Jinxed: The Path of the Psychopath

All Bad Things? (Jareckis vs. Dursts, Part One)

Link to author-read audio of this article is at the end of the piece (for paid subscribers only)

In 2015, I wrote a piece about the HBO series, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, directed by Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans). Unusually for me, I never put the piece online. The Quietus site wanted to publish it, but they had just introduced ads to their site and weren’t willing to pay anything. This seemed like an unfair arrangement, so I shelved it.

Nine years later, The Jinx is back with a second season (maybe a first for a documentary series, at least after such a long time lag). I have re-viewed the first season, and I plan to cover the deep background on both the Durst and the Jarecki dynasties, which I no more than touched on in this first piece. Rather than revise this original piece, I am publishing here in only slightly updated form, and will save the more recent discoveries for subsequent chapters.

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“Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.” —Marshall McLuhan

Robert Durst was the first-born son of Seymour Durst, of the New York-based Durst Organization. To give you some idea of how powerful the Durst Organization was in 2015, at that time it owned and managed more than 8.5 million square feet of Class A office space in Midtown Manhattan and over one million square feet of luxury residential rentals. In 2010, it joined in the development of the “Freedom Tower” or One World Trade Center, the building which replaced the twin towers destroyed in 2001.

So we are talking 1% of 1% here.

Robert Durst was the rejected stone in the Durst power pyramid. While he was a real estate developer in the 1980s, it was his younger brother, Douglas, who was appointed to run the family business. This increased a rivalry between the siblings that had reputedly been of Cain and Abel proportions from the start (as children, Robert and Douglas underwent counseling for it).

In 1982, Durst’s wife, Kathleen McCormack Durst, went missing. Though Durst was suspected of murdering her (he had been violent towards her and she was in the process of divorcing him), he was never charged. In 2000, Durst’s longtime friend, Susan Berman (who may or may not have known something about Kathleen’s disappearance), was shot in the back of the head. Once again, Durst was suspected but not accused of murder (until he was arrested for it 2015, uncannily timed with the last episode of The Jinx).

In 2001, Durst had been arrested for the murder of his neighbor, Morris Black, whose body Durst dismembered, wrapped up in garbage bags, and threw in the Galveston Bay. Though admitting to the dismemberment, Durst pleaded self-defense, and was found not guilty of murder in 2003.

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Andrew Jarecki, the director of The Jinx (both seasons), first came to prominence with his 2003 documentary film, Capturing the Friedmans, about a father and son accused of—and subsequently imprisoned for—sexually abusing children. The film won eighteen international prizes, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the New York Film Critics Circle award, and was nominated for an Academy Award. It appeared to present a balanced viewpoint of the case, and was inconclusive about the Friedmans’ guilt. But soon after, Jarecki said he believed Jesse was innocent, and lobbied for his release. (Jesse Friedman has since served his time, but he is still claiming innocence at his website, seeking exoneration.)

In 2010, Jarecki made a feature film called All Good Things, based on Durst (played by Ryan Gosling) and the disappearance of his wife (played by Kirsten Dunst). The Friedmans documentary was highly memorable; the Hollywood film not so much. However, it did get Robert Durst’s attention, who liked the way the film presented him, and who got in touch with Jarecki shortly before its release.

It was this that led to the making of The Jinx.

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Jarecki, like Durst, was born of a well-to-do Jewish family, the son of “philanthropist-financier” and pharmacologist, Henry Jarecki (a German Jew who fled the Nazis as a child). Andrew Jarecki went to Princeton College and is the exceedingly rare case of a filmmaker wealthy enough to finance his own films (as he did for The Jinx; he even bought the rights to All Good Things back from Miramax when the film failed). His brother Eugene, and half-brother Nicolas, are also filmmakers.

Jarecki tried to contact Durst during preproduction of All Good Things, but Durst’s lawyers declined the invitation. (Jarecki consulted closely with the family of Kathleen McCormack.) Durst apparently contacted Jarecki just before the film’s release, however, and was invited to a screening. He said that the film moved him, and felt that Jarecki “understood” him. He offered to give Jarecki an interview, in which he promised to disclose things he had not talked about publicly before.

Naturally, Jarecki agreed, and the result was the six-part HBO series, The Jinx, which climaxed with Durst’s apparently unwitting confession, coinciding, however coincidentally, with Durst’s arrest for the murder of Susan Berman.

Through the Looking Glass

The first season of The Jinx took us through the looking glass of the true crime show, into something more universal and disturbing. Durst was unsympathetic throughout the first five episodes of the series, and his personality was revealed as increasingly psychopathic. In the last episode, however, after Jarecki and his associates find a piece of incriminating evidence, rather than give it to the police or simply tell Durst about it, they decide to lay a trap for him, and Durst walks right into it.

This leads to his unintended confession after the final interview (“Killed them all,” he murmurs into the mic while in the toilet). Even before this, Durst’s somatic reaction to the surprise evidence (he begins belching and seems about to vomit) gives a strong indication of guilt. And, in a rather grisly way, it also may elicit our sympathy for him.

The way Durst inadvertently confesses his guilt while talking to himself in the toilet (apparently unaware he is still wearing the microphone) seems both wildly improbable and weirdly inevitable. It is like a Greek tragedy, in which the protagonist conspires to bring about his own downfall.

It’s also the kind of dramatically resonant and thematically rich denouement which we tend to expect from fiction. And, just as in good fiction, the inevitability of Durst’s self-sabotage moment has been foreshadowed, by Jarecki establishing Durst’s habit (of talking to himself while wearing the mic) in an earlier episode. So although it is a shocking moment, it is not a total surprise.

At the same time, it seems (as in good writing) to be consistent with the psychology of Durst, the character. After all, why would he have agreed to the interview at all, if not out of a deep, only semi-conscious desire to confess?

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One key element to Durst’s pathology—and to his motivation to participate in Jarecki’s film, a decision that led to his downfall—would appear to be a burning resentment towards his family, most obviously his sibling rivalry with Douglas (who at one point even hired a bodyguard to protect himself from his brother).

Was the surprise ending of The Jinx the result of Jarecki manipulating Durst, or of Durst manipulating Jarecki? Or were there other, shadowy figures involved, in a much larger game of manipulation?

If Durst wanted to get back at his family, to make a name for himself, even through infamy, then evidently he used Jarecki to do it. And if Jarecki wanted a scoop to resurrect his career, Durst provided him with just such a scoop.

All of this begs the question as to the assumed “closure” of the outcome of The Jinx, and specifically of Jarecki’s lawyer/cop-like “snare.”

It would seem that exposing a multiple killer like Durst could only constitute an unequivocal good. But what if there is a larger picture to consider?