“I did not kill my best friend. I did dismember him.”
The first thing you notice about Bob Durst are his eyes. While the Bob Durst spotted in photographs and home videos from decades past does not exactly exude warmth and goodwill towards Man, the man of the present day stares out through coal-black eyes, glittering little buttons set into a small, aged face. Over the course of six hours, it dawns on you that this is no man, this is a shark wearing a man for a mask, and the central tension of HBO’s brilliant documentary series The Jinx is whether or not the mask is going to slip.
The series begins with Bob Durst on the run. In 2000, he’d been living a hermits existence in Galveston, Texas, far away from his New York City home and the real estate dynasty which had ensured a bottomless bank account for life, and the accusations of murder which have haunted him for twenty years. Durst’s idyll in Texas ends when the dismembered remains of his next door neighbor are discovered and Bob becomes the subject of a manhunt.
Somehow, the story only grows more bizarre and grisly from there.
The Jinx is structured around a long form interview between Durst and director Andrew Jarecki, who had previously dramatized the same case in the heavily fictionalized Ryan Gosling-starring film, All Good Things. Durst approached Jarecki about doing an interview to tell “his” side of the story, and Jarecki obliged him. Jarecki’s Thin Blue Line-esque recreations and interviews depict Durst’s life leading up to Galveston and beyond, all the while intercutting with today’s Bob Durst commenting on the story as it progresses. The Jinx touches on the disappearance of Durst’s first wife Kathie, the execution-style murder of Durst’s friend and confidante Susan Berman, and finally the Galveston incident, the only time law enforcement actually managed to bring Durst to trial for his alleged crimes.
Even after admitting to dismembering the body, Bob Durst still walked. Yeah.
The Jinx very quickly establishes that it is not going to be a whodunit. We all know who dun it. The brilliance of The Jinx lies in Jarecki’s ability to derive tension and pathos from a mystery even once the central question is resolved. While Jarecki never out-and-out declares “Bob Durst is a murderer” on camera, his choices in the staging and cutting of the story make it very clear where he lands on the matter of Durst’s guilt, for reasons that become more and more clear as the show progresses.
So if the mystery at the heart of a murder mystery isn’t the appeal, what is? Everything else.
What Jarecki and his team of producers and editors have assembled is a series which explores the ripple effects of tragedy and violence across years and lives. The families and friends of victims, the law enforcement officials who chased Bob, they look into the camera like shell-shock victims, their lives still hopelessly caught in the wake of Bob Durst (or the titular ‘jinx’ which Durst suggests is constantly tripping him up into these incidents through no fault of his own). Durst’s entry into these peoples’ lives was like a bomb going off, and the rest of their lives have just been scrambling through the rubble.
Part of the impact rests in the simple fact that there’s a level of intimacy that documentaries can achieve that no other film form can, and Jarecki is a master at efficiently moving his narrative forward without ever letting the empathetic, humane spine of the narrative get lost. As thrilling as it was to watch the events of The Jinx be revealed week after week, the show always reminded you that for the people actually involved, it was a slow motion nightmare from which they still have not woken up.
Jarecki places himself on camera for the central interview, but he otherwise wisely stays out of the film and lets the people involved with the story take the spotlight (circumstances in the final episodes push Jarecki to the forefront, but it’s hard to imagine the show tackling that portion of the story without doing so) letting them work through the confusion, grief, rage, and even sometimes the humor of what an inescapable mess Bob Durst has wrought over their lives. There are many (manymanymanymanymany) true crime programs on TV that are happy to cram the camera into grieving family members’ faces so they can weep over senseless tragedy, but Jarecki and his team remain far enough removed that you never feel like they are exploiting the dead or the survivors.
As riveting as this story and this telling are, the power of The Jinx rests almost entirely with Bob Durst. A twitchy mass of contradictions, Durst is at once pathetic, charming, terrifying, sad, funny, loathsome, freakish and, most of all, human. Here’s a man who was handed every advantage a person could ask for upon entering this world, and yet he’s shown again and again to be a hollowed out husk of a soul, regardless of whether or not he actually killed anybody.
The audience’s fascination with Durst is mirrored by Jarecki, who (along with dedicating close to a decade of his life to this man and this story) becomes visibly intoxicated with both Bob’s company and that tantalizing possibility of being the one to finally break the case open and deliver justice for the various victims. It’s a slippery slope between journalist and vigilante, and Jarecki dove down that slope headfirst, Cool Runnings-style, if certain reviews of the last couple episodes are to be believed.
Ethical? Debatable. Brilliant television? No debate.
It’s that central tension that elevates The Jinx, that push and pull between the innate desire to trust and connect with another human being, versus the mounting weight of incriminating information. How far can you push your perception of a man before he ceases to be a man, and instead becomes the Unholy Thing that must be caught and punished? You see Jarecki reach that point, and the show ends with what appears to be a moment of horrific triumph for his investigation.
But long after Bob Durst has rotted away, behind bars or otherwise, the grief and pain of victims and victimizers will continue to echo through the years, wreaking untold havoc. Haunting generations to come like some sort of jinx.
