This cult true-crime show has morphed into a must-watch legal docudrama
Making a Murderer Netflix
CAN reality have spoilers? In the battle of Google versus factual docudrama there is only one winner, especially when the docudrama in question has captured the public imagination and made implosive celebrities of its cast of characters. So you could, if you wanted, catch up with the ins and outs of this famous legal saga without bothering to watch the 10 episodes of the second series.
But that would be to miss the point. Making a Murderer, which focuses on the case of Steven Avery — exonerated after spending 18 years in jail, then tried and convicted along with his nephew Brendan Dassey for the murder of Teresa Halbach — is about character and process as much as it is about outcomes.
The documentarists Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi profess to having no view as to the guilt or innocence of Avery or Dassey. Like much of the evidence produced in the case, that’s almost believable. What is uncontestable, though, is the shonkiness of the American legal system, whether it is the cops leading the impressionable teenager Dassey towards a confession that corroborates their story, or the way politics complicates justice.
There is a lot of talk about narratives. You’d expect that in a media studies course, but it applies to the legal process and the police investigations too. A trial, it turns out, is a form of storytelling. In the case of Avery, the story was about blood forensics. With his nephew Brendan there was no such evidence, so the story about him was, according to Laura Nirider from the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, “words, and words only”.
The central narrative, of course, is the one prepared by the film-makers. These bits of film didn’t arrange themselves in this order, these questions didn’t ask themselves. This is an edited version of something approximating to reality. Which poses a question. After series one, which concluded with the two main protagonists in jail, what do you do? You need some new characters. But you also need to take account of the effect of your previous work. Series one wa s a h i t . S teve n Ave r y i s a l mo s t famous, but he remains incarcerated and invisible, accessible only through his family or on the end of a phone.
Step forward the star of season two, Kathleen Zellner. Ms Zellner is a lawyer who specialises in getting cases overturned. She has a habit of winning unwinnable cases. Exonerations are her thing. And she looks like Kathleen Turner auditioning to play Vampira, with impossible teeth and an expression that falls naturally into a dismissive sneer.
Zellner, of course, understands the thing about narratives, and she is good at playing herself. There’s a lot of stuff to get through about blood spatter (and Netflix’s true-crime masterpiece, The Staircase, made blood-spatter analysts of us all). She introduces “brain fingerprinting”, which, it says here, is better than your everyday polygraph because it measures specific electrical impulses in the brain that occur when a lie is told. (They call this, with all due respect to Alan Partridge, “the aha of recognition”.)
The verdict? This woman is a natural. She’s a star. You want an expert on the burning of human cadavers inside a hillbilly’s barrel, she’ll get one. “I’m Elvis now,” Zellner confesses as she prepares to address the cameras outside the courthouse.