Rectify - a film review - Part 2

Rectify is a Netflix Series that ran for thirty episodes in four seasons between 2013 and 2016.  It is a Southern Gothic drama about Daniel Holden, a small-town Georgia man on death row who was tried and convicted of raping and murdering his girlfriend.  His mother, Janet, and his sister, Amantha, devote their lives trying to exonerate him, but are handicapped by the fact that he confessed to the crime and several witnesses corroborated his testimony. After nineteen years, with the new technology of DNA testing, we learn that the semen found on the victim's clothes  is not Daniel's and he is set free pending further investigation.

The plot of Rectify centers on the fact that Daniel's guilt is uncertain.  There is evidence that his confession may have been coerced and he himself is unable to recall the event.  The pressure of the police and the justice system has led him to  internalize the charges and he is filled with doubt and self-loathing.  I imagine other viewers, like me, find themselves siding with Amantha and Janet in their belief that Daniel is innocent.  But any impulse to want to shake some sense into him is mitigated by the recognition that he is a seriously damaged human being. The story is as much about the many subplots of ancillary characters whose lives are directly effected by Daniel's struggle as it is about his inner struggle to find meaning in life.

While on Death Row he is able to establish a friendship with Kerwin, the convict in the neighboring cell, who believes in Daniel's innocence and makes that belief his own reason for living. Until the day Kerwin is led to the chamber for lethal injection.  The loss leads Daniel into a depression he cannot escape. 

That event and the many beatings he has to endure from local thugs who take their cue from a state senator whose motives for condemning Daniel are unclear make Daniel's life a living nightmare, and one would expect the grim reality of his situation to make the series unwatchable.  The opposite is true.  It makes it hard not to keep watching late into the night.

Because I found the series this exceptionally watchable I want to avoid spoilers; I don't want to take that experience away from others who I am sure will react similarly.  At the same time, I'd like to explain why I consider Rectify a must-see and I realize a simple declaration of how much I was moved by the story does not constitute a review.  That's why I began with my religious history and the fact that, while I have shed the sense of the sacred, I have retained the respect for the ethical value system that came through.  I react to injustice as strongly today as I ever did as a believing Christian.

As the story unfolds of Daniel Holden's nineteen-year incarcaration on death row, the abuse by fellow prisoners and the self-doubt that invades his soul, the quality of the acting and writing sinks in; it does what good story-telling can do, lift the story off the page and erase the line between theater and real life. I was drawn into Daniel's agony and felt my blood boil at the depravity of those responsible for it.

My husband and I differ regularly over dinner on which of Donald Trump's actions outrage us the most.  What sticks in Taku's mind is the image of Trump tossing paper towels to the crowd after the hurricane in Puerto Rico in 2017. For me it's the scene in the Oval Office where Trump, Vance, Marco Rubio and others surround Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump tells him to surrender to Putin, who has invaded his country and is killing his people.  Why? "You don't have the cards."  Whether it's insensitivity to other's pain or bullying the vulnerable, sometimes what you're looking at is not simply bad; it's evil.

Many have called Rectify a "slow burn." Whether you share that view depends, as I see it, on whether you want your entertainment to be about thrills and adventure or about the opportunity to ponder the lines between fact and fiction, right and wrong, guilt and innocence.  And how far you can be pushed before losing your sanity.  

Rectify - a film review - Part 1: Where I'm coming from

I've just completed the thirty-hour Netflix Series, Rectify, a modern-day morality play which has set me off trying to remember when I first learned the concepts of good and evil.  Let me outline that search before commenting on the series itself.

I had a religious upbringing, so it must have been in church or Sunday School when they skipped over the abstract and went directly for  the concrete.  I can see why: it's easier for my mind to grasp the concept of good when it is personified by capital G, God and evil when it is personified by Satan, also capitalized as a proper noun.

As the years went by and I got exposed to what is I understand as cosmopolitanism, including intellectual sophistication, I came to accept nuanced thinking as a requisite for what we call intelligence. Simply put, smart people eschew black-and-white thinking, I came to "understand."  I began to move more and more among those who prefer a both/and approach to truth to an either/or one.

Even as recently as graduate school, where postmodern thought reigned supreme and my peers and I steered away from certainty and categorical statements and replaced the search for verifiable facts with an embrace of often conflicting "narratives."  In time I even began to question my own beliefs, specifically my life as an ardent religion basher.  Where I once was convinced I needed to toss religion out with the trash because, as a gay man with intimate familiarity with countless men and women who had loving relations with members of their own sex, I knew the Roman Catholic description of homosexuality as "inherently flawed" was pure bullshit.  And since they (and members of other organized religious groups) were dead wrong about that, God knows what else they got ass-backwards. It would be years before I could find a way out of the battle between doubt and certainty.

I grew up in a number of Protestant churches, was "dunked" in the Baptist Church when I got old enough to know what it meant to profess religious faith, absorbed into a Congregational mindset when our Baptist Church got absorbed into a Congregational church, and later - after yearning for a more disciplined orthodox approach to worship I picked up by going to mass with my Catholic friends during lent, I got permission from the Episcopal bishop of Vermont to take communion at the St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Middlebury, even as I was meeting monthly with the seven Lutherans for Lutheran communion and eventually traveling to the nearby Dartmouth campus for confirmation as a Lutheran at the invitation of the itinerant pastor who made the rounds to cater to the eight of us of his scattered flock in Northern New England.

It was a chicken-and-egg reality and I didn't know whether my interest in and acquisition and internalization of Christian doctrine stemmed from this diversity of ways of expressing Christianity or whether the belief systems came first and the church-shopping followed.

I lucked out and got to spend my junior year in college abroad, in Munich, in the land of my German ancestors.  Because I had made a point of identifying myself as a Lutheran, got assigned to the Lutheran dormitory at Arcisstraße 31 - a two-and-a- half block (8-minute) walk up from Arcisstraße 12, where Hitler had had his "Führerbau"headquarters, where the Munich Agreement between Hitler, Chamberlin, Deladier and Mussolini was signed in 1938.  

I know this is a digression on a digression,  but my experience in Munich was critical to my moral development so I want to get this down.  The Lutherans I knew in New England, including my grandmother's church where I ultimately became a member, were fun-loving people. They loved their beer and sausages, whirled around the dance floor, polka after polka, and laughed noisily from the belly. In contrast, the Lutherans I encountered in Munich were a completely different kind of folk. On the positive side, the church I attended, St. Mark's (Gabelsbergerstraße 6), was the home of the Munich Bach Choir, just across the way, behind the Alte Pinakothek, and Sunday services were occasionally world-class concerts.  On the negative side, my colleagues in the dormitory reacted with shock when I let it slip that I liked drinking at the Hofbräuhaus on weekends.  It was not their prudery that put me off so much as the realization that with all this variation not only in church doctrine but also in everyday life, doubt over who had the correct take on faith and practice had begun to take over.  It was just a matter of time before I decided the church and I needed to part ways.

My German Lutheran upbringing brought with it a lot of distain for Roman Catholic doctrine and practice, as well.  "Papst" is the German word for "pope" and also for "vomitorium" - the basin in the rest rooms of the beer halls where one relieves oneself after drinking too much beer, so-called because one gets down on one's knees in a posture of contrition when losing one's cookies - and sometimes that word got extended to the toilet basin.  The verb "papsten" means "to puke."  Not nice.  I assume the hostility dated back to the religious wars when to be of the wrong religion could get you killed.  

On a higher plane, Luther's insistence on sola scriptura led me to the awareness that divorce, euthanasia, abortion and homosexuality are not sinful acts and I decided that if I've read the bible right, the moral life begins and ends with loving God and caring for one's fellow men and women, particularly the poor.  

I chucked religion and rummaged around in Kant and other schools of philosophy until I finally settled on Sissela Bok and her conclusion that morality can be reduced to the avoidance of violence and deceit.  That's pretty much where I remain today.