Ken Burns’s documentary, The Central Park
Five, based on a book by his daughter, Sarah Burns, tells the
by-now pretty well-known story of the false conviction of five New
York teenagers for the brutal rape in April of 1989 of a woman who
for years was known only as “the Central Park jogger.” Subsequently
we learned — her own book, I Am the Central Park Jogger
(2003) spilled the beans — that her name was Trisha Meili and that,
having made a recovery from her injuries that was little short of
the media’s favorite epithet, “miraculous,” she might as well join
in the public discussion that had surrounded her horrible
experience from the beginning and that had during the same period,
especially in the media, insisted on seeing it as somehow
emblematic of all that was wrong with America. In this respect, if
in no other, Mr. and Miss Burns are carrying on in the same
tradition, except that it is now the fate of the five not-guilty
teens rather than that of the poor jogger which is significant, and
racism rather than crime and social breakdown what it is
significant of. “Oh,” as Homer Simpson says: “that.”
The film rounds up the usual suspects, too, focusing on the
fault of the police and prosecutors who brought the case against
the teens, on the gap between rich and poor in New York in the
1980s and the fear of crime that gripped the city in the period
between the coming of crack to the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant
and Harlem in 1984 (I would argue much earlier than that) and the
crackdown on crime under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani a decade later —
which, so far as the film-makers are concerned, may or may not have
had anything to do with the relative peace and safety in which New
Yorkers live today. Understandably, they also show less interest in
the question of the guilt of the innocent Five in several other
incidents of assault and vandalism, which took place in the Park on
the same evening and which they were originally arrested for. It’s
obviously important for the sake of their story that the boys
remain pristine in victimhood.
To be fair, the role played by the media and the media’s hype in
what happened to them is mentioned in passing and Jim Dwyer, then a
reporter with Newsday and now with The New York
Times, offers a perfunctory mea culpa on their behalf. But the
movie itself is evidence that hype is now our lingua franca. Mayor
Ed Koch is shown calling the jogger case “the crime of the
century,” as if it were still 1989 and he were still in office. For
the most part the Burnses prefer to avert their eyes from the
crucial role of the media in pushing for the false convictions, as
they do from the fact that both the prosecutors who seem to have
been the chief culprits (if culprits they were) in stitching up the
Five, were female. So, too, the fear of “crime” that the film
mentions was much less important in generating the popular energy
that the case produced than the fear of rape specifically. Whether
the racial or the sexual element in the case was the more important
factor in generating the hype which, in turn, generated the need
for a quick conviction may be a moot point, but there can be little
doubt that the two were vitally connected. The film is thus
weakened by its attempt to disentangle them in order to attribute
the false convictions to racial inequality.
The result is that this study in popular hysteria is much less
cogent or interesting than it might otherwise have been. We are
left with the impression that the police identified the suspects
and the prosecutors built their case against them simply out of
malicious racism. The fact that none of those police or prosecutors
chose to cooperate with this documentary cannot be quite unrelated,
though a pending lawsuit against the city would have made that
impossible in any case. Their presence would undoubtedly have
helped in the effort to understand what happened, if we assume for
a moment that understanding and not propaganda is the object of the
film. The nearest it gets to an effort to arrive at any more
persuasive explanation is the verdict of Jim Dwyer, who fingers
“institutional protectionism” — a linguistic barbarism which
refers, I take it, to the human tendency of police and prosecutors
to close ranks in order to cover up their mistakes from public
scrutiny.
The thing, if not the term, doubtless did play a part in
bringing about both the injustice to the five boys and the further
injustice of failing to make the effort to put it right. It was
only when the actual rapist, Matias Reyes, came forward to confess
more than a decade later that the case was reopened and the
convictions overturned. But the indictment brought by the black
historian, Craig Steven Wilder, against “society” — of which the
Five’s convictions are said to have been a “mirror” — seems at
least equally unjust. “Society” is much too easy a scapegoat for
the faults of particular people who behaved badly. And if blame is
to be allocated, let’s at least make sure that the media get their
share. They were clearly complicit in the popular will to believe
in a recrudescent savagery associated with such much-exercised
journalistic terms as “Wilding” and “Wolf pack” that seemed to
dehumanize the alleged criminals.
Like the crime itself, these words came to stand in the popular
imagination for crime — assault and property crime as well as rape
— committed just for the fun of it which, therefore, could be taken
to signify a complete moral and social breakdown. As it turned out,
however, rape was not ordinarily that kind of crime but one
appealing to the criminal specialist, such as Matias Reyes, who was
a serial rapist and murderer. But the media version lives on in the
absurd contention of David Denby in
The New Yorker that the film is “perhaps the
most devastating portrait of contemporary social inequality to
appear in an American documentary.” This is like calling
Citizen Kane a devastating portrait of the dangers of
sledding or Casablanca a devastating portrait of gambling
in Vichy France. The fact that the suspects were from socially
unfavored backgrounds was not quite irrelevant to their plight, but
a society without disparities of wealth and power not being
imaginable, we ought to have wit enough to look to our portraiture
for something more specific to this case, such as media
fear-mongering, and not a constant of the human condition.
