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Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory – Art 4/5 Ent 5/5 Worth 5/5
The most agonizing thing about the first two films in this HBO trilogy covering the legal proceedings that followed the 1993 child murders in Robin Hood Hills, a part of West Memphis, Arkansas, was the absolutely suffocating sense that we’re probably further from the truth once the credits roll than before we pressed play. For the longest of times, looking back on the two previous documentary films that deeply affected me as a teenager who could in some ways relate to the “West Memphis Three” (Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley, Jr. – the three young men convicted for the murders, falsely so we’re to understand today), I was worried that maybe there was some truth to the official verdict. I was worried that the case was valid at face value, and there was nothing more to it than that.
I grew more worried when celebrities began affecting the legal process, after these documentaries had been released, ‘manipulating’ the record. I use the term manipulate in a benign way, I’m absolutely positive that the filmmakers (Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky) were seeking the truth, but just like the West Memphis police department and the State of Arkansas judicial system, and Michael Moore for that matter (the documentarian from Flint, MI, not the child victim in this film), they are subject to their own humanity. I believe the filmmakers and the audience are capable of bias and error that evades our own better senses. Even the greatest journalists can be faulted for seeing what they believe. A sociopath can look directly into a camera and convincingly lie. A murky, mysterious situation could easily be spun by a master liar, even if forced into interrogation and the pressure of imprisonment with fellow culprits. That’s what scared me to death: that I was falling into a demonic person’s web of lies, and so were Johnny Depp, Peter Jackson and Eddie Vedder. It would be absolutely horrifying if we all fell for it.
The third installment, recently aired on HBO, follows recent developments since the second film aired 12 years ago. Such a massive duration of time might seem to confirm that justice was given, but quite the contrary we see how a bureaucracy of egotism, failure and complete lack of self-criticism can lead to a depraved system of injustice. Paradise Lost 3 presents a series of convincing arguments that legal and forensic experts presented at trial to overturn the conviction of the West Memphis Three, and even once the seemingly open and shut case was presented and the State of Arkansas had no choice but to release the three innocent men, they still equivocated and tried to save face by demanding the men offer pleas of guilt while professing innocence, and legally refrain from suing the State for their injustice.
That right there is a straight up Soviet chestnut of Orwellian nonsense, that should scare the shit out of every free person who watches this film. This kind of chicanery happens all the time, we’re told, but these guys had Pearl Jam behind them so the soul-crushing bureaucracy had to yield and spit them out. What about the people of whom Johnny Depp has never had the luxury to watch on HBO? There’s a very John Lennon feeling to all of this. I’m really scared of the implications in this case, because what happens when Pearl Jam or Rage Against the Machine or Justin Bieber or RuPaul advocate for some bastard who really did kill people? Aahhhh, this stuff is just too depressing to think about for too long.
