Pictures at an Execution

This book is about murder—in life and in art—and about how we look at it and feel about it. At the center of Wendy Lesser’s investigation is a groundbreaking legal case in which a federal court judge was asked to decide whether a gas chamber execution would be broadcast on public television. Our grim and seemingly endless fascination with murder gets its day in court as Lesser conducts us through the proceedings, pausing along the way to reflect on the circumstances of violent death in our culture. Her book, itself a murder mystery of sorts, circling suspensefully around a central point, is also a meditation on murder in a civilized society—what we make of it in law, morality, and art.Lesser narrates the trial with a sharp eye for detail and an absorbing sense of character. Questions that arise in the courtroom conjure other, broader ones: why are we drawn to murder, as an act and as a spectacle? Who in a murder story are we drawn to—victim, murderer, detective? Is such interest, even pleasure, morally suspect? Lesser’s reflections on these questions follow the culture in its danse macabre, from Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song to the Jacobean play The Changeling, from Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line to Crime and Punishment, from Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer to Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, from Weegee’s photographs to television’s movie of the week. Always anchored in the courtroom, where the question of murder as theater is being settled in immediate, human terms, this circle of thought widens outward to the increasingly blurred borderline between real and fictional murder, between event and story, between murder as news and as art. As gripping as its subject, Pictures at an Execution ultimately brings us face to face with our own most disturbing cultural impulses.

Lesser’s mesmerizing study about the spectatorship of murder...demonstrates why a televised execution cannot succeed as either deterrent or moral instruction. A significant addition to the literature of capital punishment., Erudite but sensible culture crit., Unusually compelling reading, for the book suggests that the persistent interest in murder is in fact one of the threads of our common humanity, a prospect we can hardly entertain with complacency. Why murder should draw us is the question Lesser explores through a multiplicity of lenses in a sensitive and intelligent manner, abjuring sensationalism. This is a provocative, well-conceived, and well-written book., Her style is not dense but enviable, a joy to read, like listening to an old friend., What’s most engaging about Pictures at an Execution is the way in which Lesser’s intense involvement with her subject is mediated by a cool rationality that militates against sentimentality, cant, and disingenuousness. It’s bracing to watch an active moral intelligence at work, ready to question anything, including the writer’s own motives...We can read the book with pleasure, interest, and admiration.

Wendy Lesser is editor of The Threepenny Review.