You may think this film is a thriller about the death penalty, but it is not. It looks like it, true, but the end reveals it is something completely different. It is about the way the media can be manipulated in any direction, provided you are intelligent. Once a brilliant university professor was confronted in a TV debate to the governor of Texas about the death penalty. The governor asked him to give the name of one executed person that was innocent and could be proved so. The professor could not answer such a question for the simple reason that there is no post mortem investigation in the case of an execution, except
And the professor started, with his main assistant in his fight against the death penalty, to think of how to prove that point. In the mean time he is tricked by some dumb girl student into doing exactly what he should never have done: have sex with her. She sue him for rape, even if later she will drop the charge. The damage is done. He is kicked out of academia. His wife takes his son away and gets a divorce. She sells the house. He cannot even get a job as the manager of a technical store. He is reduced to nothing, to being a rapist forever. But he does not want to move. His main assistant in his fight is going to die of leukemia. When he learns that, the plan to trap the governor germinates in their minds and they put it through. He is going to be accused of the murder of his assistant though it is not a murder. The evidence it is not is a tape, the recording of what really happened. But it will come in three pieces. The man will be sentenced to death. Three days before his execution he asks a famous journalist from New York to come and take the first and last interview he is going to give her in six hours spread out over the three days before his execution. The first excerpt of the tape we have mentioned will turn up in the journalist's motel room on the second day, before execution, too short and a copy. Worthless. Then after some adventure the journalist manages to recuperate what she thinks is the whole tape that proves what she was thinking, after some personal experimentation, is right: the woman killed herself, but who worked the camera? A man that is seen at the end of the tape, a man the journalist has seen here and there and in whose shack she has found the tape. But that too is too short though not worthless. It creates havoc and it proves an innocent man can be sentenced to death. During that time the $500,000 for the interview travel to Mexico and the ex-wife for the son. The father had been vindicated in the mean time. But the journalist finally receives the last excerpt of the tape, the end of the suicidal demonstrative séance and there the professor is shown coming at this very moment, just after the death of the woman, just as if he had been behind the camera all the time and he turns that camera off, after checking the woman is dead. The media had been manipulated about the guilt of the man and about the fairness and justice of the death penalty, then about the man's innocence and the suicide of the woman, and yet the truth was that the death had been planned in such a way that the execution would demonstrate how an innocent person can be sentenced to death. Manipulation all along by a woman who wanted to make her natural death useful for the cause she advocated and by a man who did not have the courage to move on and start a new life after having been destroyed by an unscrupulous student and by his own dumbness: students are out of reach as long as they are within grading distance. He preferred to make his death (which becomes a very special suicide) useful for the cause he advocated and for his own son. But the film is short because two men helped the woman and staged her death and the man lied all along the way of his confession and ordeal. The media are so naïve that they believe anything provided it smells slightly sulfurous or sulfuric.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID