SONGS FROM THE HOLE (Netflix, released Wednesday) is an award-winning documentary that explores creatively the life of James Jacobs. He was imprisoned for murder in California when he was only 15, and subjected to prolonged solitary confinement in a tiny cell — the “hole” of the title — but discovered liberation and expression through songwriting.
The songs are the soundtrack to the narration, combined with scratchy phone recordings of his reflections from prison, and stills of his handwritten notes. It is all very highly stylised and self-conscious, but that’s part of the point: this isn’t intended to be a conventional documentary, but something more in common with a music video. It is a visual album that tells the story without the interjection of voices of authority.
I was disturbed at various points when the narration slipped into self-pity and blame, but this was resolved quite powerfully by the end, mostly through the lens of faith. Mr Jacobs’s father was a pastor, and the part that the church played in James’s upbringing has clearly been central. As a child, he sang in the choir, and his mother was the musical director.
In an awful twist, his older brother was shot dead only three days after James himself committed murder. Incarcerated while still just a child, he is both perpetrator and victim, which means that the narrative is messy and splintered, resisting tidy and simplistic judgements.
It is a desperately sad portrayal of the pointless violence to be found in gang culture, in which futile cycles of retribution and revenge destroy the lives of teenagers and young men. It is also, to use Mr Jacobs’s own words, a stirring portrayal of the hope that he “manufactured”, showing that crippling remorse could be repurposed into something life-affirming.
Marking 40 years since its discovery, Titanic: Secrets of the shipwreck (Channel 4, 10 August) is a two-part series on the history of the search for the wreck. The first episode briefly tells the story of the seven decades that separate the sinking from the eventual discovery of the wreck in the 1980s, starting with the adventures of the Texan oil billionaire Jack Grimm. The oceanographers whom Grimm hired to explore the last known position of RMS Titanic failed to locate the site, but their photo of what appeared to be the propeller provided valuable clues to the team that eventually did.
The series does not refer to the ethics of ocean salvage, particularly with regard to a ship with as emotive a history as Titanic. I appreciated the thoroughness of the ethical discussion on the recent Noiser podcast series Titanic: Ship of dreams. The moral question what should be done with the famous wreck is as fascinating a subject as the sinking itself.
