Last week I decided to “binge-watch” the hit Netflix series Making a Murderer. I mean, I needed something to do with my time as I nursed the shattered femur I incurred from jumping off a bridge because everyone else did. Almost immediately upon launching my binge, I found myself fighting a bias I’ve carried around for years—an unfortunately condescending attitude that sometimes rears its ugly head when I read or view the work of female documentarians.
I trace the origin of my bias to the first time I read Doris Lessing. Lessing was a celebrated, Nobel Prize-winning British novelist who, in the mid-1980s, decided to travel to the Afghan/Pakistan border to write the defining firsthand account of the Soviet invasion. She was not an impartial observer, nor did she claim to be. The goal of her book, which she titled The Wind Blows Away Our Words, was to rally support for the mujahideen against the Russian invaders. In the book, Lessing, a fanatical communist–turned–Sufi mystic (in other words, a lifelong crackpot), wastes no time in letting readers know why this particular conflict is of such interest to her: She has a massive, sexual crush on Afghan men. Initially, her incessant fawning over the physical characteristics of the Afghans seems peculiar but tolerable, until it continues in the next chapter, and the next, and the next. Eventually most readers will want to scream, “Okay, we get it, you want to bone these guys. Now get to the fucking war!”
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It can be argued that Lessing’s refusal (or inability) to see the “freedom fighters” as anything more than sexual turn-ons is the kind of thing only a female documentarian could get away with. I doubt that a male correspondent, no matter how accomplished, could conduct an interview with someone like Malala Yousafzai in which every observation is bookended by comments about her breasts and buttocks, and still find a major publisher.
Lessing’s book, which I read when I was 18, instilled in me the aforementioned bias, which surfaces whenever I think a female documentarian might be, shall we say, “infatuated” with her subject. And for better or worse, that’s the feeling I got from Making a Murderer filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos.
In episode 1, the first thing that hit me was the manner in which they allowed baby-faced “bad boy” murderer Steven Avery’s youthful cat torture-killing to be dismissed as a mere prank gone wrong. Frankly (and again, this is my bias talking), Ricciardi and Demos’ excuse-making reminds me of the battered wife who so badly wants to deny the reality of her hubby’s true nature that she manages to convince herself that she actually did walk into a door to get that black eye.
That Ricciardi and Demos are in denial is made blatantly obvious by this interview with The Wrap. When asked about all the incriminating evidence they left out of the film, Ricciardi answered, “Without getting into trying to refute specific pieces of evidence, I would say that our role here was as documentarians. We were not advocates.” That’s an outright lie. Of course she and Demos are advocates, and if they want to argue that advocacy journalism isn’t always a bad thing, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But to claim that they are not advocates is a bald-faced lie. Hell, “advocates” is actually a compliment compared with shills, and I think a case can be made for the latter term.
