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"Have you ever seen a man's brains?" That question is asked by one of several old eccentrics who populate Vernon, Florida, the town after which Errol Morris named his second documentary feature in 1981. It is a question that has been at the heart of just about every film Morris has made; he seems fascinated, even haunted, by the question of how the mind works. He explored that theme in his recent docu-poem Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997). It also provides the key to what seems at first a meandering digression in Morris's most celebrated film, The Thin Blue Line (1988). Near the end of that documentary, about an innocent man who was sent to prison and almost executed for a murder he didn't commit, Morris lets another man, David Harris, talk about his own childhood. It was Harris's accusations that prompted the police to arrest the innocent man in the first place; now that Harris himself is on death row for another murder, he all but admits to Morris that he committed the original crime himself. For most viewers, the case is closed, the story told. Yet Morris lets Harris go on and trace his reckless behavior back to his youth. "I wasn't doing nothing but hurting my self," Harris concludes.
This "tangent" begins to make sense when you realize that Morris is interested not only in objective knowledge—knowledge of what has transpired in the outside world—but also in what we might call subjective knowledge, or knowledge about oneself. When I interviewed Morris for this magazine two years ago, he called Harris's epiphany "one of the most ironic lines I've ever put on film, and people never comment on it. … When ever I hear the line, I think, 'Not quite, David. Others as well.' This moment of self-knowledge seems to be a moment of self-deception."
Self-knowledge and self-deception, and the ways in which they intersect with one's objective knowledge, are the subjects of Morris's newest film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. Leuchter wrote the in famous "Leuchter Report," a document widely cited by Holocaust deniers, in which he argued that the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek were not in fact used for that purpose. Morris provides plenty of evidence to refute Leuchter's conclusions, but he is more interested in the character of Leuchter himself, and in the workings of Leuchter's mind—which, when all is said and done, re main as mysterious as they ever were.
Leuchter first made a name for himself as an expert on electric chairs, gallows, and other capital-punishment devices. Leuchter's father was the superintendent of transportation for a couple of prisons in Massachusetts, and Leuch ter grew up visiting the guards and the inmates in those prisons as he accompanied his father to work. The inmates taught him how to pick locks and crack safes; the guards let him sit in the electric chair. By the time he was an adult, Leuchter became concerned with what he calls the "deplorable condition" of execution equipment, and he designed and built a chair for the state of Tennessee which, he says with professional pride, respected the human dignity of executioner and "executee" alike. He went on to design not only lethal-injection machines (commissioned by the state of New Jersey) but gallows and gas chambers as well.
It was Leuchter's familiarity with gas chambers that caught the attention of Ernst Zundel, a Canadian Holocaust denier, who hired Leuchter to go to Poland and study the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Leuchter did this, apparently, by covertly chipping off bits of wall and floor and placing them in tagged plastic bags. He then sent these samples to labs in the States, with instructions to test them for cyanide residue; when the tests came back negative, Leuchter decided that no executions had taken place in the concentration camps, and, in 1988, he wrote his now-notorious report.
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