Chasing the Truth: Making a Murderer, Historical Narrativity and the Global Netflix Event

In 1996, Hayden White argued that modern media's “power” lay in their ability to render events “resistant” to narrativization (1996, 23), theorizing this on the cusp of proliferating digital technologies which would exponentially deepen and broaden instantly accessible information. This shift was already in progress when, in 2005, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos began documenting Steven Avery's and Brendan Dassey's trials for the murder of Teresa Halbach in rural Wisconsin. Yet, it would be another eight years before Netflix would release its first in-house productions, becoming a “dominant challenger” to “viewing practices” and “nationalised media systems” (Jenner, 2018, 3). This chapter understands Ricciardi's and Demos’ end product, “Part 1” of Netflix's docuseries Making a Murderer (2015–8), as an event which utilized the new media landscape to complicate an existing historical narrative, offering an oppositional point of view on a largely regional story shaped by hegemonic forces. It textually analyzes how the initial series, or “Part 1”, exploits Netflix's variant of the “quality TV” format, occupying multiple modes of address to widen transnational accessibility while inviting reflection on narrative manipulation, emphasizing the socio-political value of empathy, and imbuing its nearly decade-old events with a sense of changeability to encourage agency. This chapter then examines how the release of “Part 1” itself became a historical event that was “binge-watched” internationally over a brief period, inviting social media discussion and engagement with online resources and inspiring several participatory events and extratextual materials, including defense lawyers Dean Strang's and Jerry Buting's “A Conversation on Justice” tour, podcasts and memoirs. Although its textual multiplicity incited varied responses, it is argued here that, understood cumulatively as an event, Making a Murderer rendered its subject's history more global, amorphous and populist, reinforcing its thematic concerns with social inequality and flaws in the criminal justice system. Its new media event also encouraged active participation in confirming Strang's observation in “Part 1” that “human endeavors are muddy”, rendering vain “a chase for the truth”. This chapter concludes by considering the further questions on historical narrativity invited by its more self-reflexive follow-up, “Part 2”.