The Jinx, when it aired in 2015, was exactly everything you could ask for from a true crime documentary series. It was as if Andrew Jarecki, aware that he worked for HBO and could not produce mediocrity, had been able to direct the story of Robert Durst to that “killed them all, of course” that would open the news programs in the United States and, thanks to the new evidence contributed, served to arrest the murderer the day before the final episode was broadcast. It was the history of television and the genre, topped off by those miked and belched statements typical of a thriller psychopath.
He knew how to take advantage of the opportunity. He had signed the film All Good Things with Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, which was inspired by the suspicious disappearance of Kathie McCormack after her tortuous marriage to Robert Durst, and Durst himself contacted him, fascinated by the way he x-rayed her. . And Jarecki, eager, began to investigate with cameras all the murders that pointed to one of the heirs of New York, although his involvement or criminal intent had never been proven.
Let’s remember that there were three. First, Kathie’s disappearance in 1982 which pointed to a murder; then the execution of her friend Susan Berman in 2000 when it was rumored that she might know the exact details of what had happened to Durst’s wife; and, finally, the murder and dismemberment of Morris Black, for which Durst had been tried but exonerated. He defended that, while he was leading a grotesque life in Texas, his neighbor had been aggressive and that he had no choice but to kill him in legitimate defense and dismember him.
The return of The Jinx, after the events that occurred after the end of the initial documentary series, was perhaps inevitable. Durst, after all, had planned his escape during the production’s broadcast, seeing that Jarecki had put him on the ropes with the discovery of new evidence. His case lasted five years until in 2021 a jury found him guilty of the murder of Susan Berman and he was sentenced to life in prison. And, three months later, he died in California.
The second part, therefore, serves as a testimony to those months without the greatest virtue of the previous season: the statements of Durst, who had sinned into being an egomaniac by performing deadly dialectical juggling in his interviews with Jarecki. In his return, he has a notable success: the images taken during the showing of the episode of “killed them all, of course” that Jarecki organized with the testimonies of his production and with Kathie’s immediate family present at the hall.
Watching them get a kind of resolution, of television justice, is exciting. It also emphasizes the feeling of return of victory for The Jinx in this new stage: continuing to film can now be interpreted more as an act of vanity, of squeezing out the treasure, than of being able to contribute something new. We’ll have to watch it until the end just in case, of course.
