camera as freedom (all-seeing eye/I), the car as independence, the accused is carrion feeding our justice system

updated in italics 4 March 2018

camera as vehicle of liberation, car as independence-junk automobile as corpse, legal process as crime in progress, and the accused are the carrion legal powers prey upon

Making of a Murder on Netflix

This Netflix series is a powerful dissection and exhumation of how corrupt "bodies" (entities, systems, regulations, surveillance, documentation, individuals, beliefs, values, and institutions) contaminate personal integrity and invade purpose while it examines the investigation and trial of two men tied to a terrifying crime. The filmmakers spent over ten years gathering evidence, footage, and tape to gather and weave interviews, document, images, and fragments of a tattered murder case that sent men to prison for life.

I am writing to reflect upon and sort through nuances in the puzzles within the chronology, a sinister treasure hunt that leads to terrifying truths about our human condition and identity.

I want to unearth for myself some sense of what is being said within the coded visuals and legal process. We must read into the narrative to find out what is really there.

There are many visual metaphors within the film that become links to what may otherwise be discarded as unusable evidence, a flawed series of events, etc. These clues (may) bring us closer to underlying motives, concealed back stories, or sheltered information that, thanks to the filmmakers, becomes the lasting voice to eclipse possible cover ups, memory lapses, shielding of individuals, self-defense and justifications of the indefensible, etc. The chase for the filmmakers is a different experience for me, a distant viewer voyeur, the filmmakers, the attorneys, police, neighbors, fellow citizens, reporters, news outlets, historians, etc.)

The camera is a stealth, all-seeing eye (I) and vehicle of liberation. The car is the symbol of American independence, a way to move, travel, and overcome limits we or other place in our midst.
..... way to get away, get out, explore, discover....and run into a "flat", engine overheat, or a deadly crash. The car symbolizes all those things here. 

Our criminal justice practices systematically prey upon the accused, the carrion of crime that feeds the system. Its vulture tactics are ravenous, insatiable, unrelenting and destroy human lives and dignity. There is no escape; that incriminating evidence is the trap that has no exit, and becomes the undetermined hell some might endure until death. The film shows us that like an old vehicle we are ready to dump, law can and will take possession of, disassemble, crush, and dispose of lives. The law and its agency can destroy anything that contradicts the image they present in a case, or that interferes with their narrative, cast of suspects, and circumstantial details. 

The location of the events hovers between the over forty-acre property of the Averys in Wisconsin, the homes, the salvage yard and buildings there, and the court houses, jails, legal offices, and streets of the Midwestern towns involved. The haunting image of the auto graveyard is a lasting, and points directly at the Avery’s lives, crushed by the system, the powers that be, the lies and deception, and twisting of truths to conveniently disable, disempower, separate them from society. Fenced in, walled up, and invisible. The press and media can revive images they gathered and make, replay them for consumption, but will that help the case move in any direction, and where?

The family members are marginalized, their movements diminished and halted; they have become completely impaired, ineffective, isolated, and unable to move. Decisions have been made for them, and land two of the family’s members Steven and Brendan in jail with life terms. Their lives are a waiting game, dictated by capricious moves in cat and mouse moves.

Their daily living and security been destroyed, seized, altered beyond repair. These men have been rendered permanently defective, dangerous, and illegal. They are immobilized, stopped by the side of the road, railroaded, branded, and membership as citizens cancelled with the stamp of criminal. Whether there is veracity in the Prosecution or Defense's determinations and cancellation of their identities is what needs further probing. Red tape will complicate and hinder movement. The pace of these matters drags. The film asks us to bear with the process, endure the wait, and become informed.

This story is reminiscent of Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. The prison system and building with its pantoptic structures segregate and watch inmates who cannot be seen or see outside; they become numbered bodies, contained, fed and stored far from their communities. By eliminating them from the stream of life, the criminal ruling and dictates of the law reduces them to a line up, series of numbers, codes, a mug shot, penned up and hidden away as filed documents. The stories of their lives become a folder of papers and forms, the fragments of which paint a distorted picture, and include a blurred life.

Like the abandoned cars in the Avery junkyard, these men have been removed from their surroundings and purpose. The accused are alienated from their families, loved ones, community, and work, lost their ability to function like “normal” people. They are punished, demeaned, torn apart by the legal process, cut open by the court and its investigators, and put on public display. Even the attorneys say once you have been accused, whether innocent or guilty, it alters your life forever. Perhaps, you will never get your life back, and certainly, you will never have your life as you knew it.

The film opens our eyes to the contamination of justice, truth, and civil, legal, human rights. The men the film focuses on have been dumped and trashed by a system that refuses to cooperate, manipulates the truth, and scapegoated these men to make an example of them and judge them.

I am reminded of Kesey’s Cuckoos Nest, a horrifying story of how we criminalize people, demonize and torture them so they have no recourse, there is no way out, and they have no defense. In Kesey's story, medical staff and doctors attack their bodies and minds, claiming that they must be subdued. They are zombified so they cannot think or act upon impulses or urges, drugged regularly to control their bodies and diminish those instincts. 

In Kesey’s novel, the patients are imprisoned, medicated, dumbed and numbed into an irrevocable stupor, and have no say about what happens to them. They cannot fight back, escape, or get help. The milky white fog is the haze they live in, the atmosphere they have to survive in as inmates, prisoners of their minds and the State who incarcerates them. They are forgotten, disposed of, determined degenerates, feeble-minded, insane and deranged, capable of hurting themselves and others. They are subdued, stupefied, and subjugated, render alien even to themselves.

Human beings are the cruelest most calculated creatures on earth. Though we have the capacity for compassion and generosity of spirit, when our soul is unwell, damaged, or weak, we are capable of great inhumanity.

The most foreboding, implicating images repeated throughout the series are the rows of vehicles from above and seeming maze navigated in a golf cart. This automobile cemetery is both the site of the criminal investigation and represents the livelihood of the family, a paradox of cycles of life and death. Those chassis lined up, dented, rusted, and inoperable, simply take up space and wait to be further picked apart. They are only valued for their parts, the parts that could be repurposed, and then they are ready to be further pressed and flattened to become scrap metal, salable at a fragment of their original value, use and worth.
The two men, like the vehicle-carcasses, await their turn to be pecked at by the vultures of the law, who eat carrion, feed upon corpses, tearing at flesh indiscriminately, licking bones clean, leaving nothing.

The American dream has always been linked to travel, mobility, the endless possibilities for gain, especially economical and social. The automobile allowed men to thrive beyond the covered wagon, the gold rush, the steam engine and railroad tracks that shortened the distance between coasts. The car is the pride and joy of every American and represents that liberty, that ability to roam, discover, conquer, and own property.

Our pride is not soley national, but that personal dignity we seem to find in our work, careers, roles in the professional world. We identify ourselves with how much money we make. America values productivity as upstanding and working citizens in service of the nation, its identity, pride, and wealth (power). Since the fifties, the money we make working provides us with the wealth to get the best car, the fastest car, the car that gives us independence, the independence this country was built upon, or so we thought. The car is automatic freedom, speedy access to everything we desire. The vehicles we drive get us ahead, get us places, take us where we never dreamed of going.

The auto graveyard becomes the very opposite image of that. The disemboweled cars in piles emphasize throughout the episodes that once the car has experienced an accident, a wreck, and damage, it is no longer legal; it is no longer visibly the representation of a shiny faced American citizen with good standing in the community, and its dents, scratches, and blemishes point to its inadequacies, its flaws, its potential to go off the road again. A car that exceeds service is considered and labeled irreparable. Its unpredictable functioning makes it unsafe. The only option is to take it off the road to protect other drivers, place the vehicle as is in the salvage yard where it sits, its parts extracted and the rest scrapped. Its fragments have little value, can only be reassembled, and will never be considered whole again.

Other images of decay, disrepair, and confusion show up in the images of the trailer, the garage, the property as a whole. The forensic and documentary views purport a clean, cold view of things that has no emotional attachment or narrative. The filmmakers are brilliant in their ability to remain detached, and it is in the gathering of the conversations, images, and events that there is a stream of objective information. The film is far from cold or detached, and clearly the filmmakers have spent time getting to know the community. One can always say that in anything of this sort, the editing is not objective, and this is where people can begin to argue that the film will drive the views or understanding in a certain direction.

The camera is a vehicle of freedom, a voice, and has been in the past, a way for people to disseminate information through images and words. There are propaganda films, and there are skewed tellings of history. We know this from the beginnings of time. A friend always says, the winner writes the history. Why, because some aspects of a story get buried, conveniently lost or hidden, erased or camouflaged. History is written and rewritten. Innocent people will always suffer at the hands of a power that destroys from a corrupted heart and mind. Truth, for the most part, does emerge in time. Sometimes truth doesn’t surface soon enough to save the innocent or prevent inhumane acts. As human beings, we are all responsible to do our part, even at the smallest level.

Our reliance on the camera since its inception as a vehicle of truth, as a means to record and evidence some fact, some semblance, some appearance to get at something deeper is dearly held conviction. Perhaps that is what is at the core of films like Murder. Whether fictional or real, crime stories of any sort or scale have a sinister, morbid quality not because the facts lurk in the shadows of truth, but because the truth is only partially disclosed and poke at our own levels of honesty and compassion. How do we judge and incriminate others in favor of saving ourselves, or making way for our own safe passage, pleasure, and freedoms.