How "Making a Murderer" Made a Perfect Victim
The popular Netflix documentary Making a Murderer is a lot of things: gripping, enraging, heartbreaking, and, as it turns out, not entirely transparent. Its achievements are many, but its flaws, unfortunately, threaten to undo them, as Making a Murderer gives audiences a circumscribed view and violence victims the short shrift. But perhaps more troublingly, it does a serious injustice to those accused of crimes, by feeding into poisonous, dangerous narratives about perfect victims and devious cover-ups - at the expense of the mundane, tragic reality of our incarceration-happy country.
Making a Murderer could have forced us to answer a difficult question: Can we believe there's reasonable doubt to let a man accused of murder walk free even if he's flawed? What if he's repulsive? Even reprehensible?
Instead, it coddles us, the filmmakers apparently sure that viewers have to like a person for us to believe he should be treated fairly.
The series revolves around Steven Avery, an intellectually challenged man convicted of, and later exonerated for, raping a woman in 1985. Two years after DNA evidence leads to his release from prison after 18 years, he's arrested again, this time for allegedly raping and murdering 25-year-old Teresa Halbach. Within weeks of the series going up online in December, petitions circulated for Avery's pardoning, self-styled Internet sleuths were digging up alternate theories of the crime, and Kathleen Zellner, an attorney who specializes in wrongful convictions, along with the talented lawyers of the Midwest Innocence Project took up Avery's case (disclosure: One of those lawyers is a friend of mine from law school).
And then there was the backlash.
By now, the Internet is awash in the many things Making a Murderer left out. In the quest to illustrate the gross injustices perpetrated by the state of Wisconsin against Steven Avery, filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi gloss over or totally excise crucial information: Avery's DNA on the hood latch of Teresa Halbach's car, handcuffs and leg irons found in Avery's bedroom (he said they were sex toys), accusations that Avery sexually assaulted a teenage relative, and claims from Avery's ex-fiancée Jodi Stachowski that he beat her repeatedly, among others.
If documentaries are supposed to be something akin to journalism - have a point of view, sure, but don't shy away from inconvenient facts and don't flinch in the face of complexity - Making a Murderer certainly did a less-than-stellar job. And it did a disservice to victims as much as viewers: Steven Avery is painted as the story's lead casualty, while actual murder victim Teresa Halbach's life gets only a cursory look.
Instead, the filmmakers painted a rosier picture of Steven Avery than what was perhaps accurate. We understand why: Americans like perfect victims, or at least as near-perfect as humanly possible. Plumbing the depths of Avery's life - that he was in and out of jail, that checkered relationships with law enforcement seemed to be the norm among his clan, that he had a sadistic and violent streak - was surely inconvenient. The manipulations and incompetency at every level of the law enforcement apparatus in Manitowoc County stokes rage in part because the series was so effective in convincing us that Steven Avery is good. Could we still be outraged at those appalling miscarriages of justice if Steven Avery is less good? What if he's actually guilty?
One thing Making a Murderer does commendably is shore up sympathy for the Avery family - not a simple task, given that your average Netflix documentary viewer is several degrees wealthier and more educated than any single Avery who appeared on screen (compare, for example, the compassion for the Averys compared to the national ridicule of the similarly stereotypically "trailer trash" family in the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo). The filmmakers force the viewer to spend time with the Averys, to really see them and feel with them. It can be a frustrating process, to watch so closely this family who at first seem to find repeated arrests and imprisonments entirely normal, and then to see them attempt to navigate a system they don't understand, to stumble through challenges that to many viewers seem so simple.
Several friends who have watched the documentary mentioned quietly, shamefully, that it took them halfway through the series to move past their repulsion and disgust, and feel real empathy for the Averys. By the final few episodes of the show, viewers are collectively offended when an investigator, who was supposed to be working for the lawyer of also-accused Avery nephew Brendan Dassey, reads from old emails he sent about the family - the investigator paints the Averys with every white trash stereotype, stating, "This is truly where the devil resides in comfort. I can find no good in any member. These people are pure evil. A friend of mine suggested: 'this is a one-branch family tree. Cut this tree down. We need to end the gene pool here.'"
How awful, the filmmakers want us to think - and they're right, how awful. But how awful too that so many viewers can only dredge up that kind of indignation after the family has been massaged just enough to conform to middle-class ideas of who deserves sympathy. The filmmakers can't make the Averys into a respectable and relatable family, but they can at least frame them as "those poor, sad people."
What if the truth is that young female members of the Avery clan were sexually abused by older male relatives? What if the truth is that Dolores and Allan Avery didn't raise three nice but slow young men, but three violent sociopaths? Steven's brothers are now under scrutiny, at least on the Internet, for Teresa Halbach's murder - one was charged with raping his wife and strangling her with a telephone cord, and the other was charged with sexually assaulting his two daughters. When Steven was in jail the first time, he sent a series of deeply disturbing letters to his ex wife threatening to kill her, in addition to allegedly beating his girlfriend and ex-wife and sexually assaulting another family member. According to the documentary itself, he was convicted of animal cruelty for pouring gasoline onto the family cat and throwing it onto a bonfire, and later went to jail for running his female cousin off the road because she made him angry. What if the truth is just what it looks like: that the Avery brothers are often violent and sadistic, and the people on the receiving end of that violence are often women?
Sometimes, the people who get caught up in the criminal justice system are a lot like your average Netflix documentary viewer: college-educated, middle or upper middle class, urban or suburban; people who have savings accounts and know a lawyer and would understand what it meant if someone told you your statements were "inconsistent." Often, though, the people who end up interfacing with the criminal justice system lack many of those privileges: They're poor, or they're black or brown, or they lack higher education and professional social connections, or, quite often, all of the above. Many are in the criminal justice system because of how the dysfunctions and incentives bred by poverty and racism and powerlessness butt up against a structure largely operated by a more prosperous, more educated, more powerful over-class. That is not a dynamic that breeds understanding or compassion or, ultimately, justice.
Some members of the broad law enforcement apparatus, including police officers and prosecutors and investigators and even judges, are happy to cut corners or even break the rules if they believe they have a guilty person in their grip. It's easy to make the ends justify the means, and to use one's power to tip the scales in favor of what you believe to be a just conclusion. Miscarriages of justice are far more often a kind of mundane behavior on the part of individuals who believe they're right and think it's their job first and foremost to get the bad guy - zeroing in on one suspect and ignoring any inconvenient others, cramming the evidence into a rigid premade theory of the case, not turning over exculpatory evidence to the defense - than they are massive conspiracies where everyone knew they were doing wrong.
The good victim targeted by bad people is a convenient narrative, and it makes for good TV. But anyone facing criminal penalties, whatever their story, deserves a fair trial. They still deserve to benefit from the fundamental promise of our criminal justice system: that it is the state's obligation to prove an accused's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which means presenting evidence truthfully and accurately that the person on trial actually did the thing for which he is accused – not that he's the kind of person who would do such a thing.
That is where the Making a Murderer filmmakers had a precious opportunity – and where they squandered it. They presented Steven Avery's case as a shocking departure from the norm, the railroading of a good and innocent man. That prosecutors behave unethically, that police officers bend the rules, that media coverage is predatory and inaccurate - these things are features of our justice system, not rare exceptions.
That should shock and appall us even if the accused is an imperfect guy, or a bad guy, or even a guilty guy. Making a Murderer, unfortunately, feeds into a kind of Law & Order legal fantasy that the system is usually fair, and when it's not, it's the result of a conspiracy among the comically evil, and then innocent people, who are conveniently also good people, suffer. Real life is much messier.
This matters because real people - the kind of people who have their perceptions of the criminal justice system shaped by watching Making a Murderer or Law & Order or any of the many true-crime series on television - sit on juries. They are the people who judge their peers to be guilty or not. When they understand guilt or innocence to be wrapped up in a person's goodness or relatability, rather than about the much less exciting question of whether a prosecutor met the very high bar of demonstrating guilt beyond any reasonable doubt, it poisons the whole process.
How much more interesting, and how much more accurate and challenging it would have been, to see Steven Avery and his family in the whole of their dysfunction, to see Steven himself as someone who had terrible things happen to him and who also did terrible things, to understand that most people are capable of both bad and good, that one can be a victim and a perpetrator, to force viewers to confront the utter monotony of so much of our legal system - and then still grapple with the fundamental wrongs leveled by that system against Steven Avery and, by many more degrees, Brendan Dassey.
When injustices are leveled against a criminal defendant, justice is not served, regardless of the jury's verdict. Making a Murderer made such a strong case for Avery's innocence, and painted such a convincing picture of local bigotry and manipulation, it leaves viewers with the righteous sense that if only we had been on that jury, we would have done better. It feeds the fantasy that what Avery experienced was exceptional. It sends the message that Steven Avery, because he's a decent guy who has been wronged, didn't deserve this - rather than the more complicated idea that even people who have done bad things still deserve procedural fairness.
It's hard to tell a story without a hero. But sometimes, all you have to work with is a human.
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