True-crime stories have always been hot, but the past few years have seen a flare-up in interest over sordid accounts of real-life scandal. The Netflix series Making A Murderer is the documentary currently captivating the nation’s attention, enraging viewers with the mind-boggling wrongs perpetrated on Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey by the collected forces of the Manitowoc County legal system. Before that, Sarah Koenig’s soothing voice brought listeners through the spotty trial of Adnan Syed in the Serial podcast, and filmmaker Andrew Jarecki stumbled into a confession from serial murderer Robert Durst on HBO’s The Jinx. America, land of the free and home of the brave, simply can’t get enough gross miscarriages of justice.
Documentarian Errol Morris was ahead of this particular wave, having crafted the genre’s high-water mark all the way back in 1988. The Thin Blue Line championed the cause of Randall Dale Adams, an Ohio man wrongly convicted of murdering Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. Morris’ documentary exposed the sketchier aspects of the trial and the overall case with his scrupulous, hard-hitting film and ultimately freed Adams, effectively saving the man’s life. What Morris has to say about this recent spike in true-crime stories should be of great interest, as the filmmaker has remained a vital voice in American documentary cinema and has a special familiarity with this subject material. How felicitous, then, that Slate would run a fascinating interview with Morris, whose upcoming projects include his own true-crime series with Netflix, this morning expounding on that very topic. Morris gave his two cents to interviewer Isaac Butler on humanity’s continued morbid obsession with true-crime narratives:
However you want to describe it: the whodunit; the mystery of what really happened; the mystery of personality; of who people really, really are is powerfully represented when you have a crime standing in back of all of it. It’s a way of dramatizing really significant issues: How we know what we know? How have we come to the belief that we have? Is justice served by the various mechanisms in our society? Is the law just?
Not only did he provide insights on the universal underpinnings that make crime stories so potent, he spoke to the accusations of bias in Making A Murderer that may cast suspicion on the show’s conclusions:
The purpose of documentary—whether it’s true crime or anything else, for that matter—is not just to give us reality on a plate, but to make us think about what reality is. And I believe Making a Murderer really does powerfully engage us. It’s engaged millions of people. One thing that you do learn in an investigation is that we’re all prisoners of narrative, and we can’t escape from narrative; we need stories in order to figure out what the world is about. If the police come up with a story, they don’t look for any evidence that would suggest otherwise. And if you don’t look for evidence, you don’t find it, often. I found it extraordinarily powerful, and ironic, because there really is no investigation in Making a Murderer.
Objectivity is a fickle thing, and nearly impossible to achieve in something so personal as a movie. Morris knows what he’s talking about; any documentarian who tries to claim complete objectivity is probably the most suspicious of all. The best a nonfiction filmmaker can do is own that subjectivity, work with it, and use it to illuminate something larger and more significant.
