Presentation of Truth in the Film The Thin Blue Line (Essay Sample)

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Presentation of Truth in the Film The Thin Blue Line
Errol Morris's exclusive documentary The Thin Blue Line positions a captivating, yet provocative true story detailing the arrest and successful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a police officer stationed in Dallas in 1976. The film has received credence with overturning the conviction of Adams for a murder case, a crime that he agonized a death verdict. Briefly, the film re-enacts the crime scene alongside the investigation of concerning the murder of Robert Wood, a police officer. On the storyline, the film features Adams and his 16-year-old brother, David Harris, going out at night where they smoked some marijuana, took alcoholic drinks, and later went to watch pro-soft movies. Adams contended that he departed from the moteland proceeded for a night rest, unlike Harris, who observes that law enforcement officer stopped them late night, and Adams abruptly gunshot at the policeon noticing their van. Further, Morris shows the police substantiation, who fell for undue pressure to conclude the case. In the event, it points out that the conditional evidence was insubstantial. Even though the police’s evidence served to sentence Adams to death, the truth of the matter exposed in the film shows that Harris was more likely to be a suspect for the reason that he was in the midst of crime spree.
In the process of presenting the murder charges against Adams, the director strongly refutes the initial judgment and encourages the audience that Adams was above suspicion. The conclusion of the film, consequently, served to reveal the truth concerning Adams’ innocence. This truth depicted at the concluding scenes of the movie reflects the interpretation of the director based on the evidence presented. Nevertheless, he successfully satisfies the audience that Adams suffered an unjust sentence, where he gains the audience attention. In light of this, Morris evidences that the audience had shown the inclination to assent to his points of view concerning the innocence of Adams (Dwyer n.pag). Eventually, the film provides a framework that allows the audience to acknowledge that it is always challenging to ascertain the truth. Thus, it is unreasonable to accept simply the matter filed as evidence as a proof of the truth, as the preceding suit on murder case assumed.
A number of circumstances in the film shows the voice of Morris as an unyielding belief that the police alongside the prosecution-imagined evidence through an edited testimony while overturning vital documents and engineered a case that fell short of prosecution threshold. The family of Morris conceived that Adams remained unfairly targeted and presented as a rambler who drank beer, smoked marijuana, and used a minor conduct his activities. On the epicenter of the prosecution’s objectionable depiction of Adams, the documentary reveals, the defense lacked witnesses, unlike the prosecution that assembled multiple. In addition to that, information describing Harris’ uncertain and unwarranted past stayed disregarded in the court. Instead, the prosecution presented unreliable witness testimony. Morris presents a clear truth that the conviction of Adams was unfair as he uncovers numerous facets of a mistrial and underprivileged police investigation. Certainly, the filmmaker shows Adams as an individual the prosecution required to pursue the true killer for conviction.
A close examination of the documentary film reveals that the most crucial and persistent nature of truth reflects Morris’s belief that human imperfection is the major impediment in occluding reality. In some instances, the fallibility is inoffensive, yet it can be a catastrophic human error. As Morris details, human error provides a platform for atrocities to occur, individuals suffered undesirable torture and scapegoated, and finally receive death sentence rows. Given the above circumstance, the film focuses on revealing the truth based on the persistently flawed interior services of his participants rather than describing objective certainties themselves (Dwyer n.pag). Assertively, the audience notices that the film ends up revealing a holistic and factual argument, appearing as a secondary byproduct of the dubious judicial system, which grounds its judgment on a fictitious testimony. Even if the does not assure that truths are contingent on or irreversibly lost in the past, in some occasions, it may boil down to individual human judgment, bias, error, and covering up a serious matter that needs thorough investigation.
As Dwyer observes, the unfolding events in The Thin Blue Line stem from a scenario where Morris conducts interviews with a solitary objective in mind to demonstrate that Randall Adams was innocent of the charges, and his unfair trial was unfortunate (n.pag). Morris estimates to prove to the latter, that after recurrent legal proceedings, there was a need for providing new evidence on the case. In fact, some of the crucial documents the filmmaker had exhumed during his investigation supplemented with videotaped interviews offered a platform for the release of Adams after serving 12 years of his life sentence. As shown, Morris developed an interest in the case by chance, when he was quizzing prisoners who remained behind the bars, and could kill again if released. The process of uncovering the truth on the matter commenced when Morris supposed that Adams was innocent of the murder charges and corresponding life sentence penalty. To that extent, he began to research on the transcripts and documents of the mistrial and settled on his individual investigation files. As he carried on with the cross-examination of various data sets, he established that the District Attorney of Dallas, Henry Wade alongside his assistant Douglas Mulder, had full knowledge of the realistic discrepancies offered via the testament of David Harrison. As Adams observed in the documentary, Harris’ accounts of the day Wood died from a gunshot was consistently different with two hours.
In furtherance of the above, the film depicts that Adams and Harris went out to a drive-in movie theater together, shortly after the shooting occurred; apparently, part of the legal investigation would have factored checking the schedule of the theater. The report provided by Mulder shown that the timings Harris provided were inaccurate, at least considering the screening times, nevertheless, they inhibited essential data in the proceedings. In a bid to reveal the tr...