On The Jinx: Part Two, we spend no small amount of time watching people watch television. In the penultimate episode, we see Jim McCormack, brother of Robert Durst’s first wife and victim, Kathie, glued to a screen as the real-estate scion/psychopath receives the guilty verdict he deserves. Earlier in the season, we’re treated to re-creations of Durst watching The Jinx as it airs, recaps of which he would write as part of ongoing correspondence with a journalist. This is a fitting motif, since so much about the Durst saga is inextricably linked to public spectacle.
This extends to The Jinx itself, which achieved pop-culture immortality when the HBO docuseries closed out its original run in 2015 with the hot-mic moment heard around the world: “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” Later deemed admissible in court, the recording of Durst would play an active role in his trial, underscoring how The Jinx, both as a phenomenon and as evidence, remained central to his fate through the end. Even in an increasingly surreal world where reality and television and reality television are melding into one giant blob, it’s hard to overemphasize just how weird and unprecedented this entire situation is. It’s a shame, then, that Part Two swerves away from unpacking any of that.
Well, not entirely. The closest it comes to self-reflexivity arrives about thirty minutes into the opening chapter, when the episode cuts to footage of people gathering to view the finale’s live broadcast nine years ago. This was no ordinary watch party; held in the upstate New York home of director Andrew Jarecki, who created the series with Zac Stuart-Pontier and Marc Smerling, the screening brought together a wide array of people intimately affected by Durst’s crimes. “It was like the meeting of an old club,” said Charles Bagli, the former New York Times journalist who’s one of the more consistent talking heads in both seasons. “You had investigators, prosecutors; you had witnesses.” Most importantly, Kathie Durst’s surviving family members were present too: McCormack, his wife, Sharon, and their daughter, Liz.
What unfolds in this scene is utterly captivating. We see the crowd laugh at the right beats. We see them grow quiet as the episode builds to the climax we know is coming. When Durst’s hot-mic moment plays, the room stirs. People audibly exclaim; someone else shushes them. The camera, meanwhile, stays focused on McCormack’s face, emotion gradually percolating. There’s so much baked into this moment: about true crime as pop culture and extrajudicial process, about our relationship with media as a means and an end, about grotesque intertwinings of fame and death, about the strange sensation that arises watching this group of people watch a piece of footage that’s going to change them. It remains the most interesting sequence in Part Two by a mile, and I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.
Indeed, I’ve never known what to make of The Jinx. At the heart of all true-crime media is an acute tension: Some may be well-meaning efforts laboring to right wrongs, but all are still fundamentally pieces of consumer entertainment. The Jinx is perhaps the most accomplished expression of this. The series may have drawn ethical questions over the years (should Jarecki & Co. have reached out to the police earlier?), but it nevertheless turned out to be the rarest of things: a doc that was thrilling and consequential.
For its troubles, The Jinx became larger than itself, and this is why it’s so frustrating that Part Two never grapples with the reverberations of its own spectacle. We see evidence of its influence in the sequel but mostly in a self-congratulatory manner: The opening episode plays footage of billboards promoting The Jinx in 2015 and clips of television programs discussing its revelations; members of the justice system, here in the present, process the significance of the phenomenon. “When The Jinx came out, my prediction was that this is going to be the biggest thing to hit my office since O.J.,” John Lewin, the district attorney who would lead the prosecution against Durst, tells Jarecki. These self-references are used as flavor beats, and Part Two never explores The Jinx’s role in the story further. How did the creators and participants of the original series feel going through that maelstrom? What do they think it all means within the context of their lives and society around them? Instead, Part Two moves forward with a straight face, building out the rest of the season in standard true-crime-procedural fashion: trial, jury deliberation, conviction.
This isn’t to say Part Two is bad. It just feels unnecessary, arriving somewhat out of nowhere after all these years. To be fair, these six episodes possess a clear purpose: They give The Jinx a nice round shape, recontextualizing Durst’s hot-mic admission as a pivotal turn in the story, not merely an explosive ending. You can see the season push to reframe itself around something bigger than its central grotesquerie: a story not just about one very rich and very crazy man, but a monster who used his wealth to build a network of enabling confederates. Part Two additionally tries to emphasize cost, taking a page from the more humanistic strain of crime docs that balance the genre’s core salaciousness with a kind of victim-centrism. Durst may have died in prison, but those impacted by his actions, most notably Kathie Durst’s surviving family members, still live under the shadow of death; that McCormack figures heavily throughout the six episodes is meant to remind you of this.
The effort is laudable, but it all feels pro forma. The conventional nature of the follow-up reminds you how Durst’s participation was the essential spark that energized The Jinx, whose legacy, in retrospect, was rooted in its being a mesmerizing character study of a charismatic killer. Much of Part Two recaps Durst’s trial in a way that might remind you, awkwardly enough, of something like Drive to Survive: a nonfiction show coloring in the details of an event you could’ve kept up with in real-time. You don’t get further insight into Durst, who (understandably) refused to cooperate with production prior to his death. Nor do you get any huge new material or emotional revelations. There’s Durst’s supposed best friend, Nick Chavin, who remains defiantly in support of his guy … until the very end, when he maybe doesn’t. (In a nice mirror to Durst’s hot-mic burps, Chavin’s sorta-guilt manifests in uncontrollable yawns.)
Then there’s the late-stage turn that tries to elevate Durst’s widow, Deborah Lee Charatan, to the sequel’s prime villain. To be sure, the woman is horrible, between her craven opportunism and her systematic abuse of the people who reside in the buildings she bought using Durst’s money. But the turn feels tacked on, a trite observation: We’ve been living in a world awash with “rich people behaving badly” pop culture for several years now, so it’s especially hard for The Jinx to extend that argument. Robert Durst mostly got away with doing the most heinous things imaginable; meanwhile, Trump is favored to retake the White House.
It’s weird to grouse about a lack of navel-gazing, but I really do wish Part Two would’ve looked down its chin more. The Jinx was a public spectacle that directly influenced the fate of its subject matter. Part Two could have given the team at the center of that phenomenon the chance to meditate upon what it’s like to be in the eye of the storm and, in the process, unpack the questions it inspires about entertainment, justice, fame, and death. That they pursued a more straightforward follow-up, one that largely disregards its own impact, doesn’t just feel like a missed opportunity — it ignores a fundamental pillar of what happened. It’s not really acknowledging the world as it exists. In that sense, turning the camera back on one’s self shouldn’t qualify as navel-gazing. It’s the story.
Nicholas Quah , 2024-05-27 05:00:20
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