“Poor people lose”: “Making a Murderer,” reality television and our shared mythology of a classless

[Douglas Carpenter]

society: "Making a Murderer" is a police procedural. It’s also that rare thing in American film: A story about class

by Jennifer Haigh


(Credit: Netflix/Screen composite by Salon)

Over the New Year’s weekend, I binge-watched Netflix’s 10-part documentary series “Making a Murderer,” which follows the remarkable case of Steven Avery – a man wrongfully convicted of rape and released after 18 years, only to be rearrested and convicted of murder. The filmmakers, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, spent untold hours at home with the Avery clan, who live in a kind of family compound on their scrapyard in rural Wisconsin.

I see a lot of documentaries, but I’ve never seen one about people like the Averys. Watching, I was struck by how rarely a mainstream American film shows how poor people actually live. We see Steven’s mother frying hamburgers, talking on the phone, watching local news coverage of Steven’s trial while making soup. What makes these scenes interesting, even revelatory, is where they occur. Steven’s trailer, his parents’ modest house, look nothing like the set of a family sitcom or its contemporary equivalent, the “reality” show. If you spent your life watching television, you might reasonably conclude that all Americans live like Kardashians or “real” housewives. For poor rural folk, nothing could be less real.

The Avery story is unusual in that it isolates the variable of class from the powerful, and related, question of race. “Making a Murderer” takes place in rural Wisconsin; like the police, the prosecutors and the victim, the Avery family is white. If the Averys were black, their story would become part of the current conversation – long overdue – about racial inequities in policing, the criminalizing of blackness. We’d have a language to explain why police were so convinced of Avery’s guilt, or why his girlfriend was harassed by law enforcement, or how his learning-disabled nephew was interrogated for hours without legal counsel. Micro-aggression, targeting, the culture of incarceration: because the Averys are white, none of these terms seems to apply. The closest we ever get to an accurate assessment of the forces at work comes from Avery himself in the third episode: “Poor people lose,” he states simply when confronted with the new charges against him. It’s hard to disagree. Yet the fact that we lack any larger language for talking about class cuts to some basic truths about Americanness.

American society is classless, a pure meritocracy: this is part of our shared mythology. My parents believed it. Raised poor, they joined the military, went to college on the G.I. Bill and became schoolteachers. They believed they’d made it, and in a real way, they had. They worked and saved, built a house, sent two kids to college – the sort of incremental mobility that was possible for poor white people (and, thanks to discriminatory lending practices, largely off limits to poor blacks).

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[BeyondGeography]

1. I've only seen Episode 3 so far

My daughter got me to watch. Brendan Dassey's "confession" was truly sad to watch. I know he has lawyers working for a retrial. Reminded me of the Central Park jogger case.

[Chakab]

3. Episodes 4-6 made me viscerally angry. That idiot who represented Brendan Dassey

should be disbarred.

On topic:

The Averys aren't black, but they were viewed with contempt and considered trash by most of the people in their community. This story is a perfect illustration of how people are treated when nobody in the "justice" system is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[Doctor_J]

2. I just started today

Ms haigh is correct. It is very raw and unsettling how poor people are basically defenseless.

[Mr Dixon]

4. agreed

i watched the whole thing but this is nothing new, very sad but the poor have been getting railroaded for decades.

[valerief]

5. I just binge-watched this, and I agree with you. If you're shocked by anything in this

series, you're not paying attention.

This was a sorry excuse for justice from start to finish. A well-done series.