I have occasionally made comments on this blog that America has become a sick nation in its ravenous appetite for true crime. It is obvious, from some of my posts, however, that I suffer from the same sickness. I suppose this is due to the fact that nothing excites me more than to see Netflix dropping another of its three-part docuseries which, almost always, are well made, enlightening, and (oddly enough) fun to watch—you know, in the sick way.
The streaming platform has been dumping them left and right recently, from an overview of the Menendez case which counteracts the events portrayed in Ryan Murphy’s atrocious miniseries to two of its most recent and best—Phil Lott and Ari Mark’s This is the Zodiac Speaking and Joe Berlinger’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey.
Both share the hallmarks of a well-made docuseries—new information from today’s hindsight, never before seen (and never before considered) photographic evidence, and hope that the cold cases discussed might come to a close in the near future.
This is the Zodiac Speaking **** out of ****
The Zodiac killer, like Jack the Ripper, has come to be an example of a case in which most people have simply thrown up their hands with the realization that it may never see a light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, this series focuses almost exclusively on a well-known suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, and the people who knew him.
With laser sharp focus, Lott and Mark make their case, through dozens of talking head interviews, with journalists, criminalists, and a family known as the Seawaters who were acquainted with Allen and were also victims of the once prisoned (and now deceased) pedophile with violent tendencies. You leave the series dizzy with hope that old samples of DNA may finally nail Allen, even if it’s from beyond the grave.
In this way, it shares a lot of similarities with HBO Max’s adaptation of the late Michelle McNamara’s unfinished tome, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, in which an amateur sleuth (the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt) gave a name and set the stage for the arrest of the Golden State Killer. We are familiar with films, like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, in which the documentarian penetrates the truth in a way the courts cannot and changes the course of criminal history. One waits for the fallout of This Is the Zodiac Speaking.
Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey ***½ out of ****
One filmmaker whose works have led to such exonerations is Joe Berlinger, the co-director of the Paradise Lost documentaries. He is to Netflix what Alex Gibney is to HBO. While his films are rarely as intelligent or penetrative as Gibney’s, they are visually arresting (even with the camera glued to nothing more than an audio cassette spooling forward) and do what great documentaries do—ask better questions, rather than giving concrete answers.
The cases of the 1990s have exploded in recent years. Suddenly, Menendez, Simpson, Ramsey, and other cases with dubious outcomes, have been investigated more thoroughly. Again, with hindsight—away from the flickering lights of the hype—you have time to go deeper than ever in these cases and come out seeing things which were impossible to notice at the time.
The greatest revelations of Cold Case involve the systematic way the Colorado police fed journalists the fodder to support their own conclusion—that John and Patsy Ramsey were the killers. A famous South Park episode even included them with Simpson and Gary Condit, portraying them as liars who knew what happened and withheld information. Berlinger’s docuseries refutes their assumed guilt with an almost scientific method of dissecting what was going on behind the scenes.
Ramsey’s case, with her youth alone, will always be one that touches hearts and the damnation with which Berlinger rains down on the police is exquisitely rendered. The series perhaps doesn’t give us the light at the end of the tunnel Zodiac provides, but it most certainly exonerates the parents, one of which (by the grace of God), no longer must live defending herself.
*****
I’m not sure what draws normal audiences to these dissections of extreme violence. I don’t know what draws me except to say, in these days of uncertainty, I turn more and more to non-fiction, to truth telling. I would much rather see another three-part doc than a lazy fictional movie of which we are about to have an avalanche in time for Christmas. Filmmakers such as these go after the truth. My hat remains forever off to them.
This is the Zodiac Speaking
Netflix, 2024
Directed by Phil Lott and Ari Mark
Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey
Netflix, 2024
Directed by Joe Berlinger
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