‘A film that will rock you to your core’: Emotion and affect in Dear Zachary and the real crime documentary

A documentary tragedy

Kurt Kuenne is a filmmaker who wears his heart on his sleeve, which is due in no small part to the deeply personal attachment he has to his subject matter – the murder of his best friend. In a statement on the film’s website, Kuenne writes that he set out to make Dear Zachary as a memorial to his dead friend:

I wish that I had never had the opportunity to make this film. I wish that my friend Dr. Andrew Bagby was alive and well and that I was blissfully ignorant of the lessons I’ve learned along this journey. Alas, this is not the case. When bad things happen, good people have to take what they’ve learned and make the world a better place, and that is precisely what I hope this film will do – make the world a better place.

While this heartfelt statement indicates the idealism underlying Kuenne’s film, it is interesting to note that Dear Zachary utilises a very similar marketing campaign to other crime documentaries such as Capturing the Friedmans, the Paradise Lost trilogy and The Imposter, in that it, too, attempts to entice viewers by referring to a ‘mystery’ at the heart of the story. Where Capturing the Friedmans asks ‘who do you believe’?, the Paradise Lost films invite us to ‘make up our own mind’, and The Imposter advertises itself as containing ‘shocking revelations’, ⁴ Dear Zachary draws its viewers in by getting us wondering about the horrifying ‘twist’ that has all the films’ viewers in tears. Here is a brief recount of the story: the filmmaker’s best friend, Dr Andrew Bagby, was allegedly murdered by his ex-girlfriend, Dr Shirley Turner, who then fled to Canada, shortly after which it was learned she was pregnant with Andrew’s baby. The Canadian government let her out on bail and she evaded prosecution. Andrew’s devastated parents, Kate and David Bagby, moved to Canada so that they could be close to their grandson, a circumstance that meant they ‘were forced to stomach a civil relationship with the woman they knew had murdered their only son’. ⁵ In the trailer, Kuenne’s voiceover states that his mission with this film was ‘to bring a man back to life’, by interviewing people and recording those interviews on digital tapes so that one day, Zachary, the name of his dead friend’s child, would get to know his father. The trailer concludes with this voiceover from the director: ‘But I never could have guessed what happened next.’

This question of ‘what happened next’ is the hook of the film. Reviews of Dear Zachary generally characterise it as a very powerful and emotional documentary film, one that contains a major ‘plot twist’, which reviewers are careful not to reveal. As one Time Out reviewer argues, ‘some twists deserve to be kept secret, because the twist is central to the experience of the film…Dear Zachary earns our discretion, for the simple reason that we want you to experience this movie the way we did, as a series of emotional shocks. Just take our advice and bring tissues. You’re going to need them’ (Sartin, 2008). No doubt, it is the ‘emotional experience’ it provides that is the most remarkable thing about this documentary for its viewers, as indicated by the public responses to the film found on Internet forums. There is an emphasis on the viscerality of Dear Zachary in audience responses, which refer to the bodily experience of viewing the film – the chest tightening, the breath quickening and the gut ‘wrenching’. ⁶ This response is echoed in the reviews of the films; as one review declares, ‘Several gut-wrenching twists and turns later, we’re left with a film that will rock you to your core. You will cry. You will hurt – and this film will sit with you for days, weeks, months’ (Davis, 2008). Repeating the idea that the film is ‘best seen with as little foreknowledge as possible’, Jenni Miller of Premiere wrote that she was ‘so devastated in the first five minutes’ that she ‘had to watch it over the course of two days…It’s impossible to fully explain the pain, sorrow, and love this documentary holds without ruining its effects on future viewers’ (Miller, 2008). The strong emotional responses to Dear Zachary are seen as inextricably tied to the temporal unfolding of the film and its withholding of key narrative information. In order to experience the maximum amount of pain and emotion and to be ‘hit so much harder’ by the documentary, as one viewer notes, it is important to let it unfold in a temporal structure of ‘real time’ (IMDb User Reviews, 2008).

If I am to critically explore the function of the plot twist in Dear Zachary it is necessary to reveal the tragedy that is so carefully withheld by the film’s reviewers, which is that during the filming of the documentary, Zachary, the 13 month-old baby son of the murdered Andrew Bagby and his alleged killer Shirley Turner, was murdered by his mother, when she regained custody of him after she was let out on bail. She drugged him and walked into the ocean with him strapped to her chest and they both drowned. Dear Zachary holds back this information from us until near the end of the documentary, when it is revealed to great dramatic effect. In this way, Kuenne’s film changes from being a letter to a son about his father, to a memorial of a murdered father and son, and a very public tribute to the grieving grandparents who were left behind and who feel so betrayed by the Canadian government’s bail system, which allowed Turner out of jail. According to Kuenne, he structured the film in the way he did, because he wanted to give us ‘the cinematic equivalent’ of his ‘emotional experience’ (cited in Rich, 2008). As Kuenne declares: ‘It is my hope that this film puts people right inside that experience and that no one will be able to come away from it unchanged’ (Kuenne, 2006).

This notion of the film as a traumatic yet transformative experience has been tied to a recognition of its apparently cathartic nature. Some reviews of Dear Zachary stress the idea that you need to first make your way through the ‘black’ despair to find the ‘life-affirming message of hope’ at the film’s end (Buchanan, 2008). Such a response articulates the Aristotelian ‘paradox of tragedy’, in which, as Stacie Friend suggests, ‘we appear to enjoy tragedy not despite, but precisely because of, the painful emotions we feel in response’ (Friend, 2007: 184–185). This is one of the ‘best’ films they have ever seen, according to many viewers, precisely because it managed to make them feel so very bad. In the end, though, this bad feeling is arguably converted into positivity because of how the emotional experience of viewing the film is tied to its project for activism and social change. As Kuenne writes in his ‘filmmaker’s statement’ on the film’s website:

I will be making every effort to get this film seen by lawmakers in Canada and abroad, where applicable. As Andrew’s parents, Kate and David Bagby, have said repeatedly, ‘The best we can get out of this is change in the future to prevent a reoccurrence. It’s too horrible to let it happen again.’

This positioning of the spectator as a worthwhile, empowered citizen is further facilitated by the DVD version of the film, in which supplementary material invites you to sign a petition urging bail reform in Canada. Even if you do not sign the petition, the rhetoric of intimacy, and the very personal appeal made to viewers by director Kuenne, does give an important sense of an active, involved spectator, a viewer ‘with a job to do’, as Carol Clover puts it (2000: 246).

While crime documentaries such as Capturing the Friedmans and The Imposter also work to generate feelings in viewers, there is a purposeful ‘lack of resolution’ to these other films, which ‘leaves the viewer with unresolved emotions’ (Bell, 2008: 91). By contrast, Dear Zachary is unabashed in its courting of raw emotion and is very clear in its direction of our feelings. The judgement on the crimes it discloses has already been made: Shirley Turner is presented as an evil, psychotic killer and the victim and his family and friends are shown as kind, decent people. Viewers are asked to join director Kuenne in his very personal grief and outrage over the death of his friend and to harness our emotions to the public cause of law reform. Kuenne’s obvious anger against the Canadian legal system, which failed to keep Turner in jail, is articulated through his depiction of the legal system and its agents; legal representatives are mocked and derided through a variety of techniques, including a Monty Python-style facial distortion of their television interviews and a vehement repetition of key phrases from their legal judgments in Kuenne’s emotional voiceover. Visits to the film’s website consolidate the idea of the social and legal importance of Dear Zachary. In a 2010 addendum to his original statement regarding his documentary, two years after its release, Kuenne announces that, thanks to Dear Zachary, a new law was finally passed in Canada regarding bail reform, ‘which likely could have saved Zachary had it been in place in 2003’. He thanks the ‘thousands of you who wrote to Parliament in support of our cause’ and notes that he has been ‘humbled and overwhelmed’ by the response to his movie. He concludes with the following: ‘Please stop by the “Bail Reform” section and read a letter of thanks to you from Kate & David Bagby. Thank you so much for your passionate support, and for helping make the world a safer, better place.’

But despite the emphasis placed on the social good of Dear Zachary there are serious questions that linger about the nature of our emotional encounter with the images of crime it displays. What, for example, does it mean to use the murder of a baby as a documentary ‘plot twist’? For some critics, there is something uncomfortable about this narrative strategy, which raises ethical questions. As Karina Longworth writes:

As a viewer it’s hard to not feel as though your sympathies have been taken advantage of. Ironically, in being honest about how, when and why his project changes focus, Kuenne has to initially lie to his audience. He documents an undeniably affecting personal story…but there’s something about it which feels false enough to undercut some of its potential power. In its title and initial structure, Dear Zachary sets up a foundation which it knows it’s going to pull out from under us, and that makes it every bit as emotionally manipulative as a studio film.

In this reading of the film, Dear Zachary is seen to capitulate to the fictional machinations of the dream factory and therefore lose some of its documentary integrity and its commitment to the ‘real’. And yet in the majority of broadsheet reviews, as well as in the online forums, the manipulation of the plot twist is seen to be key to the powerful visceral experience of the film, hence the countless recommendations to watch it with no ‘foreknowledge’ so as not to spoil its emotional impact (IMDB.com). It is imperative, therefore, to take the powerful affective responses to Dear Zachary seriously (rather than merely dismissing the audience as duped or tricked by the film), in order to open up a set of crucial questions about our embodied relationship to documentary crime images.

One of the most striking things about the reception of Dear Zachary and other contemporary crime documentaries is how the emotions they evoke continue to circulate as the films are distributed as DVDs, on the Internet, and in marketing publicity and reviews. What becomes paramount, then, is the issue of how emotions are harnessed and transmitted through various affective channels and media platforms; after all, it is not only, or not even primarily, at the ‘movie theater’ that our emotional engagement with the moving image takes place. In today’s ‘cinema of interactions’, to borrow Richard Grusin’s phrase, media events are ‘distributed across a variety of media forms and practices’ (Grusin, 2010: 90). In the sections that follow, I will trace the affectivity of the crime image as it is routed through the remediated home video footage in Dear Zachary and then through the ‘extras’ on the DVD format. Following Sara Ahmed’s lead, I am interested not in what our emotional attachment to the documentary ‘is’ but in what such an attachment ‘does’ (Ahmed, 2004: 4). As Ahmed argues, the interesting question is how ‘objects of feeling, circulate and generate effects: how they move, stick and slide. And how we move, stick and slide with them’ (p. 14).

The politics of re-enactment: Remediating home video footage

Dear Zachary is representative of what Jonathan Kahana has described as a ‘renewed interest in the powers of reenactment’ in contemporary moving-image culture (Kahana, 2009: 46, 47). Although documentary film theorists do not acknowledge it as strongly as they might, the crime documentary is one of the most interesting and important sites in contemporary culture for the performance of re-enactment. ⁷ Among the recent examples of crime documentaries deploying re-enactment are Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (released in the same year as Dear Zachary, 2008), and the aforementioned The Act of Killing and The Imposter, both released in 2012. In all of these crime documentaries, re-enactment calls upon the affective involvement of the audience and is a powerful way to interpellate viewers in the scene of the crime. ⁸

Out of the above list of films, Dear Zachary has most in common with The Imposter, a documentary that was similarly marketed as ‘edge-of-your-seat stuff’ and where there was an emphasis placed on not giving away the central ‘mystery’ (Barnard, 2012). But in contrast to Dear Zachary and its raw, amateur look, The Imposter’s re-enactments are glossy, high production affairs that use actors. Standard Operating Procedure and the Academy Award nominated The Act of Killing (produced by Errol Morris) are also recognised for their stylised – and in the case of the latter, highly surreal – renderings of violence. As Kahana notes, Standard Operating Procedure was criticised for what some felt were its ‘luridly stylized dramatizations’ of the violence against detainees by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib (Kahana, 2009: 49). Morris himself has written eloquently in defence of re-enactment in The New York Times, asserting that a ‘story in the past has to be re-enacted’ and that re-enactments allow him ‘to burrow beneath the surface of reality’ (Morris, 2008). The director of The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer, has similarly argued for the value of re-enactment as a way of allowing viewers to get ‘inside’ violence (Whittaker, 2013). Oppenheimer’s film shows men who participated in the genocidal killings in Indonesia in the 1960s re-enacting their murders in the style of Hollywood fiction films. While these re-enactments were widely lauded by critics as remarkable, there were some dissenting voices. Tony Rayns, writing in Sight and Sound, criticises The Act of Killing for its ‘near total lack of context’ and for its ‘emotionally manipulative use of some of the material’ (Rayns, 2013).

The charge of emotional manipulation has also been levelled against Dear Zachary and its distinctive remediation of amateur fiction film scenes and home video footage in the context of crime reconstruction. I now want to turn to a close examination of these reconstructions to explore what they reveal about the emotional and affective potency of re-enactment. To give an example found early on in the documentary, Kuenne’s voiceover is delineating ‘a summary of the evidence against Shirley Turner’, in a staccato, true-crime delivery, with Psycho theme-style music playing in the background. ‘He [Andrew] was shot five times, in the face, the chest, twice in the buttocks and in the back of the head, he also received a blunt trauma to the back of the head.’ As this information is recounted for us, we do not, à la CSI and countless other forensic crime dramas, see graphic crime scene images; instead we are shown a sequence of photos of Andrew as a toddler and a young boy. The voiceover and the images work closely together so that as we hear about how Andrew was shot five times in the chest, there is a zoom in on Andrew’s chest in a photo of him as a toddler; in this image of Andrew as a little boy, his T-shirt has a red stain on it, which is here made to connote the blood from the gunshot wounds that killed him.

To a certain extent, what Kuenne is doing here with photographs of the victim draws on an established tradition of crime reporting. It is common practice, for example, to show photos of victims before and after dramatic reconstructions on popular reality crime television programmes. As Deborah Jermyn suggests, the purpose of such photos is to ‘communicate enough about the victim to make the viewer respond on some kind of emotional level, be that guilt, empathy, sympathy or outrage’ (Jermyn, 2007: 90). Dear Zachary also uses photos of the victims to communicate emotions, but takes it even further, and ratchets up the level of affective involvement considerably, by remediating family photos of the victims into the narrative of the crime itself. In other words, the photos and video footage of the victim do not just bookend the story of violent crime; rather, and crucially, it is through these very images that the crime is presented to us, so that, as in the above example, when Kuenne’s emotional voiceover describes a bullet going through his friend’s chest, we see a close-up image of Andrew’s chest not from a crime scene photo but from a photograph of Andrew as a young boy. Indeed, Dear Zachary relies heavily upon the emotive use of the figure of the child: it is vital to its ideological project that the photos used during the crime reconstructions are of Andrew as a baby and young boy and not of him as an adult. As with the coverage of other contemporary crime stories, there is a strong emotive force assigned to the image of a lost child, which ‘represents the face of innocence’ and which is ‘universalized through the imagined loss of any child as a loss that could be my loss’ (Ahmed, 2004: 192).

Dear Zachary’s affecting brand of crime re-enactment reaches its emotional crescendo in the reconstruction of the murder of baby Zachary. As Kuenne’s rapid-fire voiceover provides a ‘summary of the evidence’ of the murder of the infant Zachary by his mother, Shirley Turner, actual home video footage and family photos are again employed to affective ends. As we hear Kuenne say, ‘The night she killed you’, the film provides images of Turner in a paddling pool with baby Zachary on a sunny summer’s day, playfully throwing a ball at him. When describing how Turner fed her son prescription drugs before she drowned him, the film shows home video footage of baby Zachary refusing some food in his high chair. The film then zooms in on an extreme close-up of baby Zachary dozing off to sleep with his face made up as a cat in yet more home video footage from happier times. Kuenne’s voiceover breaks down with emotion as he tells us that ‘the only good thing we know about this [the fact that the baby was drugged] was that you were not conscious and did not suffer’. The happy image of baby Zachary drifting off to sleep is here recast as the scene of his death.

As Kuenne recounts the details of how Turner strapped the baby to her chest and walked into the Atlantic Ocean, an image is shown, again from previous home video footage, of Turner in a swimming costume, kissing and carrying along baby Zachary, in a wading pool. This footage, which presents a recontextualization of the past for the viewer, is here re-viewed, retrospectively, as deeply ominous and disturbing. A voice recording of Turner saying ‘mummy loves you’ then plays over a series of still photographic images of a smiling Turner in the pool with baby Zachary, finishing on an image of her holding her son as he swims under the water (all the while, the soundtrack plays of her voice from a series of recorded telephone calls made to Zachary’s grandparents while she was in jail; in a feedback loop of the recording, Turner is heard saying ‘mummy misses you, mummy loves you’).

The repurposed or remediated family photo and home video sequences in Dear Zachary highlight the tension between dramatic and documentary modes of viewing, and between the private and public consumption of family photos and home video footage. Marsha and Devin Orgeron have noted that the ‘extensive use’ of home video footage in contemporary documentaries ‘signals a shift in recent documentary production, one that compels us to consider the implications of using home videos as narrational and illustrative tools’ (Orgeron and Orgeron, 2007: 47). While there is an undeniable power in taking the images of baby Zachary from a happier time playing in the pool and making them perform the dramatic, illustrative work of crime reconstruction, there is arguably a certain violence involved with this move. As noted by Minette Hillyer, critics such as Roger Odin and Eric Kuyper have argued that ‘screening home movies out of context can perform a kind of violence that is not only textual but also social’; or to put it even more strongly, the ‘exposure of intimate home video material out of context is an “obscenity”’ (Hillyer, 2010: 768). Whether or not one considers such a recontextualization ‘obscene’, the emotional charge of the home movies of Dear Zachary comes from the way in which they are taken out of their (private) context and reworked in the public context of crime and death.

To further think through the affective force of the home video footage on display in Dear Zachary, it is helpful to reflect on theorist Richard Grusin’s observations about the public reaction to the photographic images of criminal acts committed by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Grusin has argued that what was so shocking about the photographs was not only their horrible content but, rather, ‘the stark contrast with the kinds of affective responses we normally associate with viewing digital photos on our computers or on TV and in the newspapers’ (Grusin, 2010: 89). That is to say, that what was recognised, ‘at some level’, was that:

what these soldiers were doing with their Abu Ghraib photos or their photos of maimed and mutilated bodies was not fundamentally different as media practices from what we do with our digital cameras and video cameras when we capture scenes of a wedding or birthday party…And that part of the horror of these images, if the unarticulated or non-symbolic part of that horror, is this bodily feeling both of the affectivity of these digital images and of the affinity between our own practices of distributing affect across and through other media as well.

The point Grusin is making here is a subtle but important one: on an affective level, before there was a chance to process feelings or express emotions about the disturbing photographs from Abu Ghraib, there was a recognition that we also use photos in this way, to distribute our affect (happiness, sadness, etc.) and that there was therefore a disturbing affinity between our own media practices and torture and violence (Grusin, 2010: 89). The public response to the Abu Ghraib photographs needs to be understood as ‘not only a response to what the photographs reveal or mean or to the emotions they evoke, but as an unqualified bodily response independent of, and perhaps phenomenally prior to, our understanding of the emotions they evoke or the meanings they entail’ (Grusin, 2010: 81). ⁹ The embodied affective response to the photographs should be understood in relation to their circulation in terms of familiar media habits, so that the shock that was felt over the photos was not just about the content but about the ‘prior affective relationship with our everyday media practices’ (Grusin, 2010: 81).

Grusin’s analysis of the public outrage over the Abu Ghraib photographs is useful for thinking through the powerful affective responses to the crime images in Dear Zachary. The home video footage and the still photographic images on display in the film are a familiar part of everyday media practices and it is the dramatic reframing of those images in the context of violence that draws attention to the potential proximity of such documentary images to crime and death. By shifting home videos away from their initial context, that is, Dear Zachary is making visible what happens more generally when terrible events place home photos and movies into a public record of violence and retrospective reading. It is useful here to refer to José van Dijck’s argument regarding the widespread public awareness of digital cameras and recording devices as tools for ‘producing future memories’ (Van Dijck, 2008). Even young children today, as Van Dijck suggests, are acutely aware of the ‘pliability of mediated experience’ and of how the registering of private lives via new digital technology ‘may help shape (future) public identity’ (Van Dijck, 2008: 71). While the emphasis in constructing this kind of ‘cinematic hindsight’ may be on manufacturing pleasing and desirable images, I would argue, along with Van Dijck, that there is also a growing sense of how such ‘audiovisual retrospectives’ play a role in public articulations of grief and death, something which is made dramatically apparent by crime narratives.

When we watch the family photos and footage of Andrew and Zachary, overlaid by Kuenne’s voiceover, which provides us with details of their violent deaths, it is painful not because of how horrible it is (which it unquestionably is) but because of our more basic and prior sense of material familiarity with the mundane video images and photographs on display, images that structure our own affective lives. That is why one reviewer who castigates the film for being too personal and therefore not relevant to a wider cinema audience beyond the victims’ friends and families is missing the point. ¹⁰ It does not matter that viewers did not know the victims, as testified to by the emotional outpouring over the documentary in online forums. The reason it does not matter is because the emotional involvement with the documentary is predicated upon the affective familiarity with the images it displays and the graphic ways in which it foregrounds the increasingly blurred boundaries between what we might imagine is ‘private’ and what we are increasingly asked to do with/through those private feelings and images in public life.

In fact, I would like to suggest that the recontextualised home video images and family photographs in Dear Zachary underscore the more disquieting elements of the affective relay that occurs between the private and the public in today’s media culture, the formulation of which theorist Brian Massumi has referred to as a ‘quasi-public sphere’. Speaking of the ‘relay and overlap between private and public messaging that blurs the boundaries between them’, Massumi uses the example of Facebook: ‘you friend your friends’ friends, and they friend yours, and soon you’re sharing “personal” news with total strangers. The mode of expression is still “personal,” but the presupposition is of a certain degree of publicness, more restricted than broadcast but not exactly intimate or personal in any way previous generations would have understood that word’ (Massumi, 2012). For Massumi, it is not just that the private has become public but that there is a:

whole new relational field where the act of expression is already informed and formatted by its quasi-publicness, so that it is marked from within by the presence of others. It’s an example of expression becoming explicitly what Deleuze and Guattari called a ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’. To the extent that we produce ourselves through social media – in pretty much the same sense as when we refer to what film producers do – we are fairly explicitly participating in a collective individuation under the flimsy guise of ‘the personal’.

There is a striking example of just such a ‘collective individuation’ in one of the better-known scenes from Capturing the Friedmans, in which David Friedman speaks to the camera in home video footage he took of himself from 1988 (‘private’ footage which he turned over to director Jarecki for inclusion in his documentary). In this intimate footage, David Friedman, wearing his underwear, utters the following: ‘Well this is private, so if you’re not me then you really shouldn’t be watching this because this is supposed to be a private situation between me and me. This is between me now and me of the future, so turn it off, don’t watch this, this is private…If you’re the fucking cops go fuck yourselves, go fuck yourselves because you’re full of shit.’ This monologue exemplifies Massumi’s idea that so-called private expressions are ‘marked from within by the presence of others’ (Massumi, 2012). ¹¹

In its remediation of home video footage in relation to crime reconstruction, Dear Zachary is also making explicit the kind of collective and public enunciation that already exists within our so-called private expressions. It is noteworthy how this relay between the personal and the public manifests itself at the level of the film’s distribution as it shifts across various viewing platforms producing different circuits of affect. In its extensive deployment of still and moving images of the murdered Andrew, Dear Zachary, by Kuenne’s own admission, was initially intended only for family and friends, as a kind of ‘cinematic retrospection’ or memorial video, which as Van Dijck has noted, is gaining in popularity ‘as part of a funeral experience’ (Van Dijck, 2008: 85). It was only later, after the various twists and turns the story took, that the film’s viewing context shifted to the public domain, to film festivals and television screenings, in which emphasis was placed on withholding information about Zachary’s death. While it is common practice to try to retain some secrecy around major plot twists in fictional films, it is slightly more curious in a documentary film, especially one about a violent crime(s), which has already been heavily publicised in the media. ¹² That so much effort is put into concealing the open secret of the murder of baby Zachary for ‘future viewers’, not only by the film’s marketing team, but by critics and online reviewers, goes to show the extent to which the crime documentary operates as what Vikki Bell, writing on Capturing the Friedmans, refers to as a ‘compound of affect,’ a ‘materiality that…promises to hold and deliver sensations at a future encounter’ (Bell, 2008: 93).

Given the emphasis placed on the sensory experience of the film and its emotionality, the question then becomes: what are the ‘cultural politics’ of such emotions, to borrow Sara Ahmed’s phrase? To help get a sense of the kind of cultural work performed by the emotional responses to Dear Zachary, it is instructive to consider the outrage directed against (the very few) reviewers who criticised the film for its crass aesthetic and blatant emotionalism. Noting how her ‘analytical response to the documentary seem[ed] to be [so] thoroughly out of tune with the emotional responses of MSNBC viewers’, critic Karina Longworth reprinted several viewer comments that took her to task for reviewing the film in the first place. In response to her charge that the film is a ‘blanket of overlapping sentiment’ (Longworth, 2008), legions of outraged viewers wrote in to passionately defend Kuenne’s film and to criticise Longworth for her lack of ‘empathy’. In similar fashion, another reviewer, Ron Wilkinson, who argued in even stronger (and arguably more glib) terms that the film was nothing but ‘maudlin tabloid journalism’, faced an onslaught of comments from viewers who were furious at his failure to empathise (Wilkinson, 2008). Among the arguments put forward by these viewers was the idea that Dear Zachary ‘isn’t just a documentary’ but a ‘profound act of love’. To quote from one viewer in full: ‘What an awful review! This film was so moving to me…Are you that heartless to write something that cruel and negative? It was wonderfully done and heartwrenching. Andrew’s parents are to be commended for having to accept and overcome what they have. Andrew definitely got his amazing spirit and love of life from them’ (Wilkinson, 2008). This kind of comment is echoed in the general viewer response to the film found on IMDb.com, in which viewers express how much the film has affected them emotionally, offer love to the ‘Bagby friends and family’, and emphasise how ‘inspirational’ they find David and Kate Bagby (IMDb User Reviews, 2008). In these responses, feeling grief for the other ‘moves the subject’ into what Ahmed calls a ‘position of charitable compassion’, which can be characterised by the following formulation: ‘In being moved by this pain, I show myself to be full of love in the midst of the violence’ (Ahmed, 2004: 192). The problem, as Ahmed points out, is that there is a certain conservatism that underlines such compassion and sympathy.

What is indeed noteworthy about the public response to Dear Zachary, I want to suggest, is the extent to which strong emotions, underlaid by a prior affective recognition of the dangerous proximity of crime and violence to everyday media practices, appear to reinforce conventional ideals about love, family and society. Noting the close historical relationship between criminal identification and Western culture’s reification of the family, Jermyn has pointed out how closely intertwined the discourses of family and crime remain on contemporary crime programmes, which, she argues, ‘adhere[s] to and promote[s] conventional and conservative ideological structures…revering the institution of the family and “legitimising” victims through their placement within it’ (Jermyn, 2007: 83). Dear Zachary similarly reinforces powerful ideas about the family through its memorialisation of the victims of crime; or to put it the other way around, it is through the institution of the family that it is able to so effectively convey the idea of victimhood and suffering. Drawing the viewer in through its use of the fictional device of the ‘plot twist’, which, I argue, serves primarily to heighten the emotional experience of the film, the audience of Dear Zachary ultimately comes together over the scene of violence to affirm certain absolute convictions about the power of love and family, good versus evil, justice and the ‘norms of acceptable behaviour’, ideals that have long been central to crime films more generally (Rafter, 2006: 4). It is this kind of emotional interaction with the documentary text and the ideals underpinning it which creates a positive collective affect, one that insulates and protects the viewer from more disquieting revelations.

Bearing in mind how important it is to consider the ‘extra material that increasingly surrounds and structures our interactions with/reactions to the primary text’ (Brown, 2008: 96), I now want to consider the DVD format of Dear Zachary in order to further reflect upon the kind of affective responses solicited by, and enacted through, the remediation of home video footage in the documentary.

Afterlife

While it had a very limited theatrical release, and made some notable appearances at film festivals, Dear Zachary first came to most people’s attention via its television premiere on MSNBC in 2008; it was later released on DVD in 2009, and has since had an extensive afterlife on the Internet – on the website devoted to the film, in Internet chat rooms and in review forums on sites such as Amazon. This is not just incidental detail: though it is often overlooked, the question of distribution and exhibition across different media platforms, and the complex intersection between the private and the public, is absolutely crucial to any understanding of our affective engagement with crime documentaries. Van Dijck observes that the ‘cultural format of a DVD, which comes replete with “making of” scenes and evidentiary material’, means that the viewer assumes ‘the position of active co-constructors of hindsight’ (Van Dijck, 2008: 79). This position of the viewer as the co-constructor of hindsight is especially acute in relation to crime documentaries, which tend to place strong emphasis on the notion of viewers as ‘armchair detectives’ (Shannon, n.d.), and which, in their search for lost objects and their reconstruction of past events, evoke provocative questions about death and temporality.

The DVD sleeve of Dear Zachary includes a review by Erik Childress, the Vice President of the Chicago Film Critics Association, which guides our emotional response to Kuenne’s documentary. Childress heaps praise on Dear Zachary, a documentary which, by his own admission, works him up into a ‘hyberbolic frenzy’. His ‘shaken’ response to the documentary and his colourful descriptions of its viscerality are in keeping with the other vivid emotional responses to the film found in the online reviews discussed earlier. Childress (n.d.) likens the documentary to a ‘rapidly approaching buzzsaw that opened a pit in my stomach and quickly filled it with sadness, joy, shock, contempt and the helplessness of living in a God-fearing world that would allow this to happen’ and describes it as a ‘furious lightning bolt of reminiscence and outrage that is going to reach into each viewer’s chest and squeeze their heart like a tomato in a vice while it unfolds like a masterful thriller’ (my italics). Such hyperbole is interesting not for what it reveals about individual emotions but for what it suggests about how Dear Zachary circulates as an object of emotion, emphasising Belinda Smaill’s recent point that the ‘expectations and assumptions that permeate the production, reception and critique of documentary are based in an emotional attachment to the form’ (Smaill, 2010: 4).

The ‘Extras’ section of the DVD menu includes six additional scenes that didn’t make the final cut, interactive DVD-enabled material regarding bail reform in Canada and, significantly, three home videos that come together under the heading ‘Footage of Andrew & Zachary’. It is the home video footage that I am particularly interested in discussing for the questions it raises about our affective engagement with the film’s staging of documentary facts. DVD reviews of Dear Zachary typically frame its three additional home videos as extending the emotional experience of the film and providing ‘more heartbreak’ for the viewer (Humanick, 2009). Where Dear Zachary is an incredibly fast-paced film, moving from interviewee to interviewee and from sequence to sequence at ‘breakneck speed’ (Sartin, 2008), it is significant that the home videos are included in their entirety here, allowing the viewer to linger over them, and calling upon a different, more ‘pensive’ spectatorship than the film (Mulvey, 2006: 186). What is perhaps most interesting is how we respond to this footage retrospectively; when we come to the ‘extras’ of the home videos after watching the film, we are already re-enacting it – or recontextualising it – in relation to crime and death. In other words, it is not the content of the home video footage that grips me, and keeps me watching throughout the entirety of a video of Andrew Bagby’s ‘Best Man’s Speech’, but the mental reframing of that footage in the context of the violent crime and death that we know has already occurred and that we have already engaged with through our experience of the documentary. In other words, the documentary footage is retrospectively reframed by the viewer in relation to crime images. The prior affective familiarity of such home video imagery, as well, strongly encourages us to recall our own personal images, and to imagine not only what would happen if those documentary images were viewed in relation to crime and death but, rather, more crucially, to see those images in some way as already potentially infused with violence and death.

The final home video extra, ’16 mm film of Zachary’, is footage of baby Zachary playing outside with his grandparents. Set to extra diegetic elegiac music, the footage of baby Zachary with his grandparents is poignant and tragic and is meant to elicit tears. It is reminiscent of the emotive footage of other missing and lost children, such as Madeleine McCann, which often appears on our television and computer screens, and which strongly appeals to mass public sentiment. The ethical purchase of Dear Zachary, I believe, is located within this footage. How are we meant to watch these images? Should we be watching this footage at all? On one level, the function of the video footage is obvious: it is a memorial to a murdered child. For Kate and David Bagby, his grandparents, it is a cherished visual memory of the time they spent with their grandson; for friends of Andrew Bagby, it is, almost certainly, an unbearably sad and touching video of their murdered friend’s son, a ‘media memory’ of a child they never knew. But what is our relationship to this footage? To borrow John Ellis’ phrase, ‘What are we expected to feel?’ (Ellis, 2009: 67). It is indeed likely that such an ‘extra’ provides us with more ‘heartbreak’, but to what end? What are we re-enacting in our return to, and review of, this footage of a dead child? As the elegiac music tacked on to the image acknowledges, there can be no ‘innocent’ viewing of this footage outside of the terrible knowledge of what happened to this child. Oddly, while so much emphasis is placed on withholding information about the ‘plot twist’ of Dear Zachary so that future viewers of the film can watch the film in ‘real time’ and approach it with fresh eyes, unencumbered by any foreknowledge, here things are turned around so that in watching the home video footage we are being invited to shudder ‘over a catastrophe which has already occurred’ (Barthes, 1993: 96). In both cases, though, the emphasis is on generating – and heightening – our emotions. While we might well ‘wonder about the wishes at work in the visual archive of the child in pain, in death’ (Lebeau, 2008: 149), it is the emotional ‘truth’ of the figure of the child that this crime documentary finally wants to leave us with; a figure that, as I have argued, is mobilised for affective ends, to secure our sympathy and indeed our outrage, over the flimsy laws that led a murderer to reoffend, but also, finally, to shore up certain idealised convictions about good versus evil, and the power of love and family.

In this essay I have explored the movement and effects of the emotions mobilised by the crime documentary Dear Zachary – and specifically, the home video footage that lies at its heart – as it circulates through different media channels, in particular in online comments and reviews and in its format as a DVD. In particular, I have been interested in exploring the ways in which the affective labour of the viewer is used to shore up dominant ideologies and social values regarding the institution of the family, all the while keeping at bay a deeper, more unsettling set of cultural anxieties regarding the proximity between violence, death and our own everyday documentary practices. As I have argued, the strong emotional response to Dear Zachary is not primarily about the terrible crimes it discloses, but about our affective familiarity with the materiality of the documentary images it deploys.

Dear Zachary and its attempt to harness feelings to a public cause through its highly affective brand of crime reconstruction can be understood in the context of the growth of digital technologies and the emergence of new distribution formats for documentary, as well as a wider turn to empathy in post 9/11 culture. As I have suggested, however, it is vital that we unpack the cultural significance of this desire to feel or to ‘refeel’ violent events (Bruzzi, 2012), and consider the work such emotionality is performing. As Daniel O’Gorman has observed, in his discussion of the ‘empathic line’ taken by political theorists in a post 9/11 context, it is imperative that we ‘acknowledge a need for empathy itself to be “unsettled” and critically interrogated’ (O’Gorman, 2012). Crime documentaries, with their strong affective pull on audiences, open up a set of vital questions about the politics of empathy, and about the functions of emotionality in a contemporary culture in which the lines between the private and the public, the individual and the collective, are in the process of being dramatically reconfigured.