Making a Murderer

Not since I watched Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, eons ago in a theater, have I been as powerfully affected by a documentary about the miscarriage of U.S. justice. And this time it came right into my house, courtesy of Netflix streaming.  Over the course of ten scrupulously filmed and even more scrupulously edited hours, Making a Murderer, by the incredibly talented duo Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, tracks the encounters of two members of the Avery clan—Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey—with the criminal justice apparatus of Manitowoc County and the wider Wisconsin courts. I can’t say much without giving away the plot, and believe me, you don’t want me to do that: the ins and outs of who did what to whom, and whether to believe this person or that, and what order the events occurred in, and whether they actually occurred, form an essential part of one’s motive for watching this show. So do the character portrayals, which are extensive and complicated and deeply revealing. Suffice to say that some people (particularly Steven Avery’s lawyers) come off as true heroes, while others (particularly some of the D.A.s and investigators and cops) come off as despicable, self-justifying monsters. It is a frightening portrayal of one kind of horribly American small-town “justice,” and when you reach the end of it, you will only be able to turn off the TV, not the constantly playing episodes in your mind. May this haunt all of us for a long time.