Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) (Friday, January 13, 2012) (139)

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory is the third part of the documentary series about the so-called West Memphis 3, three teenagers who were convicted of murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. From the outside, the prosecution relied heavily on the boys appearance and fascination with the occult and heavy metal (which, of course, is not totally unusual for teenage boys). There was never any strong physical evidence, no motive and the convictions were largely based on the confession of Jessie Miskelly, the most damaged of the three, whose testimony was forced and hard to believe when heard. Of course, the convictions were really based on the fact that the community needed scapegoats and these kids were weird, had long hair, wore heavy metal t-shirts and didn't have lots of friends. Guilty.

The second film, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (from 2000), dealt mostly with the appeals process, where the three men brought new evidence and testimony to the court. Unfortunately for them, the judge hearing their appeal was the same one who presided over their original trials and his most important goal was to save face for himself and the police department, who had screwed up a handful of time.

Now, 11 years later the story goes on. The first 20 minutes of the film serve as catch-up to some of the more unusual details of the murders and the original trial. The body of one of the murdered boys had strange scratch marks on it and had its testicles and penis removed. Prosecutors used these facts to suggest it was a Satanic ritualistic murder, though an expert brought in by the appeal team says now that it's consistent with an animal clawing and eating parts of the body.

The step-father of one of the boys famously was accused by Damien Echols, the suggested leader of the killers and the only one on death row, to be the murderer and he, in turn, had acted out a manic ritual himself of burning and burying the "bodies" of the three murderers. That man is now on the side of the guilty men, saying he's been swayed by the lack of physical and DNA evidence in the States' case. The good news for the convicts is that the original judge was elected to the state supreme court (fail upwards!), so they would get a new judge who would hear their new evidence.

The second film dealt a lot with the cause celebre that the case had become and how celebrities like Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp had taken the story and raised money for the appeal process. There was also a lot in the appeal case seen in that film about how the cameras of directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky that were in the court room in the original trial might have affected the outcome one way or another. In this third film there is a lot more of this reflexive analysis about how much of a thing this story of three teens became due to the popularity of the films. In the end, there would not have been a strong appeal possible without the financial and emotional support of the public for the three convicts. The documentary itself changes its own outcome (very un-Frederick Wiseman).

One very interesting element about this third film (and really the second one to a degree) is how this series emerges in a very similar if unintended way to the Up Series, the group of documentary films by Michael Apted that follows a group of 7-year-olds every seven years as they grow up. In those, as in this, you see how the characters grow and change and meet different experiences depending on how the deal with the reality they are each given. Similar to those films, Purgatory also shows how the experience of being in the films changes the men's lives. Damien Echols himself got married to a woman who watch the original documentary on TV in 1996, began a letter relationship with him and ultimately moved to Little Rock to marry him. Similar to the Up films, this is not an experiment sealed in a vacuum, rather they each have different opportunities because they are known from the film.

It says a lot that when I read in August that the West Memphis 3 were getting out of jail I knew exactly what the story was about and let a few friends know about it. It has become a cultural touchstone for this era that people around the world know about. Few documentaries have this reach and few can help to free wrongly convicted men the way this series has.

Stars: 3 of 4