Here's a little history lesson. Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, premiering Monday, August 18 on HBO, tells the story of the highly publicized murder trial of Pamela Smart, who in 1990 was convicted of killing her husband, Greg Smart in Derry, New Hampshire. The Smart trials marked the first time in the U.S. that a court case had been televised gavel to gavel. But more importantly, as filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar posits through footage from the trial as well as interviews with various people involved with the case, it was the first time intensified media coverage played a direct role in the outcome of the trial.
Zagar spoke to us about Captivated, his other work, and the various effects media has on its audience’s perceptions of reality.
Do you think Pamela Smart would've had a harsher sentence or a more lenient one if it wasn’t as sensationalized by the media?
Who knows if she had even been convicted? Who knows how anything would have proceeded? The point is the media coverage changed absolutely everything. The media coverage is the reason the police looked at her in the first place. They saw her on television, and because she was wearing a blue dress and she was petting her dog and she was talking about her husband in a way that seemed odd to the police, she didn’t strike them the way that they wanted her to strike them. That’s the problem from the beginning and the problem as it continues: the person you see through a camera lens is very different from the person that is there. In very simple terms, it’s like how Tom Cruise looks like a giant on screen, but he’s really a little guy. It translates to everything; a person who is lovely and effervescent and smart and funny and interesting, as Pamela Smart is in reality, is very different on screen.
The thing is the film isn’t about guilt or innocence, ultimately. It’s about trials and it’s about our system, and it’s about, “Does this make our system unfair, and did this make our system unfair for her?” Across the board, everyone we interviewed who looks at her sentence now considers it unfair except for the police who put her there and the lawyer who put her there. Every single juror we interviewed was disappointed at the sentence that they handed down to her.
Do they believe she was innocent or that the sentence was too harsh?
Again, it’s not about innocence. The qualification is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” and the question is “Was there reasonable doubt?” That’s the ultimate question. By the end of the movie, you should at least begin to question whether or not she was guilty, and if you’re questioning whether or not somebody is guilty, it’s hard to put them away for the rest of their life.
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A lot of cases after Smart’s have been sensationalized by the media and have had very surprising outcomes, such as George Zimmerman, Casey Anthony, and others. Do you believe that media coverage of trials like this have gotten better and more informative? Or worse and more sensationalized?
They’re similar; they’ve just changed in that the media is different. The thing is that at that time, the Pamela Smart case was the only thing on. It was the advent of cable TV, the local stations suspended all their programming and just broadcasted the trial. When that happens, it becomes a perfect storm, and that will never happen again. In every case it’s different, and that’s why it’s hard to simply demonize the media.
It’s important to understand the media’s role. There is a lack of media literacy in the public realm. People don’t understand how visuals and editorial choices affect them. And when you see Foxy Knoxy and when you see the Ice Queen, it means something different to you than what that person actually is accused of. That’s important.
What effect do you think new media, like social media, specifically has on the sensationalism of cases similar to Pamela Smart’s?
Well since Pamela Smart, one of the things that’s happened is that juries get sequestered much more often. Her case was cited as a reason to sequester juries. But, what happens—do you limit their access to the Internet? Do you limit their access to telephones? We’re so inundated with media.The other thing is that because there’s so much in the media, you can’t have a trial that takes up the entire bandwidth anymore. It’s a good and a bad thing, but in the case of trials, I would say it could be a good thing because it limits the 13th juror, or the public. It limit’s the public’s ability to be a major influencing factor on the trial.
You have to look at it case by case, and the Pamela Smart case only informs other cases. When you look at the Amanda Knox trial that’s happening in Italy or you look at Trayvon Martin, you can see remnants of the Pamela Smart case in those trials. It's important to ask, “Is the justice system up to this task? Can they deal with this media influence?” In the Smart case, it’s clear that they couldn’t. It's important that there's a certain amount of transparency, but at the same time, it can go overboard and transparency can become falsehood. That’s when it becomes a problem.
The problem is our justice system is a system that deals with truth and life and death and really intense, difficult positions, whereas the media system deals with commerce. It’s about selling something to you, sensationalizing something, and when those two things mix, it’s problematic.
Do you think prevalent sexism played a part in the outcome of Smart’s case?
She fit into a narrative structure. She was the Eve. She was that woman that seduces the young man; the Lady Macbeth. When we place people in the media eye and we break them down into sound bytes and we edit them and sensationalize them, we do so to put them in storytelling tropes, because that’s how we as a society explain the world to ourselves. Because she fit into a trope, she was easy to demonize, and the truth is she’s very different from that. If she was a man, the man seducing the younger woman is like Elvis Presley; it’s such a different world that you’re dealing with.
Ramy Zabarah is a contributing writer. He tweets here.
