The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015)

In an era in which every second television series aspires to be Twin Peaks, perhaps the most unlikely successor to Lynch’s throne comes in the form of The Jinx, a study in demonic Americana that stretches from Westchester to Los Angeles to Galveston and revolves around the many near-convictions of billionaire Robert Durst. Moving between the death and dismemberment of Morris Black, the execution-style shooting of Susan Berman and the still-unsolved disappearance of Katherine Durst, it fleshes out one of America’s favourite true crime sagas with a host of incredible interviews, powerfully curated footage and a new piece of evidence that makes for what must be one of the most chilling endings ever committed to film. At the heart of it all is Andrew Jarecki’s ongoing conversation with Durst, which scrupulously respects his psychological privacy while probing the veracity of his testimony in this more informal setting, inducing Durst in turn to relax into his recollections with such eccentric ease that it leaves you wondering whether he was unbelievably lucky, unbelievably intelligent or simply fortunate enough to be backed and protected by one of the oldest and wealthiest real estate companies in the country. As the series is very much anchored in Durst’s recollections, it’s inevitable that it should sometimes recall Errol Morris, in something like a cross between The Thin Red Line and First Person, but Durst’s presence is too mercurial for it to ever fully feel like a talking heads approach, just as Jarecki tends to refrain more and more from Morris’ ironic distance and lush recreations as the series proceeds. In part, that’s because it’s impossible to discern when Durst is experiencing empathy – and so impossible to discern if he’s empathetic – as the series grows ever more undecided about him than the facts of the various cases might seem to suggest, even or especially once Jarecki seems to uncover definitive proof of his guilt. In the process, you start to feel as if Durst might have been a totally different person at each crime scene, or at each point in his massive real estate empire, turning him into something of an embodiment of American regionalism, a ventriloquist for whatever place he happens to be inhabiting, which has the unsettling effect of making the interview room itself feel like just another space that he’s in the process of co-opting and controlling, whether because it’s already somehow a part of his family’s all-perasive New York property empire, or because he’s already started to contemplate how he might transform it into his next crime scene. A liquidity crisis that continues to elude accountability against all odds, he’s the perfect psychopath for an era in which precarity and property are peculiarly fused, haunting the interview room with his presence long after he’s finally left it.