[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for “Death By Lightning”]
Before we see anything that leads the failed lawyer and frustrated Republican job-seeker Charles Guiteau to shoot President James Garfield, the Netflix miniseries “Death By Lightning” tells us that history forgot both of these men. Fans of “Assassins” may bristle at that a little, but the statement acts as a tragic leveler, bringing both the show’s Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) and Garfield (Michael Shannon) onto the same volatile playing field.
This parity between the show’s protagonists was essential for the “Death by Lightning” editing team, which consisted of Joseph Krings and Joe Leonard over the course of production and initial picture cuts, then Anna Hauger and Michael Ruscio, along with additional editors Derek Desmond and Bridget Case, for the remainder of post. It enabled the true engine of the series to be the movement between Garfield and Guiteau over the course of the former’s surprise Republican nomination and brief anti-corruption-focused administration. It also demanded that the editors really find empathy for both president and assassin, and imbue that feeling into how they cut the series.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the scene that both Hauger and Krings told IndieWire hit them the hardest. In Episode 3, “Casus Belli,” Guiteau finally worms his way into a meeting with the man he feels he’s helped elect president, angling for a consul post in Paris or Vienna (he’s learning both French and German!). But standing before the object of all his obsessive hopes, Guiteau can’t come out and say what he wants. He has to tell Garfield, first, how much he feels he knows him, and how much Garfield means to him, and a plea almost bursts out of his chest: “Help me!”
It is, to use the parlance of a different age, a big yikes.
The scene lasts no more than three minutes and 30 seconds, but the “Death By Lightning” editing team makes every one of them an agonizing parasocial nightmare. Ruscio told IndieWire that the sequence felt like DeNiro and Pacino finally meeting in “Heat” — “You’re withholding it and then, when it comes, it really delivers at a point where the audience is craving and sort of been hungry for it. And it just delivers so beautifully,” Ruscio said.
Part of the beauty is in how the edit continues to be just tantalizingly withholding. There are 10 different camera setups to capture the sequence: A couple of medium wide shots to establish the space, a close-up of them shaking hands, a medium shot of each man with the other out of focus in the foreground, then a closer medium of each, and a final devastating wide of Guiteau left alone in the doorframe at the end. The scene keeps lingering on Guiteau an awkward extra second, as his praise of Garfield doesn’t land with its audience, and in the moments of highest vulnerability and disappointment, the scene uses the shots that just show each man alone, unable to connect with each other.
“I always like to go into an edit and into a scene or to an episode with a certain amount of empathy for every character,” Hauger told IndieWire. “When Garfield meets Guiteau, you really get this depth of understanding of Guiteau’s longing, and you also get the disappointment at the end when he’s not getting the answers that he wants from Garfield and it’s — Matthew Macfadyen’s performance in that scene is tremendous.”
The mark of great performers, though, is that they give the editors a lot of different colors of an idea or emotion to play with. “He’s so desperate when he’s finally engaging with Garfield, but you know, you can’t play a desperate character desperately. Matthew found a way to really get that humanity in there, and I think the work that we did was really honing in on the performances so everyone could key into who these men were,” Ruscio said.
“Death by Lightning,” to its very great credit, shows that aspects of who these men were could be very funny. Garfield’s farm might be in Ohio, but he has a pretty Clark Kent role as the Good Man of the series, and so, in the scene with Guiteau and elsewhere, has to be quite straightlaced and unmoveably principled — much less fun than Bradley Whitford’s exasperated James Blaine or Shea Whigham’s ultimate dude take on Rosco Conkling. But not no fun, thanks to his wife, Crete (Betty Gilpin).
“Betty Gilpin came with just such a spirit for play. Whenever she would have a scene with Michael, she would just do something weird and crazy and he’d have to react to it and it really opened up Michael to having more variations in his performance,” Krings told IndieWire. “Then he’s like, ‘Oh, OK, we can play here and we can be a little bit more comic and I can be more fun and open.”
Even with the more outwardly buffoonish Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman), the editors felt that some of their job was to get out of the way every time he shouts for “Sausages!” but also some of it to seed little glimmers of someone more serious and more noble throughout, so that his arc feels earned when he finds himself with unexpected responsibility. “You go too far in one direction, and you’re going to have trouble balancing it with the seriousness of the show or the gravity of the show. So it was a really interesting challenge from the very beginning,” Leonard told IndieWire.
For the editors, the moment between the two men in Episode 3 encapsulated the rich mix of humor, tragedy, vanity for fame, and longing for remembrance that are at the heart of “Death By Lightning” and make it feel immediately relatable to a contemporary audience. That is, very much, by design — from the writing, direction, and performances, of course, but also through how long the editors choose to linger on a face and let us understand and emotion, through when they decide to cut to a crushingly confused reaction.
“We are always looking to find the connections and the parallels, but it was such a joy to get to work on something based in a really interesting historical [setting] that actually has these connections to what’s happening now,” Leonard said. “We’re naturally, as filmmaking people, going to want to work [towards] that. The story is being told right now, so it has a relevance to now,” Leonard said.
There is something oddly hopeful about that relevance, despite the tragic ending. All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again, “Death By Lightning” proves — but never meet your heroes.
“Death By Lightning” is now streaming on Netflix.
