Presumed Innocent

Television that Shows the Truth That Nobody Wants to See

What follows is a tale of competing adaptations of a singular novel—and how it shines a light on the secret truth at the heart of our culture.

Foundations in Text

Reading Scott Turrow’s Presumed Innocent was a formative experience for me as a writer—and, I’d wager, as a man. I picked it up at the library because I was too young to see the movie adaptation that was making a splash at the time. I waded into its first-person-present narration even as I found it off-putting, because there was something there in the words. Something completely captivating.

Re-reading it now, I can recognize what it was:

A confessional.

The entire book is written as a confession to a murder that the protagonist didn’t commit…but in which he is nonetheless unwittingly complicit.

Not that we, the reader, know this. Until the final five pages, it is unclear to us whether our narrator is innocent, and who the killer is, or if we will ever find out.

The book is a byzantine maze of lust, resentment, political grudges, desperate need, compulsion, obsession, and the crust of civilized respectability that floats above it all. It’s a solid legal thriller and an astute political thriller—and, like so many excellent thrillers of that era (this is the same time period that produced The Silence of the Lambs and The Pillars of the Earth), it sees through to the heart of the human animal in a deeply sympathetic, yet wholly disillusioned way.

And it is a tale of animals. Rabid, wild, insane animals caught in a prison of modernity, their animal lusts and drives lashing out to the point where they threaten to tear down everything laudable and valuable about the civilized world—and civilization is saved only at the cost of facing the beasts that drive it.

Turrow’s later efforts never really rose to the greatness of his debut novel, but Presumed Innocent is a hell of a read—great literature disguising itself as an airport novel.

The Silver Screen Beckoned

I did eventually see the movie, once I was old enough to rent R-rated movies from the neighborhood video store without parental permission.

Released in 1990, starring Harrison Ford, Gretta Sacchi, Bonnie Bedelia, Brian Dennehey, Paul Winfield, Raul Julia, and a half dozen other amazing character actors, it reliably hits the basic plot points of the book, and competently re-capitulates its devastating twist ending. It’s well-acted, adequately scripted, and fairly well directed by Alan J. Pakula (who, at his best, was one of the best thriller directors in the game).

It doesn’t come close to the intensity of the book. Like so many films of the era, it hits the high notes and the sensational bits, but it sacrifices the subtleties of the story that gave it its real power (partly, I suspect, because to do so would require saying things out-loud that you simply could not say, let alone imply, in cinema at the time).

And, to its credit, it had the balls to take a tale that was prime fodder for the then-current erotic thriller boom and attempt to tell a more well-rounded story than was conventional in the genre.

But one thing I did not notice at the time I saw it:

It is beautifully shot.

Not a frame in the film is un-gorgeous. Deep colors, exemplary blocking, subtle darks, saturated brights. It may not be a film that’s a mouth-watering pleasure to watch (at least for me), but it is a stunning film to look at.

I mean…look at this:

Dark, but not drab. Your focus is expertly managed and directed. The power relationships between the people in the frame are clear. The whole film is like that.

Okay, sure, that’s the kind of thing you’d expect from the cinematographer who lensed The Godfather, but goddamn…

Times Change

That was thirty-five years ago. But Presumed Innocent remains a great story, and it’s spawned a number of sequels in both print and on screen.

It was almost inevitable that someone would pick it up for a prestige TV adaptation. And lo, Apple TV recently picked it up and threw a lot of money at it.

And what a team they brought! Jake Gyllenhall headlines a cast of gifted character actors in an adaptation that’s meticulously shot, brilliantly acted, and with a script that is surprisingly (mostly) loyal to the book. Sure, there are the occasional race swapped and gender-swapped characters, as is in keeping with the dogmas of the current era, but none of it undermines the story and everyone on the screen brings their A-game.

And it’s unbelievably…dull.

Utterly soulless.

The photography is dark and ugly, almost unintelligibly muddy. The direction is objective and dry. Despite the mighty efforts of the actors, there’s very little emotion in it at all.

Gone is the eroticism, the betrayal, the lust for power, the resentment, and the overwhelming need that drives everyone in the story. The plot elements are there, sure, and the actions of the characters are on display, but there is nothing in the production that arouses these feelings in the audience.

The job of a storyteller is not to convey events, it’s to convey experience. And this piece of prestige TV, like so many other dramatic presentations (and, frankly, novels) I’ve seen over the last decade, completely fails on this account.

Instead, like those other works, it reads like a character study of zoo animals that faithfully shows human responses without understanding them at all.

It's the kind of drama you would expect an alien to make.

And it occurred to me as I watched the miniseries unfold that this isn’t some strange, crazy accident. It’s not just a style, or a cinematography fad. The Norwegians use the same washed-out cinematography and coldly-objective aesthetic, but they produce crime dramas (and other dramas) that are utterly captivating. No, this is happening to American entertainment because it perfectly reflects what is broken in the American soul.

The American consciousness, as revealed through this production and many others in the past several years, is enmired in a depth of alienation that is horribly and deeply un-human.

This isn’t the kind of desperate or startled alienation such as featured in the cinema, avante-garde, and novels of the 1960s-70s (The Prisoner, The Conversation, the films and exhibits of the Warhol studio, the novels of Robert Ludlum); nor is it the alienation packaged as ironic detachment and screaming pain of the 1980-90s (Clerks, Fight Club, American Beauty, the writings of Ellis and Wallace).

Here we have something more broken—so broken it doesn’t understand its own brokenness. It's a more despairing, empty, resigned aesthetic. It's as devoid of thought and reflection as it is of passion and obsession. It’s the kind of art you'd expect from a Bauhaus architect, or bored and depressed Tetris addict. The sex has no eroticism, the erotic obsession has no longing or rage, the violence has no punch, the rage and anger and betrayal has no bite, the danger has no dread, and the unflinching brutality of the presentation doesn't change that.

In a story filled with intense emotions, there is no emotion in the camera's lens but detachment.

It is a cinema of abundance, in which there is no want.

It's as if the adaptation is an exercise-of-summary by an AI that understands all the words, and even all the implications, but still somehow can't find meaning.

And it left me with a strange, horrible flash of insight into the cultural decay that so many are railing against, but seem unwilling or unable to do anything about:

The current cultural ferment is not about religion, or porn, or hedonism, or drugs, or economic ennui. It might not even be about a failure of tradition or cultural transmission.

It's about a lack of contact with the real world and the desire it stirs up.

It's about a hatred of human need, and the feelings of inadequacy it causes.

The people around you, the ones walking through the world like zombies, the ones stuck in their phones, the ones who seem lost and un-dateable, the ones who have no direction? The freshly idealistic, the preachy, the activistic, the suddenly religious? The young and old, the rich and poor, who can’t seem to make life work no matter how extremely they act out?

They are what they are because they are seeking refuge from the one thing they hate and resent so much that they can’t bear to let themselves look at it:

They are human.

And they need.

And that hurts.

---

If you found this essay helpful or interesting, you may enjoy some of my other articles on arts and culture, such as Lost in the Generational Noise, I Literally Can’t Even…, and The Magic of Sound.

When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.