![]() Each theory makes a little sense, but the series flies past them so quickly you don’t have time to think about their deeper significance. ![]() It can’t decide whether Hernandez’s father was too abusive or too distant, and then it decides the real problem was that his father died too young. He becomes an elusive figure whose motivations the filmmakers can’t quite crack.īecause of that, The Killer Inside veers very much toward the irresponsible. So the documentary simply speculates about Hernandez’s state of mind. Hernandez essentially left a series of signs that said, “HERE IS A CLUE, MAKE SURE TO PICK IT UP” and “HERE IS ANOTHER ONE, DON’T MISS THIS ONE EITHER” at all his crime scenes. (And his fiancée did that.) There is no real mystery here. He showed up in surveillance footage right before his crimes, and he didn’t do anything right as a criminal mastermind other than get rid of the murder weapon. After all, Hernandez was a notoriously terrible criminal: He committed crimes impulsively and sloppily, he left circumstantial evidence everywhere. Part of the problem is that this isn’t really a traditional true-crime story. But why should that stop us from taking a few stabs at it? The Killer Inside feels like a title in search of a story. Why did Aaron Hernandez, an All-Pro NFL tight end with seemingly everything going for him, kill his friend Odin Lloyd and (maybe) two random clubgoers in Boston? He had a bad dad! His dad died too young! His mother was aloof! He had an unhealthy relationship with his cousin! He had CTE! He was lonely! He smoked too much weed! He was gay! The series doesn’t know any better than you do, and it certainly doesn’t know any better than the stacks of terrific reporting on the story that already exist. It feels less like a definitive theory of the case than a series of postulates and speculations thrown at the viewer in a rush, leading to a sense that it’s a bunch of gossipy rubberneckers lobbing guesses at each other. One of the stranger things about Netflix’s documentary series The Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez is that it is so obsessed with that question of why that it forgets to focus on the victims at all. Movies like the controversial Sundance documentary On the Record have tried to reverse this instinct, to put the focus on the victims rather than the perpetrators, but human nature is human nature. ![]() It’s the eternal battle for any fan of true crime: What is our motivation for being attracted to the genre in the first place? We want to think of the victims and their families first, and we are horrified by the crimes committed against them, but in many ways, it is human nature to spend more mental and emotional energy trying to figure out the madmen behind the crimes. ![]()
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