Pictures at an Execution

This book is about murderin life and in artand about how we look at it and feel about it. At the center of Wendy Lessers 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 societywhat 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 tovictim, murderer, detective? Is such interest, even pleasure, morally suspect? Lessers reflections on these questions follow the culture in its danse macabre, from Norman Mailers Executioners Song to the Jacobean play The Changeling, from Errol Morriss documentary The Thin Blue Line to Crime and Punishment, from Janet Malcolms The Journalist and the Murderer to Jim Thompsons The Killer Inside Me, from Weegees photographs to televisions 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.