* * * * (out of 4)
At first glance, Fred Leuchter is a mousy little man with coke bottle glasses and chipmunk teeth which curl into a pained grimace whenever he smiles. He's a nebbishy fellow, but seems very sure of himself as he describes his vocation. One might assume he was a travelling bible salesman, hat in his hand, travelling across the Midwest. In fact, he pursues a far stranger dream.
His mission is to expedite the means of execution by tweaking devices such as the electric chair, the hangman's noose, lethal injection and the gas chamber. He travels from state to state improving the quality of these death machines in order to provide a swift, easy death without torture. The neck must break when the noose drops, and the body must not be cooked in the electric chair - a cleaner method must be engineered.
When discussing the process of lethal injection, Leuchter recommends the prisoner be seated in a more comfortable "luxury dentist's chair" and be allowed to either listen to music, watch television or gaze at paintings on the wall to make the entire experience more pleasant. "This is a human being," Leuchter reminds us. He goes on to say that he sleeps peacefully every night.
Expedition of Product - From Point A To Point B
Filmmaker Errol Morris gives Leuchter center stage for the first half hour of the film, exploring the nuts and bolts of his macabre craft. While he has had no formal training, he seems confident and assured while playing with these gadgets, all buttons and levers, electric currents and rope pulleys.
The crucial information which is largely ignored in Leuchter's discussion is that he is doing his small part to expedite and streamline the process of killing. When Morris makes his crucial shift in the film, taking the story of Fred Leuchter into a new direction, these early scenes click into place as soon as one word is presented: Auschwitz.
The Nazis did everything in their power to create an environment where they, too, could create a working means of production for the taking human lives. Much like Leuchter, the fundamental idea is building a system which allows you to forget that these are lives - suddenly, they are mere numbers. "X number of product must be transported today, from point A to point B, for sanitation, and the product must then be delivered to point C and cremated."
