MEDIA & CULTURE
RATIONALIZING MURDER: Aaron Hernandez Docuseries Shifts Focus from Victims WRITTEN BY CAMERON GLYNN // ILLUSTRATIONS BY JESSE FUTERMAN // PHOTOGRAPHED BY JUSTINE NEWMAN Netflix’s newest hit, “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez,” brings up a tough question: Are we capable of pitying a murderer and rationalizing his behaviors? The docuseries hypothesizes the reasons as to why the former New England Patriots player murdered innocent men in the Boston area. With so much focus on Hernandez’s psyche, there is a noticeable neglect for the victims and the court cases as a whole. Nevertheless, the documentary tries to take a stab at a myriad of societal issues such as childhood abuse, traumatic brain injuries, sexual repression, and more. Viewers are left questioning Hernandez’s internal motives even more so than before they started watching. The events in Hernandez’s life are outlined as the perfect storm in order to create the psyche of a murderer, yet this approach shifts guilt off of Hernandez at the expense of the victims and their families. Despite the negative messages perpetuated in the documentary, there are a few positive aspects worth mentioning. The documentarians were effective in using football to juxtapose Hernandez’s flashy NFL lifestyle with the semi-professional football life of one of the victims, Odin Lloyd. One of Lloyd’s teammates, Mike Massey, gave wholesome insight into Lloyd’s life and spoke about how football to them was a sense of family as well as something that kept them away from drugs. Following Lloyd’s death, his team had a commemorative game in his honor. This scene was touching as it brought together Lloyd’s family of
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Cape Verde immigrants and all of the hardworking teammates. The viewer’s heart goes out to the victim’s loved ones, seeing so much heart and so little resources. This is shown amongst television clips of Aaron Hernandez playing in the NFL, which are portrayed as cold, impersonal, and in a money-making lens. Massey emphasizes that in semi-professional, they pay to play, but they are richer than Hernandez because there is so much love. Another important message that the documentary showcased was raising awareness to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), which is a brain disease resulting from repeated head injuries. Viewers are reminded that the NFL is a profitable business that does not necessarily care about the long-term health of their employees, because in reality players are just expendable assets. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, is shown telling mothers to put their sons into football as soon as possible. A former NFL player discusses that he quit his career for brain health reasons, which puts the NFL business in jeopardy. This was a great topic to shed light on. However, the documentary takes it one step too far in the connections they make between CTE and Aaron Hernandez’s violent actions. The documentary makes inferences that Aaron Hernandez’s CTE could have played a part in his homicides. It is disrespectful to the victims and their families to start making excuses and rationalizing why a man committed murder. Thousands of athletes
