Errol Morris | Through the Shattered Lens

Errol Morris is a documentarian who has made a career out of interviewing the eccentric and the quirky.

In My Psychedelic Love Story, he interviews Joanna Harcourt-Smith who, way back in the 1970s, was the lover of Acid guru Dr. Timothy Leary. She was in her 20s and he was in his 50s but they still apparently had a wonderful time as exiles in Europe. Leary, at the time, was a fugitive, having escaped from prison and fled to Switzerland. (Before his escape, he was serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted of possessing two joints. Leary claimed that he was set up by the arrest officer. Still, the fact that two joints led to a 20-year sentence tells you all you need to know about American drug laws in the 60s and 70s.) Leary and Joanna spent a few years as glamorous international exiles, staying at the homes of the rich and self-styled decadent. Eventually, Leary was captured and, upon returning to the United Sates, became an informant for the FBI. Though Leary always claimed that he gave the FBI useless information (and reportedly, no one was ever convicted of any crimes based on any of the information that Leary provided), his decision to “cooperate” with the authorities was viewed as a betrayal by many members of the counterculture.

As usually happens whenever a male cultural figure lets down his disciples, the woman was blamed. Many — including Allen Ginsberg — suggested that Joanna Harcourt-Smith was actually an agent of the CIA who had not only arranged Leary’s capture but who was also responsible for him eventually cooperating with the government. Interestingly enough, in My Psychedelic Love Story, Joanna also suggests that she may have been unknowingly manipulated by the CIA to take Leary down.

That’s one of the many stories that Joanna Harcourt-Smith tells over the course of My Psychedelic Love Story. Though the film largely focuses on her relationship with Leary, Harcourt-Smith also talks about her childhood and her life after her break-up with Leary. Some of the stories are interesting and, to be honest, some of them are more than a little boring. The documentary never quite convinces us that Joanna Harcourt-Smith is as fascinating as she and Morris seem to believe that she is. Perhaps her most interesting moment comes when she says that she has a long history of lying.

If anything, Harcourt-Smith comes across as being the type of figure who is familiar to anyone who has actually researched the counter culture of the 60s and 70s, the wealthy hippie who can afford to rebel because her position in society is guaranteed regardless of how that rebellion turns out. Harcourt-Smith often comes across as something a dilettante, someone who got involved in radical politics because, at the time, that was the thing to do. Listening to her speak, I was reminded of the end of the film Guerilla, in which former left-wing terrorist Patty Hearst, having been pardoned by the president, smiled and said that she was looking forward to going home. (Home happened to be a mansion.) That’s not to say that Harcourt-Smith was brainwashed as much to suggest that one reason why she could do what she did was because she had the escape clause of being from a wealthy and connected family.

As for Leary, the documentary features recordings of him speaking but he remains an enigmatic figure. At times, he comes across as being very sincere. At other times, he comes across as being a manipulative Svengali. At his worst, he comes across as being a character straight from an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. One can easily imagine Sorkin writing a screenplay about how Leary was betrayed by every woman he ever met. (“I could have turned the world on, if not for those women with their pesky opinions!”)

Despite all of that, My Psychedelic Love Story is still an interesting historical document. If you’re a student of the 60s and 70s cultural history, you’ll want to watch it. The film may leave you frustrated but it’s still a chance to hear about the era from someone who was there.

This 1999 documentary provides a disturbing portrait of an absolute moron.

Of course, when we first see and hear Fred Leuchter, Jr., he doesn’t seem like a moron. He definitely comes across as being a bit eccentric and maybe just a little bit off but, at first sight, he’s actually kind of likable. As he explains it, he grew up in the United States prison system. His father worked in prison administration and one of Fred’s earliest memories was sitting in an electric chair. Fred grew up to be an engineer and, concerned that America’s execution methods were cruel and potentially dangerous to even those who weren’t being executed, he decided to dedicate his life to redesigning electric chairs and gas chambers. He even built his own lethal injection machine, all designed to make sure that the condemned felt as little pain as possible while dying. As Fred explains it, he supports capital punishment but “I don’t support torture.”

Fred Leuchter soon came to be recognized as one of America’s leading experts on execution devices. As he himself admits, that’s largely because he was American’s only expert on the way that people are legally executed. Whereas most people deliberately went out of their way not to learn the specifics of what happens when someone is put to death, Fred made it his life’s purpose. After redesigning an electric chair in Tennessee, Fred was soon being summoned to other states so that he could refurbish and, in many cases, redesign their execution machinery. For the first 30 minutes of the documentary, Fred explains what it’s like to be an expert on executions and it’s hard not to like this nerdy, self-described “humanitarian.” If anything, you spend the first part of this documentary considering the oddness of finding a humane way to execute the condemned. America prides itself on both it’s rejection of cruel and unusual punishment and it’s willingness to put criminals to death. It’s an odd combination and, briefly, Leuchter seems like the embodiment of those two contrasting positions.

This changes during the documentary’s second half. That’s when we learn how, in 1988, Leuchter was hired by a German anti-Semite named Ernst Zundel. Zundel was being tried in Canada, charged with publishing and shipping works of Holocaust denial. For a fee of $30,000, Leuchter spent his honeymoon in Poland, went to Auschwitz, and personally “inspected” the gas chambers. Because Leuchter brought a camera crew with him, his every action was recorded.

We watch as Leuchter and his assistants sneak into the gas chamber and proceed to clumsily start chipping away at the walls. We listen as Leuchter goes on and on about how he doesn’t feel that the gas chamber was actually a gas chamber because it just seems too impractical to him. If they wanted to executed a large group of people at once, why didn’t the Nazis use the gallows? Leuchter wonders. (They did.) Why didn’t the Nazis use firing squads? Leuchter asks. (They did.) Even before Leuchter returns to America, he’s made it clear that his mind is made up. He can’t understand why the Nazis would have done what they did and therefore, in his mind, that means they didn’t do it. After all, Leuchter’s an expert. He’s Mr. Death.

He’s also a moron and, by the time he starts cheerfully talking about all the effort that went into smuggling the wall chips out of Germany, whatever likability he once had has vanished. Watching this film, I found myself wishing for a time machine so that I could go back in the past and throw something at him. You just want him to shut up for a minute and realize that what he’s saying makes no sense. Not that it would make any difference, of course. Leuchter is too proud of himself for having discovered “the truth” to actually consider that he could be wrong.

When Leuchter’s samples are tested for trace amounts of poison gas, they come back negative. Leuchter announces that this means that the Holocaust never happened and he writes up the infamous Leuchter Report, which is still regularly cited as evidence by Neo-Nazi groups and anti-Semitic historians like David Irving. However, as Dutch historian Robert Jan van Pelt explains (and, as we’ve already seen in the video that Leuchter himself shot at Auschwitz), Leuchter not only did not take a big enough sample but he was so clumsy in the way that he transported it that he diluted the sample as well. Even beyond all that, it would be very unusual for cyanide residue to still present after forty years of everyday wear and tear.

None of this matters, of course, to Fred Leuchter. With the publication of the Leuchter Report, he becomes a fixture on the Holocaust denial circuit. (We see an edition of the Leuchter Report that was published and distributed by the Aryan Nations.) Suddenly, Leuchter has fans. In his own sad and pathetic way, he’s become a celebrity and we see him beaming as he stands on the stage of a Neo-Nazi conference. Meanwhile, his wife leaves him. And prisons stop using him as a consultant, especially after they discover that he was never actually licensed to practice engineering. Financially bereft, Leuchter even resorts to trying to sell one of his beloved “execution devices,” putting an ad in the classifieds. (Needless to say, things don’t go well.) Looking over the ruins of his life, who does Leuchter blame for his troubles? “Jewish groups,” he says before then going on to assure us that some of his best friends were and are Jewish. Was Leuchter always an anti-Semite or did he become one because he needed someone to blame for his own self-destruction? That’s a question that the viewer will have to answer for themselves.

Mr. Death is a disturbing portrait of a rather sad and pathetic figure, a man who fell victim to his own arrogance and hubris and who, as opposed to seeking redemption, instead allied himself with the only people ignorant and hateful enough to still embrace him. As is his style, documentarian Errol Morris interviews Leuchter’s critics but refrains from personally arguing with Leuchter, instead basically giving the self-described execution expert just enough rope to hang himself. (Morris does, at one point, ask Leuchter if he’s ever considered that he might be wrong. Not surprisingly, Leuchter claims that he has not and seems to be confused by the question.) In the end, it’s impossible to feel sorry for Leuchter. The nerdy humanitarian who opposed torture had been replaced by a self-pitying Holocaust denier. By the end of the film, Fred A Leuchter, Jr. and his report have become a reminder of the damage that can be done by one dangerously ignorant man.