The Jinx: Part Two is a victim of its own success
If the first four episodes of Andrew Jarecki's The Jinx: Part Two prove anything, it's that some documentaries, like their subjects, can't leave well enough alone.
That isn't, for the nosy rubbernecks among us, a bad thing. But it isn't exactly good, either.
Don't get me wrong: Part Two is a fine addendum to the archive of texts about Robert Durst, the eldest son of New York real estate magnate Seymour Durst. Durst had long been suspected of killing his wife, Kathy, who disappeared in 1982, his friend Susan Berman, who was found shot in the head at her Beverly Hills home in 2000, and his neighbour Morris Black, whose dismembered remains were dumped in Galveston Bay. He had also — despite admitting to dismembering Black — gotten away with all of it.
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst became the biggest true-crime obsession since O.J. Simpson when Jarecki confronted Durst with damning new evidence. The finale concluded with audio of Durst mumbling to himself in a bathroom, apparently confessing. “Killed 'em all, of course,” he said, unaware his mike was still on and recording.
Part Two opens with audio from March 14, 2015, the day before that infamous finale aired. Bob, calling from prison, informs his lawyer he was arrested by the FBI earlier that afternoon. “I had a revolver, a whole lot of money, like $80,000, um, what else, oh, and I had — I was using that, uh, you know, that phoney ID,” he says, so casually he might be ordering takeout. “Oh,” his lawyer says. “Yup,” Durst says. There's a pause. His lawyer asks how he is. “I'm all right. I mean I've been here before.”
The new chapters competently introduce new and curious characters from Bob's universe (dwelling with particular interest on his old friend Nick Chavin and Bob's second wife, Debrah Charatan). It unearths some previously unreported details as it follows the prosecutors trying to build a case as well as a couple of juicy strategic tidbits.
Above all, Part Two tries — and mostly fails, at least in the four episodes critics received — to coherently reckon with the massive phenomenon that The Jinx (and Bob Durst) became.
The docuseries nevertheless benefits from one of those peculiar coincidences that continually threaten to make the story about this story better than the story itself: O.J. Simpson died less than two weeks before The Jinx: Part Two was set to première. Through sheer happenstance, this reprise of the Durst story comes on the cusp of our recent collective effort to reflect on the megaspectacles — and metaspectacles — these murder cases become.
Durst's case differed in crucial respects from Simpson's. But there are notable parallels: Durst, too, was a rich abusive husband known for cheating on his blond, much-younger wife, whom he tried to dominate and control until she sought a divorce. Like Simpson, he went (briefly) on the lam rather than turn himself in. Like Simpson, he was caught with firearms and a lot of cash, ended up on trial, hired a “dream team” of lawyers, and was acquitted despite an astonishing amount of physical evidence. Like Simpson's, his defence team offered an alternative account so bizarre and compelling the jury bought it. Also like Simpson — whose “hypothetical” tell-all (If ) I Did It was initially titled I Want to Tell You — Durst just couldn't shut up.
He didn't just like the feeling that he was getting away with something. He chased it. Durst's 2001 arrest (for the murder of Morris Black) happened only because, having just jumped bail and fled Texas with $37,000 in cash, he decided to steal a chicken sandwich from a grocery store instead of paying for it.
The most gratifying aspect of his confession was the sense that he'd finally lost. For a wily performer who relishes tricking and trolling the people watching him, nothing is more humiliating than actual transparency.
Durst's panicked soliloquy was maximally dramatic precisely because it was not theatre.
That the documentarians managed to elicit that incredible admission from him — and (as they revealed in interviews) didn't even discover the audio for two years — seemed like a miracle.
The trouble with the new instalment of The Jinx isn't, in other words, that its subject has died.
The second problem is that Durst's story achieved cultural escape velocity. Much like the O.J. Simpson trial, the real thing now exceeds any single attempt to narrate it.
In short, the problem for Part Two might be a slight variant on that old saw about truth being stranger than fiction.