Thin Blue Line

The entire time i was watching this movie i was convinced i would figure it out. I paid articulate attention to the 27 reenacted scenes of the murder, each time calculated the slight differences it possessed from the others. I was, and still am, fascinated by the perceptions of others.
My initial reaction to the story line was--cool a nonfiction piece un-convicted someone. That's baddass! Then the idea of why someone simply showing the multifacets of the truth could change the way people believed something happened began to sink in. The entire movie was based on truth. Not truth necessarily in the outright sense--he did this she did that--but truth in the eyes of perception. It really sought to analyze memory and the way in which people view things. During the film, contradictions littered the dialogue quicker than beer cans litter frat parties.
Holy shit, so is there really such a thing as true?
A friend of mine always says, in his characteristically cynical way, "there is no such thing as an original thought." I like to push him into explaining himself. He believes that every thought a person conceives is based on a prior knowledge of something similar being said, thought, or did. He discounts imagination as original because humans start from a normal blueprint then discount that blueprint to make something up. So in imagining something you really are just telling of how things are not. Which is not original because you have to be aware of how things are to claim that they are not. And the only way you learn how things are is by being told about them or experiencing them. He believes that every stream that passes through our head is built off of something we already knew or were told about.
I don't care for this philosophical cop-out. I don't think my friend really believes it either. I mean if he did where does he get off acting all hoity toity about his theory. He didn't make it up. It's not original.
I was thinking about this when i watched the movie though. I know, how does it apply? I was thinking about it in the sense that we don't actually know what happened. No one actually knew what happened. Even the killer and the cop saw the scene as different. We all filter things through our own perception. So maybe there is no exact truth to any situation.
I loved the way this notion was brought out by the direction of the movie. The contradictions were key to me because they truly showed me that no one ever really knew what the fuck happened or what was happening. He didn't kill the guy though. I do know that. I wonder why the 16 year old did though? I wonder how he justified the act as being true to his nature?