Oscar Wilde [left], in his 1899 essay “The Decay of Lying,” wrote “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” It makes sense then that the mimetic relation of life and art is a vicious circle, as we see in books and films portraying True Crime stories. There has been an accelerating demand for True Crime in the past half century since the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood marked its inauguration. NBC wasted no time in producing the TV movie In the Line of Duty: The FBI Murders, which aired two years after the shootout. The usually-affable actors David Soul and Michael Gross play against type as the killers, Platt and Matix, in performances that one anonymous internet commentator describes as “too bad to be believed,” and yet they were “Freddy Kruger” and “Michael Meyers” incarnate, and as despicable a pair of murderers as were ever imagined by producers of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween series of dead teenager splatter flicks.”
The FBI Murders is a televised product of the latter half of the Reagan Era. The heroic FBI agents embody the bright, optimistic and virtuous side of ‘Morning in America.’ Ben Grogan and Jerry Dove, the slain officers are played with brightness and enthusiasm by Ronny Cox and Bruce Greenwood. Grogan is the wise veteran agent—”Fifty-three years old, and still the best shot in Miami.” Dove is the vibrant rookie—”I’m thirty years old, I live on the beach, and I drive a sports car.” When Dove’s girlfriend reminds him that he has to go to work, he says “that’s the good part.” The surviving agents are shown in exactly the same light. Gordon McNeill (Doug Sheehan) and Ed Mireles (Ronald G. Joseph) are both devoted family men, who instill a sense of idealism and scout-like preparedness in their children. McNeill is protective of his teenage daughters, to the point that as the two as-yet unidentified maniacs are running around loose, he fears for their safety at social activities as there may be an armored car present nearby. Mireles is shown having a heart-to-heart discussion with his young son, in which, he explains why he hopes he can arrest bad guys without violence. But, he explains, sometimes the use of deadly force is necessary—although he hasn’t yet had to, (but eventually will.) Nearly all of these scenes are fictitious. But they create the audience-friendly atmosphere conducive to recounting the actual events. The film captures the zeitgeist.
The movie’s villains, Platt and Matix, embody the dark and sinister underbelly of ‘Morning in America.’ The themes are greed; avarice; sloth; promiscuity; infidelity and spousal abuse; even religious hypocrisy.
David Soul and Michael Gross play up the “redneck” persona to the umpteenth degree. In fact, they wear it as a badge of honor, even at one point, citing “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer,” the Johnny Russell song, as an ample description of themselves. Though they served as Army Rangers, they seem to have few discernable skills necessary to navigate civilian life, nor do they have the moral inclination to make the effort to do so. Their values are hopelessly selfish and materialistic. Despite several failing business ventures, such as landscaping and installing pinball and jukebox machines, they amass new wealth through chaotically executed armed robberies and the insurance settlement from the bloody murder of Matix’s first wife, Patty.
Despite their outward image as simple family men, they are abusive and unfaithful toward their longsuffering wives and children, to whom they explain their newfound earnings by pretending to be mercenaries contracted by the CIA to assassinate drug dealers. In spite of their Walter Mitty-style fantasies of acting as mercenaries, Matix and Platt, display a squeamishness at the prospect of armed confrontations with drug dealers, who in Platt’s words are “all a bunch of greasers, and they have all kinds of weapons.” They are, as Platt says, “safer going up against cops,” who by 1980s standards, are lighter armed and easier to dominate. There is an obvious correlation between the villains’ brutish behavior at home and their crimes by day.
Matix is a born-again Christian, but it is revealed that he often has used church services as a place to seduce, bed, and then abandon vulnerable young women. The representation of the villains as religious hypocrites, merges with the larger picture of the rot setting into the milieu of religious revivalism in the Reagan Era, where a number of televangelists were ensnared in financially and sexually-based scandals. As Greg Barnhisel writes in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette: “Inevitably, they were felled by the old sins: lust and greed.” Lust and greed. Ed Mireles, the retired surviving agent, in several emails to this author, cuts through Platt and Matix’s façade of humble piety: “Their only motive was money. They robbed, stole and killed for money to maintain the life style they wanted to have. Nothing but greed…”
In nearly every scene, Platt and Matix appear as sweaty and crude; grunting their words while munching down potato chips and fast food.
It makes sense that NBC TV was inclined to embellish the true history of the lives and crimes of the two killers, as with both of them rendered dead by the final firefight, they are in no position to answer questions about their motivations or their interactions with each other. The myriad of scenes with Platt and Matix interacting with each other are clearly fabricated. Who knows for sure what their private conversations were really like? The filmmakers get around the dilemma of this type of speculation, by keeping the back-and-forth dialogue plain and simple and without much effort in developing.
Part three of this essay will appear next week.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
