It’s not a mystery that a sharp-eyed viewer is likely to solve. The clues in Murder on Middle Beach are sparse. Murder on Middle Beach struggles to offer a clear answer to this stone cold whodunnit but Madison’s method makes for compulsive watching. The series is made up primarily of interviews, old videos of family events, and seven years of footage of Madison doing the hard work of investigating: recording phone calls, taking meetings, looking through court filings. Where The Thin Blue Line established cool stylization as the gold standard for True Crime, Murder on Middle Beach embraces a more DIY aesthetic. In telling her story and his, Madison relies on function over style. Barbara’s life story was meant to fulfill the American promise of continued upward mobility, instead of the American reality of cyclical exploitation. One can’t help feel for Barbara, and the 6.2 million women today who, cut off from real opportunity, still get swept up in multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes that hawk essential oils in a parody of entrepreneurship. But Platt is really defending the existence of tables, which she maintains provided for her family during those lean years. Jill Platt, who ultimately spent 30 months in prison for her role running the tables, hints that Barbara’s decision to invite these women led to her death. It’s an open question as to whether the money, or a reckless sense of community and purpose pushed Barbara to start recruiting from her Alcoholics Anonymous group, where she had become a mentor and leader. Having all found the basic premise of their lives derailed, Barbara, her sister Conway, and sister-in-law Jill Platt turned to running tables to makes ends meet. The premise of the tables was simple, even if their execution was arcane: a one-time gift of $5,000 to the woman at the top of a four-tier pyramid would be returned as a $40,000 payout once the initial gifter had recruited 14 other women beneath her. One of the most intriguing dead ends Madison explores, the Gifting Tables emerged in the wreckage of the post-2008 American economy that exploded across the Connecticut coast. By the time Madison resumed working on Murder on Middle Beach in 2016 - it began life as a student film three years prior - one aunt is living in a trailer, another is dead from cancer, and a third is fresh out of jail for her role in the Gifting Tables, a homegrown all-woman Ponzi scheme. Madison’s teenage struggles with drugs and alcohol nearly derailed him, and even a half-awake viewer can’t avoid comparing Madison’s obsessive quest to the family pattern of addiction. Whatever fortune afforded Madison’s childhood a palatial McMansion, trips to Hawaii, and field passes to NFL games evaporated. Amidst an acrimonious divorce, Barbara’s drinking blossomed into full blown alcoholism - the enduring Beach family inheritance. Then Jeffery lost his CEO job amid swirling rumors of embezzlement, and much of the WASP-y Beach family’s wealth that he was investing vanished. Her warmth emanates from low resolution VHS tapes and, as she plays with her babies, she is cloaked in the questionable fashion and joie de vivre of the early 2000s. She married the successful, charming Jeffrey Hamburg (Madison’s father) and had two beautiful children. In the prominently featured home videos, we watch Barbara, called Barbie by her family, growing up in a sprawling colonial with five siblings - carousing under oil paintings of patrician ancestors. Just below its humdrum True Crime veneer, Murder on Middle Beach seethes with a palpable sense of American decay. But what Madison has created proves, in its own quiet way, to be a subversive reinvestigation of True Crime’s basic principles. As Madison digs into the clues surrounding his mother’s death, he is led again and again back to his own family: his businessman father, a down and out aunt, an unstable sister who left America and the family behind. That the filmmaker, Madison Hamburg, is Barbara’s son could just be a gimmick - an appeal to our growing demand for entertainment that dissolves the wall between subject and creator. The genre is overfilled with rapes, abductions, and ritual killings that make the violent homicide at the heart of HBO’s four-part Murder on Middle Beach feel quaint by comparison. In the canon of True Crime documentaries, Barbara’s death is unexceptional. At first, they thought they’d found a dead animal. When her sister, Conway Beach, and teenage daughter, Ali Hamburg, found her body hidden under a pile of cushions they couldn’t comprehend the tangle of blood and hair. She suffered over a dozen puncture wounds. Evidence of a struggle was strewn across the lawn. Here are the facts: on March 3rd, 2010, Barbara Beach Hamburg was beaten to death in front of her modest house in Madison, Connecticut. Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women.
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