Sympathy In Steven Avery's Making A Murderer

He says, “I am really stupid” (Ep.4) twice in this conversation, capitalizing on his mother’s feelings of hopelessness and his inability to understand the complete situation. For the viewer to offer sympathy, just like the case with Steven Avery, he or she needs to examine his personality in conjunction with the accusations. Just like Avery, Brendan is portrayed as incapable of critical thinking and is similar child that has to be interrogated by the contrastingly intelligent police. Although some viewers may see Dassey’s impressionable quality and conclude that Avery could have easily coerced him to carry out his supposed crime. However, because of Dassey’s lack of understanding and complete lack of involvement, he is easily manipulated to …show more content…
When Steven is on his second trial, he has multiple conversations with his family that deal with their mutual uncertainty and disdain for the case. During the call, the audience is shown images of the snow covered junkyard and Avery’s mother, Doris, alone at home. This shifts the focus of the viewer to Avery’s family and shows the struggle that they have sustaining for the entire process. As Doris sits alone at a small table gazing forward with her hand on her lips, her uncertainty and fear is manifested in her posture. When the audience sees an old women, around seventy or eighty years old alone in a house, there is a feeling of unease. Because the focus has been primarily focused on Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey throughout the documentary, the shift in the episode comes across as surprising. It seems that the show had been only showing the opinions of the family members as opposed to their everyday lives. The audience sympathizes with the helpless women as she can only wait to hear the verdict and worry for her son’s fate. There is a sense of sadness the camera focuses on the unaccompanied Doris as the viewer could only imagine hardship she must be facing. As Avery had said, “Why have my family go through all of this, and everything else?”(Ep.8). Without having someone like Steven around to take care of her in this setting, she appears helpless …show more content…
Although the show had been focusing on the flaws in Avery’s case and the overseeing justice system, Avery and Dassey’s phone calls have given a more in depth portrayal of their personalities that contradict with the opinions of many news reports and the Manitowoc police department. Instead of being the cold-blooded, uneducated monsters, they are aloof and simple men who have their families and their flaws. Although the media and those who are of a higher class in Manitowoc county may regard them as the former, Making a Murderer has given personalities and background into these demonized men and their families that garner sympathy from the viewers that may be more similar to prosecutors than the