Making a Murderer is an incisive portrait of American social class.

 

"Nowhere is this class conflict more raw than in the final episode, when a private investigator—Michael O’Kelly, working for Brendan Dassey’s soon-to-be-fired lawyer, but collaborating with the prosecution—describes the Avery family in an email sent to Dassey’s own lawyer: “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.’”

It’s a moment of astonishing cruelty, coming in Dassey’s presence, and following episode after episode emphasizing the teen’s borderline intellectual disability, often in hearings in front of Dassey. But the damning email is the culmination of a theme that begins developing in the first episode: the contempt Manitowoc County’s burgher class has for the marginal Averys, and how that bleeds into the legal system, coming to define the scope of Steven Avery’s life. “They didn’t dress like everybody else; they didn’t have education like other people,” his lawyer in the 1985 rape case, Reesa Evans, tells the filmmakers. “I don’t think it ever crossed their mind that they should try to fit into the community.”

read  the article by Whet Moser>>

Making a Murderer is an incisive portrait of American social class.: