Stranger than fiction, almost too slick to be real

I still remember watching the finale of the original 2015 series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. In that six-part documentary, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki had sat down for over 20 hours of interviews with Bob Durst, a New York real estate heir who at the time of the show’s première had been connected to, but not convicted of, the disappearance of his first wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, the murder of his friend Susan Berman, and the shooting death of a neighbour, Morris Black.

There was that electric moment when Durst paused the interview to go to the washroom, still wearing his microphone, and then could be heard muttering to himself, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

A hot-mic moment for the ages, this apparent confession would have seemed ludicrous and improbable in a scripted drama. But there it was — the kind of freak accident that documentarians dream about.

Coming almost a decade later, this second instalment (now on Crave, with new episodes dropping Sundays) would seem doomed to anticlimax, especially since Durst, who was eventually charged and convicted of Berman’s murder, died from cardiac arrest in January 2022, one day before he was set to go to trial for the murder of Kathie McCormack Durst.

Bob Durst is dead, and the friends and families of his victims have been left to grapple with their losses as best they can. (“Closure” is not a word he uses, Kathie’s father says at one point.) Some things we know already, and some things may never be known.

So, what is new here? This second series starts by focusing on the justice system, as a soft-spoken Los Angeles D.A. prepares his case against Durst. Once again, we see Durst as a shark-eyed sociopath. But now we meet more of his hangers-on, getting a clearer sense of how Durst’s wealth and power attracted a motley bunch of grifters and goons, enablers and opportunists, oddballs and show-offs.

What feels familiar in The Jinx: Part Two is a continuing sense of moral queasiness. In 2015, The Jinx helped kick off the prestige true-crime genre, with all its potent possibilities — Jarecki arguably helped convict a killer — but also its potential ethical morasses. “Riveting but revolting,” one reviewer called the original series. “At once exploitative and high-minded, a moral lasagna,” said another.

That “lasagna” has more layers now. There are the tricky issues that arise when trying to combine fact-finding investigative journalism with the audience-grabbing sensations and cliff-hanging narratives of must-see entertainment. And building on Part 1’s queasy intimacy between the filmmakers and their subject, The Jinx: Part Two shows how intertwined the film project became with the Durst case as it slogged its way through the system.

Early episodes take a look back at that timeline, reminding us that it was Durst, when he was still a free man, who made the initial contact with Jarecki, wanting to tell his side of the story. “The dumbest thing I ever did was doing Jarecki,” we hear Durst admitting in a prison phone call. “Oh, God, The Jinx.”

The Jinx: Part Two shows us that even as Part 1 was being broadcast, Durst — described at one point as a “nonstop talkfest” — was chatting with a New York Times writer every week after new episodes aired, doing a bit of a debrief.

After a particularly damning bit of evidence was unearthed by Jarecki in the fifth episode, Durst went on the lam. We see a re-enactment of his apprehension, with FBI agents tracking him to a New Orleans Marriott. As they were approaching him, we are told, a passing hotel guest asked, “Oh, is that Bob Durst?” She’d been watching the show, too.

In another very meta scene, we see family members and friends of Kathie McCormack Durst, along with many of the people involved in investigating the Durst cases, as they gather for a real-time watch party of Part 1’s jaw-dropping final episode. Durst’s seeming on-air confession was good news for these people, but it’s still uncomfortable watching them as they receive it. This feels like an intrusive, even insensitive stunt.

Jarecki also freely mixes up real footage (audio from prison phone calls and grainy date-stamped video of interrogations) with self-consciously arty re-enactments (figures shot from the back or fuzzed out of focus). One weird esthetic choice is a re-creation of Durst’s imagined getaway to Cuba, featuring a figure sitting in a speedboat in a latex mask disguise. It’s a scene that calls up a Mission: Impossible movie more than a doc about a multiple murderer, and it feels tonally off.

Since the original Jinx aired in 2015, along with the podcast Serial and the Netflix show Making a Murderer, which also dropped that year, we have become a nation of couch criminologists and true-crime rubberneckers. But the genre remains dogged by controversies. There have been charges that documentaries have irresponsibly platformed serial killers like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, causing pain to the families of their victims. The recent Netflix series What Jennifer Did has come under scrutiny for apparently using AI without indicating that was being done, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

The continuing story of Bob Durst remains uncomfortably mesmerizing, but too often The Jinx: Part Two is self-referential without being self-aware.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca