Murder Before Social Media

SPOILERS for Dear Zachary, a 2008 documentary, ahead.

The other night I watched Dear Zachary, which I’d heard was the greatest true-crime documentary of all time. Dear Zachary isn’t the greatest true-crime documentary of all time. The filmmaking is uncanny. It made me nervous.

Superficial reason first: It’s a very dark story embellished with goofy film tricks, like incongruous imports from MTV and Pop-Up Video.

But the people in it are weird too. As friends and family of two murder victims, they are extremely kind, loving, tearful people, very close to their emotions. But though they are white professionals, many of them from Silicon Valley, they talk and act as though they are entirely helpless over what happens in their lives. A farmhand in the Dust Bowl would have acted like he had more agency.

I loved these warm people, but I couldn’t figure out why they were so meek. Until it occurred to me that the film came out in 2008. It chronicles tragedies of the early aughts. So no one in the film has a smartphone or social media. We’re all media barons now, but the people in the film, deep in grief, are barons of nothing.