I came to the great Vanity Fair crime reporter/gossip king Dominick Dunne through reading his younger brother, John Gregory Dunne, whose book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen -- a work of droll and meticulously crafted prose about Dunne's role in creating an utterly mediocre Hollywood movie -- reawakened dormant longings in me to become a harried and tormented hack screenwriter someday (never one of my top five career fantasies, even, but always there in the background, ever since my teenage obsession with the legends of the early days of the Simpsons writers' room. Or maybe since Barton Fink).
J.G. Dunne had instant star-appeal in turn for me, since he was married to the great Joan Didion (his death is the subject of her Year of Magical Thinking, e.g.), which is largely how I came to be reading him.
This is the sort of six-degrees of separation game in which Dominick Dunne himself delights, and which forms a chief part of the gratification of reading him. One takes the same pleasure in studying the closed worlds he describes of conniving, spoiled, back-stabbing elites that one takes, say, in drawing the family trees of Bloomsbury. J.M. Keynes writes in the preface to his Essays in Biography of the palm-rubbing delight to be found in charting "the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England," of which few of the world's gene pools, in Keynes' telling, could be "less interbred and spiritually intermixed."
This is exactly how one feels in those pseudo-profound moments of online sleuthing, when one first follows the Wikipedia page of one's author-hero Didion to her husband, and from him to his brother, Dominick, only to say: gee, he looks familiar. And that's when one realizes that Dominick Dunne also happens to be that gossipy guy in the tortoise shell glasses who is portrayed by an actor in that recent O.J. Simpson Netflix series we all watched (and which reintroduced the whole O.J. imbroglio to my generation).
Similar odd moments: in reading both of the above mentioned books by the Brüder Dunne, one happens to notice the memorable name of a Hollywood attorney: Ed Hookstratten. Then I came across the same guy a few days later reading an unrelated long-form journalism piece about John DeLorean.
The frisson of recognition goes through one. One feels suddenly that the social world of the famous may after all be so narrow and interconnected that one might be able to comprehend it fully, to gain mastery of it from a distance. It's all the pleasure of snobbery, in short, with none of the guilt or sense of rejection. One is reading about a world that is so far away and inaccessible to oneself that one doesn't particularly feel excluded.
Okay, but reading this stuff does come with a little bit of guilt, in fairness. It comes less, however, from the fact that one is reading about glitzy people doing debauched things, than from a different and unexpected sources. It comes from the sense that one is seeing a dangerous ideology in the midst of its birth throes. An ideology that has gone on to do grave damage to our society.
Dunne, that is to say, perhaps more than any other author, is the writer who delivered to our nation the great tale of the "miscarriage of justice." In story after story, he described rich and pampered defendants hiring ethically questionable defense attorneys to get them off the hook for gruesome crimes of which they were almost certainly responsible.
Dunne thereby helped to permanently embed in American mythology the belief that the real problem with "the system" is how easy it is for the defendant to get off. The narrative -- you know how it goes -- that hard-working cops can get all the evidence together to convict, and then some hot-shot lawyer can just waltz into the courtroom and turn enough heads on the jury that they'll acquit anyway.
Does this in fact happen sometimes? Surely. Is it the typical defendant's experience in a criminal trial? Not even Dunne would pretend it is. (And let us not forget, in this regard, how few criminal prosecutions ever even go to trial, due to D.A.'s manipulative, excessive charging of crimes in order to coerce guilty pleas.)
Dunne's rather one-dimensional perspective on these matters was of course indelibly shaped by the horrific murder of his own daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, in 1982, and the light sentencing the man who killed her subsequently received on a reduced manslaughter charge. Dunne's riveting personal essay about his experiences of his daughter's death and the trial of her killer opens the book I am reviewing here, Justice. It is without doubt an exceptionally powerful, haunting piece of writing, and the impetus of this piece is compelling enough to propel one all the way through the rest of the journalism collected in the book (even when much of the rest of it is considerably less inspired).
In the course of describing the dreadful behavior on the bench of the judge in the case, however, (Burton Katz, who comes across as an insouciant Hollywood type more interested in media attention than the consequences of his actions), Dunne momentarily pauses in one scene to observe the judge sentence another defendant to five years in prison for a non-violent burglary -- a longer term than the defendant will eventually receive in Dunne's case.
As Dunne will go on to note in another essay: "A rich person on trial is very different from an ordinary person on trial."
Elsewhere, however, Dunne appears to forget these moments of fleeting recognition that the experience of the wealthy and powerful in the courtroom (on which he chose to focus in his career as a chronicler) are not especially typical. He appears to have devoted much of his energy as a public figure to supporting the aims of the "victim's rights" movement, which sought to undo many of the legal protections of defendants and which -- whatever their motives -- effectively helped fuel the rise of mass incarceration.
At times, Dunne writes about these issues with what seems an almost willful moral obtuseness -- the kind of absolutism that people imagine will be excused when they have suffered a horrific personal tragedy. He describes one of his associates in the victim's rights crusade as advocating "for changes in legislation to allow victims' rights to equate with the rights of criminals." Which sounds reasonable to anyone who doesn't reflect particularly on the meaning of the words, and which Dunne appears to think is a good idea.
As Dunne well knows, however, the rights of a defendant are not the same things as "the rights of criminals." The whole purpose of a trial -- the reason why we have a constitutional right to due process at all -- is because we don't know who's a criminal and who's not until the matter can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Furthermore, victims cannot ever have equivalent due process rights as defendants, not because we care about them less, but because only the defendant, of the two, is threatened with the possible infliction of judicial harm by the state.
And as everyone should know (though people often don't, or forget), there need to be extremely strong safeguards against the state's unjust exercise of force, unless we are willing to live with the risk of deteriorating into a fascist or totalitarian police state.
Dunne's concern with ensuring that wrongdoers never escape justice makes him largely indifferent to the alternative danger, against which it must always be delicately counterbalanced -- the danger of the descent into fascism.
Perhaps Dunne's most unpardonable sin in this regard is his approach to Mark Fuhrman, the LAPD detective who found crucial physical evidence in the O.J. Simpson trial, and whose racist statements ultimately cast the entire prosecution's case into doubt once they were unearthed on recorded conversations with a screenwriter in the 1980s.
Dunne frequently dances just out of reach of the accusation that he admired and supported Fuhrman (in one passage, he describes Fuhrman, weakly, as "a controversial character")-- yet he helped publish --and penned an introduction for -- Fuhrman's second true crime book, thus paving the way for the former police detective's bizarre second career as author and "criminal justice" pundit on right-wing media. (We still await the day when Fox hires Roy Moore, say, as its new authority on gender.)
Dunne weakly attempts to exculpate himself and Fuhrman in these matters by drawing a false moral equivalence between Fuhrman's past statements and some racist jokes that the defense team made during the O.J. trial about an Asian-American LAPD forensic specialist. Similarly, he tries to reduce the accusations against Fuhrman to the mere accusation that he "used the n-word" -- an all-too typical dodge among white writers, who find it most comfortable to think about racism as a mere matter of speech and "bad words."
As Dunne writes in one essay: "charismatic lawyer Johnnie Cochran mesmerized people into believing that to say the n-word was a worse crime than to slit the throats of two people. To me, the two things don't compare in any way[.]"
What Dunne notably fails to mention is that there is a great deal on the Fuhrman tapes other than an ugly racial slur. Fuhrman also describes incidents of planting evidence in order to falsely incriminate Black suspects, committing horrifying acts of police brutality and systematic harassment of female colleagues, and more. Some of these incidents were apparently found to be invented by later investigators, but the fact that Fuhrman concocted these stories and took pride in them surely says something about his character.
Furthermore -- and crucially -- the fact that Fuhrman described LAPD efforts to frame Black suspects, on racist motives, surely was directly relevant to the defense's argument in the O.J. trial. Most of us will still conclude, with all the evidence before us, that O.J. did it. But introducing these tapes as evidence hardly seems out of place in a trial in which Fuhrman was a crucial police witness.
Likewise, Cochran was apparently pilloried at the time for comparing Fuhrman to Hitler in his closing argument. The comparison was based, however, on witness testimony, according to which Fuhrman had said that if he had his way, all Black people "would be gathered together and burned." What Cochran said about these words was that they were a call for "genocidal racism" of the kind Hitler practiced, which is more than a fair point -- it's indisputable.
In short, the "reasonable doubt" to which Cochran appealed in the mind of the jury was the horrifying thought that the LAPD was more than capable of an elaborate racist frame-up, in order to bring charges against a Black celebrity and close a case. It doesn't look to us now that that's what actually happened in the O.J. case. But with a key police detective touting his own role in planting fake evidence in former cases, brutalizing Black suspects, and calling for genocide, one can easily imagine how this notion might come to seem reasonable to the jury indeed.
The kernel of truth to which Cochran successfully appealed in order to acquit his client was the same that Claude McKay once described, in one of his poems in "The Cycle" (a collection from the WWII-era chiefly aimed at the hypocrisy of white liberals at the time who called for racial solidarity and denounced Nazi atrocities while ignoring the racism in their own country). McKay wrote: "For sixty years [American Blacks] ha[ve] lived/ Under regimes in Europe known as Fascism."
Dunne dismisses these doubts. Instead, he just repeats the same trivializing bromide: Cochran cheated because he "made it appear that saying the n-word was a worse offense than killing two people." Once again, Dunne is so single-mindedly focused on making sure that "criminals" don't get away, he appears to have forgotten the necessity of establishing by due process who is a "criminal" and who is not, and guarding against the disturbing and very real possibility (one documented in the practices of many American police departments) that police could be guilty of false evidence, tampering, and coercion. (In another scene, Dunne appears not to understand the defense's argument that if the evidence is faked, Simpson may well be innocent. He says that in such an instance, both the police and Simpson should be tried and punished.)
All of this is to say that one can see in many places in Dunne traces of the self-righteous cruelty that seems to be a particularly endemic failing of the American national character. Though Dunne does a higher-class performance of it, many of the ideas of vengeance to which he gives vent in this book could please a Donald Trump.
In the final essay, for instance, written after the 9/11 attacks, he expresses his disgust at the fact that members of Osama bin Laden's family are allowed to fly around the United States on commercial airlines.
This is the sort of morally reckless writing that paves the way for far worse later evils -- evils like Trump's "Muslim Ban," or his calls to bomb and murder terrorists' families. It is as if we find buried in Dunne the prehistorical skeletons of ideas that will take on hideous flesh in the decades since, as they are adopted by Fox News, and thence pass into the sadistic brain of our current commander in chief.
Dunne is essentially suggesting in this passage, after all, the collective punishment of people who had nothing to do with 9/11, purely because they have a familial association to the perpetrator. This is an attitude closely related to Dunne's approach to criminal trials, where he seems to rank the danger of a guilty person "getting off" as greater than the risk of punishing the potentially innocent. These are doctrines that conflict with the most basic and ancient of human moral intuitions. For, as Abraham once pleaded with Yahweh, "Far be it from you to punish the wicked along with the innocent! Far be it from you!"
It makes no sense to speak of forgiveness, that is to say, unless one first recognizes the justice and validity of punishment. It is because one has a right to demand penalties of those who have done wrong, that it is a meaningful act when someone willingly forgoes this right for the sake of pity and humanity. Or, as William Blake put it:
Mercy no more could be
If all were as happy as we.
But forgiveness remains the nobler response, for all that; and one can still hold out the wish that Dunne had found more room for it in his heart.
Likewise, "justice," understood in this case in its rather impoverished sense of limited and proportionate punishment for wrongdoing, may have its necessary and timeless place in human affairs. But it is an ugly and tragic necessity, if so, and one in which we should take no pleasure.
I'd like us to have a bit less Dominick Dunne in our American national character, that is to say, and a bit more Saul Bernstein -- the sympathetic judge in Sloan Wilson's famous sentimental novel of the 1950s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Of this judge, Wilson writes: "He might have been happy except for one thing: he detested justice almost as much as he detested violence or cruelty of any other kind." May we share his hatred.
No comments:
Post a Comment