Adverbs are a writer’s cruelest weapon. Take this line from Ian Parker’s New Yorker profile of Apple design chief Jonathan Ive: “Ive tends to be strenuously courteous toward his employers.” Strenuously! I imagine a blood vessel pulsating on Ive’s forehead as he pledges fealty to the Apple corporate brass. He bows so low that he strains his back.
Imagine you’ve just met a writer who is profiling you. What an honor! How exciting it will be to see your name in newsprint, to have a carefully written and researched account of your life and work. The first time you meet your profiler, reaching out to shake her hand, immediately you’ve opened yourself to the adverb. To borrow another descriptor from Parker’s profile, perhaps you shook her hand a little “sheepishly.” What does it say if you shook her hand eagerly? Or limply?
Nonfiction writers inevitably make their subjects into characters, which means that all our little mannerisms and off-hand remarks—the types of things we all do and say 10,000 times a day, and think nothing of—become data points that a writer can use to construct a persona. When you sit down for an interview, or agree to be the subject of a profile, you put yourself at the mercy of the writer and her adverbs. Janet Malcolm wrote a book about this strange relationship between writer and subject called The Journalist and the Murderer, which begins, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
Even if you regard this view as too cynical, it’s easy to see how vulnerable a subject becomes when he allows someone to write a story or a book about him. He is entirely at the mercy of the writer, and no detail is too small for extrapolation. In his profile of Ive, Parker mentions that Ive has in his office a seven-inch Playmobil figure of himself, which his colleagues made as a gift. If you visited Ive’s office, I imagine you wouldn’t give the figure much thought, except maybe to envy that you don’t have a Playmobil likeness of your own. But in Parker’s story, with Ive as a character, the figurine becomes a potent symbol for Ive’s ego, a postmodern portrait hanging on the wall.
It’s not hard to imagine what might motivate a person to agree to be written about. Malcolm calls the period of interviews, in which a friendly and inquisitive stranger asks question after question, the subject’s “narcissist’s holiday.” Which is to say, one major motivation is ego. Another might be to tell your story on your terms. Maybe you’re Anthony Weiner and your name’s been run through the mud and now you want to sit down and try to explain your side of the story. Or maybe you’re Robert Durst, the subject of HBO’s documentary series The Jinx.
Durst, a scion of one of New York’s wealthiest families, has been in the public eye for decades, since even before his wife Kathie Durst disappeared mysteriously in 1982. HBO’s brilliant six-part documentary miniseries, which aired this February and March, implicated Robert Durst in the disappearance of his wife and linked him to the murder of a close friend two decades later. At the end of the 6-part series, having forgotten that he’s wearing a recording device, Durst admits to the killings, babbling to himself while using the bathroom. “What the hell did I do?” he says. “Killed them all, of course.”
It makes for riveting television, a fantastical true-crime drama with a shockingly satisfying conclusion: Durst was arrested on murder charges one day before the final episode aired. For any fan of the podcast Serial maddened by its un-conclusion, Durst’s confession gives The Jinx a bow with which to neatly wrap itself up. There’s not much mystery to the series at all. You can feel from the first episode that Durst did it, whatever it was. Instead of the cliffhangers that propelled Serial, the energy of The Jinx comes directly from Durst. You study him and try to understand how he works. One of the documentary’s central mysteries is why Durst would agree to be its subject in the first place.
Durst contacted Jinx director Andrew Jarecki in 2010 after seeing Jarecki’s film All Good Things, a fictional retelling of the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst. The exchange between Jarecki and Durst, which is shown at the end of the first episode, is in some ways the most interesting part of the entire series.
Durst calls Jarecki, his voice crackling over the phone, and proposes that they sit down for an interview: “Would it make sense for, in some capacity, there to be an interview with me related to what’s in the movie?”
“Yeah, I think that’s a fascinating idea,” Jarecki says, adding later, “You should feel free to call me Andrew.”
Durst explains that over the years he has turned down interview requests from scores of reporters, and says he’s not interested in doing “true-crime kind of stuff,” so Jarecki makes a proposal. “I guess the question is, you know, has anybody really done a piece on you where they didn’t walk into it with very strong assumptions?”
That was deceptive—Jarecki’s documentary, the full name of which is The Jinx: the Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, indicts Durst from the get-go—and it’s the exact sort of deception that led Malcolm to describe all journalists as amoral and two-faced. Jarecki never intended to tell Bob Durst’s story from a point of view sympathetic to Bob Durst. Jarecki’s motivations were clear all along: to tell a captivating story, and he tricked Durst so that he would agree to play subject.
Altogether less clear are Durst’s motivations for participating in Jarecki’s film. Maybe he wanted to try to clear his name. That’s more or less how he framed his proposal when he first reached out to Jarecki. Or maybe some part of him wanted to get caught. Maybe, like a serial killer desperate to be recognized for the elegance of his crimes, deep down he craved some recognition. His final confession, the capstone to a documentary that took five years to make, was recorded while the cameras were off, during a private moment in the bathroom. It might seem unfair to catch a 71-year-old man unwittingly admitting to murder because he didn’t realize the red light was on. But in an earlier episode Durst’s lawyer had already explained to him that any utterance spoken while wearing the microphone would be recorded.
During their final interview, just before Durst’s confession, Jarecki shows him some particularly damning evidence, and in one of the most spectacularly strange sequences I’ve ever seen on TV, Durst begins burping involuntarily. It’s as if he’s having some physiological reaction to Jarecki’s revelation, like his body’s trying to reject what’s happening, like some evil thing is bubbling out of him.
Afterward, Durst heads for the bathroom. “There it is,” he says. “You’re caught.”