McKinney 1
Jade McKinney
Professor Williams
ENG 102
Film Annotation
The Thin Blue Line
The crucial message in Errol Morris’s film The Thin Blue Line, which was released in
1988, is his belief that human fallibility is the main impediment in occluding the truth. Human
Fallibility can cause atrocities to occur, human beings to be tortured and scapegoated, and
innocents to be sentenced to loss of life row. The film investigates the wrongful conviction of
Texan Randall Adams, who, in place of a more obvious suspect, was arrested for killing a police
officer. It also presents a series of interviews about the investigation and reenactments of the
shooting, based on the testimony and recollections of Adams, Harris, the judge presiding over
the case, several witnesses, and as well as the detectives. Morris’s films are extra inquisitive
about revealing the improper interior workings of his subjects than in revealing any kind of goal
truths themselves. Morris has been referred to as the “anti–postmodernism postmodernist”
because his films don’t assure that truths are contingent on or irretrievably misplaced in the past,
however that it is able to every so often boil all the way down to human judgment, mistakes, and
bias overlaying them up. Within The Thin Blue Line, Morris did begin carrying out interviews
with a very specific intention in thoughts “to show Randall Adams’s innocence and his denial of
a truthful trial within the murder of police officer Robert timber.” The movie, in Morris’s
estimation, only proved the latter, “After its launch, repeated felony attempts subsequently ended
in a retrial permitting new evidence, a few files that Morris had unearthed in his studies, and
videotaped interviews used in the film which allowed Adams to eventually be released after
McKinney 2
serving an existence sentence for 12 years.” The purpose of this film was to uncover the truth
about the legal system and make the audience, which was the general public and citizens of the
United States, aware of how wrongful convictions and the negligence to one’s right can cause
terrible consequences for someone who is innocent and can allow guilty men to walk free. The
use of visuals, the development of narrative of the corrupt justice system, and
The Thin Blue Line isn’t generally organized as an examination. The techniques of visuals
used, make the film similar to a dream, loaded with abnormally overstated pictures and hued by
the unfavorable murmur of Philip Glass’ score. This implies minor points of interest in some
cases accept undue significance, upstaging key actualities of the case: Mr. Morris’ moderate
movement picture of a milkshake flying through the air turns out to be substantially more
significant than the declaration of the policewoman who was drinking the shake, for instance.
