In most adaptations of Frankenstein, who is the greater "monster"?  Dr. Frankenstein or his creation?  The text advocates for scientific restraint, urging moral caution against man's arrogance.  And it is Dr. Frankenstein who, through his arrogance, creates a monster; it is Dr. Frankenstein who ultimately causes the horror.

Errol Morris invokes the imagery of Frankenstein in Mr. Death, but its title ironically plays with this imagery.  Dr. Frankenstein's arrogance manifested itself in trying to re-animate life.  Fred Leuchter's work is in creating death, an interesting foreshadowing of his later investigation of one of the most-extreme causes of death promulgated by the direct work of humans.

This irony and contradiction works through the film.  Some felt that Morris created a sympathetic figure and gave him a platform.  Others felt that Morris made Leuchter look pathetic and silly at best, recklessly destructive and ignorant at worst.  It may be presumptuous to say, but based on my small scientific sampling, most fell somewhere in the middle.

These shades of gray are where we find history.  Like Dr. Frankenstein, who may have been mistaken from arrogance and pride, or perhaps the seemingly less-pejorative ignorant or careless, Leuchter's story is complicated.  And this is how history is made.

Leuchter in many ways fits the mold of our stereotypical Holocaust-denier.  He speaks at "revisionist" conferences, doubling down on his testimony that was supposedly only in advocacy of free speech.  He obstinately refuses to hear any refutation of his views, a seemingly ideological (rather than empirical) way of understanding the past.  And he invokes the language of any good racist: "I'm not racist, I have a lot of Jewish (or insert whatever ethnic or racial group here) friends."  (Kind of like a man who claims he's not misogynist because he has a wife.)

At the same time, Morris seems to paint him as a pathetic figure, in over his head.  Leuchter seems ignorant of why his methods are flawed.  He claims his testimony was merely in the interest of "truth" and "free speech."  His social awkwardness might lead us to believe his sense of consequences may be almost completely absent (a "honeymoon" at a former concentration camp?).  Clearly lonely and without much of a legacy, he seems to speak at "revisionist" conventions as a way to get recognition.  He ends a pathetic lonely figure; Morris shows a stereotypical cinematic trope: a lonely man, contemplatively gazing into the distance, along a road where people in their cars race by without seeming to notice him.

But even these are dubious.  Even without gas chambers, a slave labor camp directed at a society's chosen scapegoat group is a historical abhorrence.  Yet to Leuchter, even assuming he is right (and I would never argue that he is), the very possibility that there are no gas chambers almost makes the Holocaust "okay" or a lot more so.  And yes, when he speaks before these revisionist conferences, perhaps it is for want of belonging for a man who clearly has psychological issues.  But surely he knows to what causes he is lending support.  He has to hear other speakers, talk to the organizers, understand the motivations for these events.  And as an engineer, one would hope he would have the intellectual curiosity to understand or seek reasons why his investigation falls short.  His ignorance seems only to bolster his own self image; to be wrong requires one having to admit one is wrong.

Morris shows Leuchter's life destroyed by the end of the picture.  And what are we to make of this?  Where am I going with this?

Morris seems to come down pretty confidently on which "history" is correct.  The man who worked at the lab and the historian clearly paint the enormous gaps in Leuchter's investigatory methods.

That isn't the point of the movie in my mind (yet it is necessary to understand Leuchter as a figure.  With this knowledge readily available to Leuchter, the fact that he does not seem to seek it or even offer a counter-argument is crucial to understanding his ignorance and reasons).  Here I think is what we learn from this film:  When the history of historical revisionism, of Holocaust denial, and of Aryan supremecy is written, what will be said?  Leuchter's story (as portrayed here, anyway) shows that even though he does seem at best callously unaware of his errors and the ideology it supports, these ideologies and revisions and historical fallacies cannot be understood monolithically.  Though Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism and white/Aryan supremacy are all inextricably linked, these are often supported by complex psychologies.  How often, for instance, are immigrant communities scapegoated during harder economic times ("they're taking 'our' jobs")?  Yet others discriminate based on cultural supremecy.  Historians should not view these causes as justifications.  Racial intolerance occurs on larger levels (like political movements and faux academics), but it is built on a number of smaller factors that show themselves monolithically.  Leuchter is a complicated figure who contributes to a movement of hatred.  As a human being, as a person who claims to be interested in history, as an engineer, as any number of things, he seems to care little about the consequences of his historiographic methods.  While he may very well be a racist, this film seems to advocate that this label will not completely explain his study.  He may be a secret fierce advocate for Holocaust denial on the basis of anti-Semitism or racial superiority, or he may see these movements as tolerable to achieve a more-personal sense of recognition, fame and belonging.  Or he may be willfully ignoring the consequences of his "report" in arrogance.

To fully understand these issues of revisionism, ignorance, and intolerance, we must avoid categorical frameworks.  As historians, we cannot use the moralizing language (that as a blogger I have clearly invoked, and for that I apologize), but as human beings who care about these issues, we can understand that the "causes" of intolerance do not justify merely by explaining them.  Perhaps Morris should have, as a human being, sought to crush rather than undermine Leuchter's history; perhaps Morris gave Leuchter a platform.  That could be argued with my sympathetic ear.  Yet, he did justify Leuchter; rather, Morris showed how categorical understandings of Holocaust-denial may explain, but do not fully explain, each person in the movement. 

-Joshua Bark