I mean, what the fuck?
They’re going on about Aaron’s entitlement and celebrity status and self-hate and his ambiguous sexuality as possible causes... Inside the Mind of a Killer but they interview strangers and estranged childhood firends. Teammates he wasn’t close to...
Why not lead with the fucking neurodegenerative disease??? And an interview with a psychiatrist? Or a neurologist? Why - because it would have lasted half an hour instead and there would be less talk generated. They could have made something educational about this. Three hours and what did they do with all that time?
The man’s brain had to have been melting away since he was a teenager. An interview with any single person that was actually close to him would have been able to point out all the changes.
This was a really shit documentary when you really think about it and it’s so disturbing I can’t stop thinking about it. Imbecilic and purposeless.
And the people at the end? The CTE is not to blame? I mean, fuck, do people not understand that a person’s brain controls their behaviour? People are talking about excuses. It’s rational cause and effect! How was he supposed to act while his brain shrivelled away? What do people think happens to you when you have a neurodegenerative disease? Do people think it’s like the Notebook? Where you spend time in a rocking chair listening to stories by a fire? Do people in real life have grandparents with Alzheimer’s who take it like champions, baking cookies?
Was he supposed to develop some kind of cool quirk, was he supposed to become kinder, mellow, gentle giant with super hugging powers like a Stephen King character?
You slowly lose all sense of yourself for years. Then you kill people. Then you kill yourself. Then they cut your brain open for evidence of where it all went wrong. Then they make a documentary about how gay other people thought you possibly could have been.
With the technology available today CTE is only diagnosed post-mortem so they couldn’t argue as to him being mentally incapacitated then, but how do you make a documentary years after the fact, knowing what you know, with universities full of neurologists, pathologists, neuropsychiatrists at hand and act like you’re dealing with some unknowable mystery? Netflix could have afforded to hire a doctor to sit down and inform people that brain damage is a real thing and that a person with brain damage behaves differently to an otherwise healthy person. Because apparenty that needed to be said?
I get that the NFL probably have their own sports psychologists under lock, keeping them from testifying or whatever, but they could have made a more educated attempt than, “Weed and secret gayness? And by the way, ground breaking, never before seen brain damage... We will never know what effect that had on him. He seemed fine.”
