight without suffering any damage.

Although there is much poverty in Vidor, and despite its racist past, there is comparatively little violence there. Theft is somewhat above the national average, which is probably due to the fact that many people are living on or below the breadline. But David Harris cannot be seen as a natural product of his surroundings. Many people in Vidor know how to use guns, but they don’t shoot other people with them.

Almost everyone who has had contact with Harris, other than his various victims, agrees that he was a bright and charming young man. Even when they know the truth about him, they are liable to be taken in by his cheerful smile and his superficially open demeanour. He was, says one of the Dallas detectives, a friendly kid. Sam Kittrell, the police officer who knew him best, tells us that in his dealings with him, the boy was always polite, cordial, never disrespectful. He speaks about ‘little David’ with a certain tenderness, a tenderness which is shared by most of the people in his home town, for they close ranks to protect him when Dennis White comes down looking to convict him of the Wood murder.

These traits are typical of the psychopath or sociopath. According to the Psychopathology Check List, such a person is someone who highly narcissistic, and who has a thoroughly deviant lifestyle. He or she is superficially charming, has little deep attachment to others, feels no remorse for any harm he causes, tells lies, and blames others when things go wrong. The person is impulsive, always looking for excitement, and is unable to think ahead and make plans. But on first acquaintance, you are unlikely to be aware that you are in the presence of a dangerous individual. The psychologist, Hervey M. Cleckley, an influential specialist on the subject, put it :

“…More often than not, the typical psychopath will seem particularly agreeable and make a distinctly positive impression when he is first encountered. Alert and friendly in his attitude, he is easy to talk with and seems to have a good many genuine interests. There is nothing at all odd or queer about him, and in every respect he tends to embody the concept of a well-adjusted, happy person.

Such people are fairly rare, and are not always quite as dangerous as David Harris. It is sometimes claimed that they are well represented in Board Rooms and on Wall Street. Nor is it altogether clear that the diagnosis is fully accepted by the psychological profession: as Olivier Moyano points out, it has been absent from international systems of classification since the end of the 80s. It is not, he insists, a mental illness, but rather a complex disturbance of the personality.

American specialists tend to see the condition as innate: you are born a psychopath. European psychological traditions, on the other hand, see it is mainly environmental in origin, a product of family, culture and society. (In the USA, psychologists distinguish between the psychopath and the sociopath, the latter personality type being the result of childhood trauma). The Americans also see it as incurable, rooted as it is in the fundamental structure of the person. This has political and social consequences: if you believe that an evil-doer cannot be reformed in any way, then your duty to society is to remove him or her from that society, and ensure that no further harm may ensue. Lock them up, and throw away the key, or strap them to a gurney and inject them with a lethal drug.

It also leads to a particular way of reading the biography of the delinquent. For the psychologist who believes that personality is developed through interaction with family, friends, and the wider society, then a delinquent who has had a tumultuous childhood can be seen as, in some way, the victim of his upbringing. In the other hand, if the worm was in the bud from the start, then childhood difficulties can be explained as the desperate attempts of families and schools to deal with the atrocious behaviour of a child who was born bad.

How does Morris’s film approach David Harris? Several witnesses in The Thin Blue Line advance evidence for his psychopathy, although the term itself is never used. The most eloquent of these is the Vidor policeman, Sam Kittrell, who gives us several glimpses of Harris’s insouciance, such as when he amuses himself by holding up his handcuffs to passers-by and claiming that the police are planning on drowning him. He also tells us that David is a habitual liar, that he always manages to put the blame on someone else, even arguing that the victim of his final murder brought it upon himself.

But there are others: David has no conscience, one of his friends tells us, contrasting the boy’s attitude with his own feelings of guilt whenever he had done wrong. Randall Adams gives instances of David’s impetuous behaviour, waving his pistol around and shooting at a road sign. And once we have picked up on these clues, we can see the void behind the charm in David’s own appearances on the screen, his evasions, his self-justifications, and his attempt, even once he has come close to admitting that Adams was not in the car at the time of the crime, and had not pulled the trigger, to lay the blame on the older man’s shoulders.

Is there an explanation for Harris’s psychopathy? As I suggested in an earlier post, Morris, following up on a lead from Sam Kittrell, prompts Harris to recall the death of his elder brother when he himself was three years old. He feels that his father, who he sees as having been derelict in his oversight of the two boys, blamed him for the accident, and was hard with him from then on, adding a lack of affection to the trauma of sibling loss. But Morris is not overly interested in Harris’s back-story, and lets it drop there: we hear nothing from David’s parents, and his friends do not, on screen, make anything of their pal’s homelife.

We do know that David uses drugs; when he meets Adams at the age of sixteen, he is already no stranger to alcohol or marijuana. If he had been using these regularly from childhood, then this may well have affected his brain, preventing full development of adult conscience.

In the end, Harris is condemned to death for a second murder. We know that in order to condemn him to the capital sentence, the state had to prove that he was likely to kill again. For the state of Texas, David Harris was an incurable killer.

In The Thin Blue Line, the ashtray figures as a prominent artifact. In the reconstructed scenes of Randall Adams’s interrogation, we see butt after butt crushed into a filling tray. We can see it as a measure of time, as a series of small death sentences. But we see it again, during one of the scenes that Morris includes from the movies that Adams and Harris watched in the drive-in movie. It is from the first of the two features, a soft-porn flick entitled ‘The Student Body’.

Ironically, this film is about a group of convicts; a group of young women have been sentenced to prison, and have now been allowed to leave on condition that they join an experimental educational institution. The heroine discovers that they are receiving a drug that, instead of making them less delinquent, renders them wilful and uncontrollable. In the scene that Morris inserts, she is making a dramatic speech to her comrades, and to one of the professors. “What’s this?” she cries, seizing an object from his desk. “It’s an ashtray,” he replies. “No, it isn’t,” she declares, “it’s a wall-breaker!” and she hurls it at the wall.

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In the first of a series of opinion pieces written for The New York Times in March 2011, entitled The Ashtray, Morris recounts the story of the day when his graduate school professor, Thomas Kuhn, threw an ashtray at him. He did this, says Morris, at the end of an argument about the ‘incommensurability of paradigms’, and it constituted what Morris tells us he calls ‘the Ashtray argument’:

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

Now, this is a rather strange story. It is a story about an argument, and it also a story about a betrayal, or a putative betrayal, for Kuhn is, by Morris’s account, angry with Morris because he has been attending lectures given by one of his academic enemies. I’ll leave you to work through the arguments for yourselves, because I’m not directly interested in them here. The point I’m picking up on is that, in some way, the ashtray seems to be connected in Morris’s mind with an incident in which a young man expecting aid from an older man is instead offered violent rejection.

Now, this is one of the stories that The Thin Blue Line tells. David Harris, a young man alone in the big city, lost and lonely, as Adams testifies in his book, is looking for both company and a place to sleep. Adams offers him the first, but, at the end of their afternoon together, tells him that there is not enough room in the motel room that he shares with his brother.

In his last interview, David Harris comes as close to making a confession to the crime as he ever came – unless he fully opened his heart to Sam Kittrell in the days before he was put to death as punishment for his second murder. Morris asks him whether he believes Adams to be innocent. He says that he does so believe, and then adds :

I’ve always thought if you could say why there’s a reason Randall Adams is in jail, it might be because the fact that he didn’t have no place for somebody to stay that helped him that night…landed him where’s he’s at…

Adams himself says that after he bade Harris farewell, he went to buy some cigarettes, and that when he returned, the boy was still standing by his car. The older man ignored him, and made his way back to his room. For that betrayal, Adams finds himself alone with an overfull ashtray.

This is an effect that Morris deliberately strove to accomplish. In his early films, he tells us, he would snuggle up to the camera, pressing his face so close to it that when his interviewee talked to him, he or she would almost be looking directly into the objective. This illusion of direct eye-contact between subject and spectator, says Morris, adds drama to the interview. The person is like a lover signalling affection, or a serial killer who is about to cut your throat.

Morris found that leaning into the camera during a long interview was uncomfortable, and so he developed what he called the ‘interrotron’, based on the teleprompter. The system has become very popular, apparently, and now you can rent one and try it for yourself. It involves the questioner sending an image of himself to a screen which the interviewee watches and responds to. So in the end, we are watching an image of a man or woman watching an image.

In each of the interrogatory sequences, the camera is fixed, as is the interviewee. There is no playing around with focus, or with point of view, and the image is closed. In fact, almost all the scenes are interiors, apart from the reconstructions of the crime, and three of the interviews. Apart from these three external interviews, the characters are set within their functional settings. Adams and Harris, the two prisoners, are in a cell, while the detectives are seen with a crime map in the background, or a sheriff’s office. The continually closed scenes are oppressive to the viewer, and it is with some relief that we find ourselves outside for the bucolic settings in which three of David Harris’s ‘partners in crime’ tell the story of Harris’s return to Vidor after killing Robert Wood, and talk to us about what kind of a person Harris is.

Using these techniques, Morris seems to be doing his utmost to abstract himself from his own work. At the beginning of his career, he tries to become one with the camera, and then, after the invention of the ‘interrotron’, is able to replace his flesh and blood with a video simulacre, almost as though he were running the interviewee through a Turing test. In ‘The Thin Blue Line’, we hear his voice only at the very end of the film, and even then we do not see him; indeed we don’t see his interviewee either, for the camera is fixed upon a tape-recorder from which the interrogation – and, pushing David Harris towards a final confession, Morris is here quite fully the interrogator – crackles its way to the film soundtrack.

‘The Thin Blue Line’ is a creation from which the Creator has retired. Morris’s objections to Postmodernism – or to the rather unsubtle version of Postmodernism that he takes to be its essence – are of a piece with his attempts to present the ‘objective reality’ of the world which he has himself constructed in a god-like manner. As Alejandro Adams has put it :

it often seems as if the film’s observations are those of a supercilious celestial being rather than those of a sympathetic fellow human.

Detective Morris is a master of ceremonies, a Hercule Poirot, who, at the end of the book, when the professionals have failed, and the wrong man has been arrested, shows us how Colonel Mustard, the Butler, the Motorist and the Singing Telegram Girl made their ways around the board, and who it was that, all along, had the gun.

C’était dans le train de Paris Nord à Pontoise, que j’ai pris à St. Denis à 16:17. On était arrivé à St. Ouen l’Aumône; le train s’est arrêté pendant un long moment. J’étais assis le nez vers Pontoise, un peu impatient d’arriver chez moi. Soudain deux mains, noires, les doigts longs et fins, de belles mains, se sont emparées de la chose. J’ai essayé de résister, mais comme vous avez pris le haut et le bas du pad, que moi je tenais par les côtés, vous avez rapidement pris le dessus. Je me suis levé pour vous poursuivre, je suis tombé en sortant du train. Je me suis repris, mais pas suffisamment; je suis tombé de nouveau, et quand je me suis relevé, vous étiez déjà en train de vous engouffrer dans le tunnel pour sortir de la gare.

Ce n’est pas tant la perte de la chose qui m’embête, à vrai dire. C’est mon outil de travail, et il faut que je le remplace, ce qui n’est pas rien, mais je savais ce que je risquais à essayer de mener une vie normale malgré votre existence. Pourtant, j’avoue que j’ai très envie de vous donner une belle râclée, de vous casser la figure: vous avez fait irruption dans le petit espace personnel que chacun espère garder pour lui dans les transports. Vous avez rompu la lecture, qui est ma façon à moi d’utiliser ce temps mort qu’est le passage du lieu du dodo à celui du boulot. C’était une agression, même si vous ne m’avez pas frappé.

Pire, le souvenir de cet instant revient et je me crispe, je me mets en colère: ce n’est pas bon pour les dents. J’ai envie de l’oublier, de ne pas être troublé par ces images de violence. En fait, c’est ça qui est le plus emmerdant dans l’affaire pour moi.

Mais vous? Vous êtes un voleur. Le voleur, il faut le dire, est un pauvre type: je n’aimerais pas être dans votre tête. Vous essayez, j’imagine, de voir vos actions comme justifiées, comme héroïques, même. Vous êtes la victime d’une société injuste, du racisme quotidien et structural, et là vous avez pris un peu de ce qui vous revient, un peu de ce luxe dont on vous montre les jouissances dans toutes les publicités, tous les films, tous les programmes de télévision. Vous avez arraché d’entre les mains de ce vieux bourgeois blanc un bien qui n’était le sien que parce que cette société est injuste. Vous êtes le jeune guerrier, le chasseur, le garçon qui fait ses preuves, qui a saisi le lion par la queue.

Mais en fait, vous savez bien que ce sont des bêtises. Vous volez à tous – les blancs, les noirs, les jaunes, les vieux, les jeunes. Vous volez quand l’occasion se présente. Et puis, vous n’êtes pas Robin des Bois; l’argent, c’est pour vous et pas pour les pauvres. D’ailleurs vous volez plus aux pauvres qu’aux riches: les riches ne sont pas nombreux à prendre les trains de banlieue. Et, même si vous savez bien que vous allez pouvoir vous en vanter devant les autres pauvres types comme vous,  vous savez aussi que devant les aînés, devant votre mère et votre père, vous n’allez rien en dire, que vous n’osez pas le dire, et que vous cachez votre honte devant eux.

Car, eux, ils ont honte, j’en suis certain. Je me souviens d’un jour où des jeunes filles ont arraché son porte-monnaie à ma femme, au milieu de Paris; à la suite de ce vol nous avons passé quelques heures dans le commissariat du quartier pour faire notre déposition. Pendant ce temps, plusieurs parents sont venus, effondrés, prendre des nouvelles de leur fils ou de leur fille, pris en flagrant délit de vol. C’étaient des gens biens, respectables, qui venaient d’apprendre que leur enfant avait – encore, peut-être – traversé la ligne qui sépare ceux qui vivent de ceux qui, comme des zombies, ont perdu une partie précieuse de leur être.

Si vous continuez, un jour votre mère viendra prendre de vos nouvelles au commissariat. Elle aura honte. Vous aurez honte, mais vous ne saurez pas quoi dire. Je n’aimerais vraiment pas être dans votre tête.

Mais je ne vous souhaite pas ça. Je sais que c’est facile pour moi. Je suis vieux, et la vie est plus dure pour les jeunes qu’elle ne l’était de mon temps. Je suis blanc, et c’est vrai qu’ici, en France, la vie est plus dure pour les noirs que pour les blancs. Mais devenir voleur dans le train, devenir pauvre type, ce n’est vraiment pas une solution: au contraire, vous entrez dans une case qui est déjà faite pour vous, et vous la remplissez pour la plus grande satisfaction des racistes de tout poil. Vous êtes tristement conformiste. Vous pouvez l’être moins – ou moins tristement.

Cordialement

Timothy Mason

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We hear Randall Adams before we see him. He describes how his brother and he arrived in Dallas, and then, on screen, how he got a job the next morning. “Everything clicked.” Adams’s voice and demeanour are restrained, somehow disconnected from the story that he tells. It is as if the tale possesses him, rather than being related by him. Such expression as there is on his face is of constrained astonishment. Morris says that Adams seemed not to expect anyone to listen or believe him; in fact, it almost appears that he cannot believe it himself.

Adams is sitting in front of a metal mesh, a name tag over his shirt pocket. The viewer immediately assumes that he is in a prison. When the film cuts to David Harris, by way of a close up of a pair of rotating police-car beacons, we find him wearing an orange shirt, his back to what appears to be a red-brick wall. Some would immediately recognize the shirt as the upper part of a modern American prison jump-suit, although when I first saw the film on its release, I did not so identify it.

Harris seems far more relaxed and natural in his bearing than Adams. He slumps slightly in his chair, offers the interviewer a charming smile. He is charming, where Adams is grim. And while Adams seems to be very clear about the narrative, Harris gives the impression of recalling it at the instant, searching back into his memory, unsure of the details. But Morris will not let him get away with this insouciance. As Harris tells how he took his father’s guns, and stole a neighbour’s car, a sixteen-year-old country-boy, running away from home, the screen switches from an image of the man’s face to an image of the pistol. Later, we will learn that this is the murder weapon. The film, from the beginning, stacks the cards against Harris, driving the viewer to make the connections that Morris wants her to make.

As we have seen, the two men are linked by the lights of the police-car. These lights should have separated them: Adams, the good citizen, sitting in his chair with the straight back of the military man that he had once been, is the kind of person that the police should shelter from the wild psychopathic beast that Harris will be revealed as in the course of the movie. Instead, they lead them both to a prison cell.

In a recent interview, occasioned by the publication of his book on photography, Morris warns that, if you are to understand a photo, you must carefully place it within its context: what the photographer leaves outside the frame is often crucial. We would do well to remember that this is true of movies as well, and that for every minute that you see on the screen, there may be hours of recording that are left on the cutting floor. If David Harris smiles and Randall Adams does not, is this a truth about the two men, an artefact of the director’s intentions, or both? If Harris is hesitant and Adams is forthright, can we conclude that Adams never obfuscated and that Harris was never straightforward? And if Morris cuts from Harris to the fatal pistol, must we conclude that it was he who pulled the trigger?

Blogging the film for the Yale Daily News, Patrice Bowman wrote :

In the opening credits, the “Blue” of the film’s title is invaded by disorderly red. The implications of such color usage and the police are obvious, but it all still makes your stomach somersault.

But how obvious are the implications? The blood shed in the film is a policeman’s; the thin blue line is broken by a gunman, and through the breach a whole series of disorders is revealed. The first of these is the dead man’s partner, the first woman to go out on patrol, breaking the chain of masculinity. The next is the fact that after almost a month, the police have found no lead to the killer, an unprecedented hiatus. In part, this is imputed to the only witness – the female patrol officer, who, despite her training, forgets standard procedure, doesn’t note the licence number of the vehicle from which the fatal shots were fired, and is unable to hit the vehicle when she fires after it in her turn. Furthermore, when they do finally pick up a lead, it takes them to a friendly, open-faced child, too charming and polite to be a killer.

Faced with the child’s engaging grin, the Dallas police and the prosecutors throw their full weight into the charge against a drug-smoking drifter who, in Morris’s eyes, is innocent of the crime. By attempting to right the resulting wrong, the film can be read as an attempt to rescue the police from themselves, and it is indeed the Thin Blue Line, the stalwart upholders of the social order, that is Morris’s true subject. As Randall Adams says in his own account of the affair, the dead man ‘is the one whom this story is really about*.’  The red on the blue is the blood of patrolman Robert Wood.

What about the thin blue line itself? It is used here as a separator: above the line, in white, we see appear a series of functional titles, a selection of the institutional roles have been filled to bring this movie to the screen. Beneath this, in the same blood red that coloured the word BLUE, are spelled out the names of the individuals who fill the roles. On one side of the thin blue line is the ordered hierarchy of society, on the other, the dangerous division of personality, individuality, the state of nature that only Leviathan can tame and hold at bay.

Morris – and we’ll discuss this more fully later – sees his film as a charge against what he understands as the postmodern belief that there is no truth. I’m not sure that this is a postmodernist credo: my own understanding is that while the postmodern allows the small, local truths – such as ‘it was X who fired the gun, not Y’ – it proclaims that it is no longer possible to subscribe to the large stories, such as religions, large-scale political myths such as Marxism, or the belief in continual progress that is identified with Liberalism. The Thin Blue Line does have such a story to tell. Its hero offers himself in sacrifice, and the villain is a Hobbesian monster of pure desire.

*’Adams v. Texas’ by Randall Adams, William Hoffer and Marilyn Mona Hoffer, St. Martin’s Press, 1991, p. xi

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After the opening credits, we see several shots of a nocturnal city, as the camera lingers over the tall buildings looming out of the dark sky. The first we see is the Reunion Tower,  which is a three-storey sphere perched on top of a set of concrete legs. It looks rather like an alien space-ship, especially at those times when the lights across its face are switched on and off to create an impression of movement. It is an observation point from which you can look over the whole city: you access the globe by taking one of the lifts running up the legs, from which you can watch the city fall away beneath you. Once up there, you can eat a meal in the restaurant, and take in the full panorama as the structure revolves.

Film-makers have made much use of towers and other high buildings. They are often rather sinister, as in Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis‘, or Alan Pakula’s ‘Klute‘, and there is a touch of malignance, perhaps, in the Dallas skyline from which Randall Adams’s voice emerges to begin his story. The skyscraper and the observation tower, speak of hierarchy, of panoptical control, and of dominance, and it is dramatically apt that we cut from these buildings to the prison cell, with its metal mesh, where the prisoner begins his tale.