Review

Aaron Hernandez doccie asks more questions than it answers

'Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez' attempts to uncover who or what is responsible for turning the high-performance athlete into a murderer

26 January 2020 - 00:00 By and tymon smith
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'Killer Inside' delves into the mind of Aaron Hernandez, a man on his way to sports immortality, but whose career ended tragically.
'Killer Inside' delves into the mind of Aaron Hernandez, a man on his way to sports immortality, but whose career ended tragically.
Image: Supplied

In 2013, the American media machine was focussed on the story of a 23-year-old Hispanic man accused of murdering the fiancé of his girlfriend's sister. Every news channel in the US had reporters in New England crowding the lawn of his mansion, door stopping his family members, calling on the expertise of lawyers and pundits, trying to figure out why he'd done what he was alleged to have done.

That's because the man in question — Aaron Hernandez — was no ordinary American. He was an American god, a tight-end for the New England Patriots football team who'd recently had his contract renewed to the staggering tune of $40m (about R578m) and was regarded as one of the most talented and promising players in the sport's history.

Patriots fans came out in droves to protest his innocence. The judge was forced to ban anyone from wearing signs of team support in the courtroom and the spectre of another fallen football idol, OJ Simpson, hung over the proceedings and the consciousness of the nation.

When, during the case, it emerged that Hernandez was also wanted in connection with the murder of two young men in a Boston drive-by shooting in 2012, the story took another dark twist.

None of it made any sense. Why would an athlete with golden feet, all the money he could want and a career that was set to catapult him into immortality throw it all away for no discernible reason other than what seemed to be a dangerously unchecked short temper? These were the questions they had asked over a decade earlier when OJ Simpson was tried and acquitted for the murder of his ex-wife and her lover. They were the same questions we South Africans asked during the trial of Oscar Pistorius.

Although Hernandez was found guilty of killing his former friend, Odin Floyd, and sentenced to jail, he was acquitted of the double murder while serving time in 2017.

SECRETS AND DARK DESIRES

Geno McDermott's three-part docuseries, Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, makes extensive use of archive footage and phone calls to family and friends made by Hernandez while in prison. He also uses interviews with friends and journalists who covered the trial to try and decipher what secrets, dark desires or traumas led to the athlete's spectacular fall from grace.

It's an approach that sometimes leaves viewers scattered but the technique succeeds overall in, if not answering them, at least posing provocative and important questions about its subject's motivations and the broader problems of the deification of football players in US society. The oppressive social and psychological consequences of the sport make extraordinary demands on players and foster an ultra-macho culture.

Hernandez was a repressed homosexual raised by a football-playing, ambitious father. The series argues that this was a significant factor in creating the dark double world in which Hernandez was forced to operate for fear of disappointing his father and of being ostracised by the testosterone-fuelled, Christian values of the football establishment. His secret and the torment that keeping it inured in him led to him acting out in unpredictable and increasingly violent ways.

WATCH | '‪Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez' trailer.

The film also explores what happens to young men who spend a large part of their youth smashing their bodies and heads into the brick-shithouse-built-bodies of other young men for the entertainment of blood-baying fans. These days, the damaging consequences of the physical demands of football and the recognition of the long-term effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) are more well publicised than they once were. The series posits the condition as a possible influence on Hernandez's violent private behaviour.

Yet, Killer Inside ultimately asks more questions than it answers.

Why Hernandez did what he did will always be a mystery. He never really explained himself. What's certain, though, is that the uber-male culture of football and professional sports needs to be properly reconsidered to ensure it doesn't produce another OJ Simpson, another Oscar Pistorius or another Aaron Hernandez.

• 'Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez' is available on Netflix.


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