∴ Logbookan on-line notebook for John Laudun

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has a terrific review of Errol Morris’ latest film “Tabloid.” It does what good, no great, reviews do: it addresses directly the larger issues as the context in which to understand the work being reviewed. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Morris has frequently, and accurately, been described as a filmmaker who is fascinated with epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and limits of human knowledge. He’s also sometimes been called a postmodernist who denies or elides the distinction between truth and fiction, and that’s a charge he has always forcefully rejected. (From a recent Morris tweet: “Compare. Hamlet kills Claudius v. I kill you.”) After all, his most famous film, “The Thin Blue Line,” clearly articulated the thesis that a Texas Death Row inmate named Randall Dale Adams was innocent of the murder for which he had been convicted, and indirectly resulted in Adams’ exoneration and release. Morris sees truth as maddeningly difficult to find or to recognize, and believes that human stupidity and vanity and self-deception often prevent us from seeing it. He even suggests that at certain moments truth may be situationally unknowable, as in the lessons on America’s failure in Vietnam delivered by the war’s chief architect, Robert S. McNamara, in Morris’ Oscar-winning “The Fog of War.” But that’s quite a different matter from claiming that truth does not exist or is entirely relative.