Like so many people I had no intention of watching the
incredibly controversial Dahmer, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series on one of
the most notorious monsters in human history. My reasoning had less to do with
the idea that it involved some kind of celebration of this notorious serial
killer. I realize that so much has been written and said about this horrible
excuse for a human being and really all serial killers, that decided to make a
limited series about him would have been just another nightmare, particularly
for the families of the victims.
In all candor, Dahmer was simply not the kind of
series I like to watch under any circumstances.
The true crime genre has never really appealed to me particularly in
limited series. I only choose to watch when it is like the series in question
will be eligible for awards consideration and even then, I tend to admire them
more than like them. I saw Black Bird
last year and it was more than I expected from it. The Patient, which
I devoured earlier this year, was a different kind of serial killer story so I
had little problem enjoying that one. But even as the show received multiple
award nominations and awards in the lead-up to the Emmys, even as it seemed
more likely to win Best Limited Series after The White Lotus was moved
to Best Drama, even as it became increasingly
likely that many of the performers were win, I resisted.
Indeed were it not for the strike in Hollywood delaying Emmys
and several outside factors – the most apparent being it is October and I felt
that it might be a decent tie to the horror genre I’m doing – did I decide to
watch it all. At this point I have made
my way through the first three episodes and am now prepared to at least making
a couple of evaluations.
Let’s be clear: no one who watches Dahmer is going to
enjoy it in any real sense of the word (part of me does question the viewer who
would get pleasure from it). This is the
kind of series that you admire from a technical standpoint, both from the skill
of the performers, writing and all the technical aspect rather than like. I can’t
imagine any sane person wanting to binge watch the entire series like they
would the most recent season of Stranger Things and Bridgeton; the
experience of any single episode is so grim and relentless that you are as much
relieved to get through as you are intrigued to see the next one. However, that
doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it. I think there’s a very real argument to
seeing this show, one which I will get to at the end of the review.
What I am fairly certain of is that Ryan Murphy was the
right person to write this limited series. Ever since Glee and certainly
throughout the work he has done on FX, Murphy is without doubt the best showrunner
on television when it comes into getting inside the heads and understanding the
outsider. Usually these people are among the LGBTQ+ community, in recent years
they have included African-Americans, sometimes a part of this same community,
sometimes not and every so often he will look at it through the perspective of crime.
Indeed, those people who are so repulsed by the idea of Dahmer as the subject
of a limited series would do well to remember that in the second installment of
his groundbreaking American Crime Story, Murphy explored the parallel
lives of both Gianni Versace and his killer Andrew Cunanan. What was very clear in both cases was how both
men were, by nature of their homosexuality, outsiders in the ‘real world’ and
how Cunanan was able to get away with a string of murders of homosexual lovers
over several months before he killed Versace due to police indifference and a
refusal to take the lives of gay men as worth investigating. I actually wonder if Murphy considered using
Dahmer’s life as a story for an FX series before this and was rejected because
of the far more graphic nature of Dahmer’s crimes; there is a clear parallel
between Dahmer’s murders and the ones that Cunanan committed. (Then again,
given the overall nature of so much of American Horror Story, maybe he
didn’t consider it until he had signed with Netflix.)
The major difference between Cunanan and Dahmer is that
Andrew Cunanan, as played by Darren Criss, was capable of hiding his psychosis
just well enough to pass for normal. It says a lot about Evan Peters’ work in
the title role that one of the biggest mysteries of Dahmer is how he
managed to exist in our society as long as he did. Peters has been part of Murphy’s stable of
regulars for awhile and I am very familiar with how good a performer he is in
previous series (he deserved the Emmy he got for Mare of Easttown). But
there’s something very effective in his work as Dahmer. Anyone who thinks this series will do
anything to humanize Jeffrey Dahmer clearly hasn’t seen it: in the three
episode I’ve watched so far, there is not a single moment Peters is onscreen
when he resembles a normal human being. There isn’t a single line of dialogue
that he utters that sounds natural; he reminds me of an android who keeps
trying to come up with the definition of personal interactions and fails on
every single attempt. And that’s clear every
time Dahmer is in the scene with anyone else. No one is comfortable being
around him for an extended period of time even before he becomes a serial
killer. You can see everybody shrinking away from him every time he’s in a scene
with anyone. The only person who makes an effort is his father (Richard Jenkins)
and so much of the time you can see that it’s something of an obligation.
That said, one of the most frightening scenes in the three
episodes I’ve seen so far is after his parent’s divorce. His father has disappeared
and his mother (who is suffering from post-partum depression) takes his younger
brother and drives away screaming at him. Dahmer is left by himself for several
months and it’s clear that even in solitude he can’t figure out what to do with
himself. He gets drunk, he pumps weights, he puts worms into a bucket. Every
time he tries to laugh, it’s unsettling. He can’t be alone and he can’t be with
anyone. Even if this episode had aired first in the running order (it takes place
well before much of the action in the first two episodes) we still wouldn’t
feel sympathy for him because Peters makes it very clear how broken he is in
these scenes.
The only time he shows anything resembling human interaction
is when he’s been driving around and he picks up a young man who wants to go to
a concert. Dahmer has been on his own for months and he clearly is lonely so he
says he’ll drive him but asks him to come back to his first play to have some
beers. The hitchhiker comes back with him and Jeff is pathetically eager for
company. He tries to make a pass at him and is strongly rejected. His attempt
to recover is equally pathetic. Out of rage he hits him with one of the weights,
spends several moments trying to make out with the victim and then realizes he’s
dead.
During the next several minutes he is frantically trying to
figure out what to do. He cuts up the body and puts the remains into plastic
bags. Clearly drunk, he is pulled over by the cops with the bags in the back
seat. His explanations are pathetic but the cop decides that he isn’t going to ‘ruin
a kid’s life before he turns eighteen.” He lets Dahmer go and he goes back home.
This brings me to the reason I truly believe Dahmer can
not be ignored and in a sense why Murphy was drawn to the project in the first
place. Because from the first moments of
the pilot to the third episode (and clearly beyond) this show is a searing indictment
of policing in America. Years after the fact many people questioned how this
could go on for so long. Murphy makes it very clear that Jeffrey Dahmer was
allowed to get away with it because of police indifference. In the second
episode of the series, clearly early in Dahmer’s spree, he has invited a young
man back to his apartment. We already know what will happen; we’ve seen a variation
in the first episode just before his arrest.
The victim is slipped a cocktail, is drugged and Dahmer puts him on the
bed, but he manages to knock him out and get out of the building, undressed and
incoherent.
Glenda Cleveland, one of the tenants, calls the police when
the victim is found. While they are talking to him, Dahmer shows up. He tells them
that the victim is his boyfriend and they were in the midst of something. Glenda is clearly skeptical of this, but the
police do not listen to her and take the victim back to the apartment with Dahmer.
When they go in, they ask about a smell. Dahmer tells them that his refrigerator
is broken and that the meat in it has gone back. Despite the obvious flaws,
they leave the victim there and don’t report it because they don’t want to be
bothered filling out the paperwork. The second episode ends with an actual 911
call where Glenda asks if the situation is resolved and she is essentially
brushed off by the cops.
By far the best thing about Dahmer is the work of
Niecy Nash-Betts as Glenda. She has already won the Critics Choice for Best
Supporting Actress in a Limited Series and is currently the heavy favorite to
win the Emmy. Even if I were not a fervent admirer of Nash’s work I would have
no problem with her receiving an Emmy for this role. In the first episode of
the series Glenda asks Dahmer about the smell in the apartment. She is unhappy
with his deflections. When the police arrest Dahmer, she shouts at the cops
that she’s been telling them about this for months and her anger is righteous
as well as her despair when she learns how many victims there have been. For
years, a registered sex offender was literally allowed to get away with dozens
of murders in the middle of a crowded metropolis because the police basically
chose to look the other way. How much of
this was due to the nature of Dahmer’s victims remains to be seen (most of the
ones were underage homosexual minorities) but the fact that it happened at all
should have been a red flag to America as to just how indifferent our police
system is to crime. Instead there has
been a lionization of Dahmer in some circles rather than an indictment of the
system that allowed him to keep doing this. Nash’s rage is one of the clearest
notes and it makes it very clear that this is not a glamorization of Dahmer.
Like almost every Murphy project I have watched over the
past decade, Dahmer is superbly written and directed and performed at
every level. I have yet to see the character that Molly Ringwald plays (she
plays his stepmother) but Penelope Ann Miller is exceptional in her performance
as Dahmer’s birth mother. There has been, at least so far in my viewing, little
of the extreme graphic violence I feared given the nature of Dahmer’s crimes, though
I suspect the worst is yet to come. The technical
aspect from the cinematography and haunting score are extremely well done.
This brings me to the question I imagine most of you might
be asking: do I recommend you see Dahmer? Yes. But don’t binge watch it;
you won’t be able to take the mood. In all honesty this series would be more suited
to cable or a streaming service that didn’t drop every episode at once; it’s
not meant for the service that invented binge-watching. You won’t want to see
it again when you’re done, but that’s true of many series you end of seeing anyway. But don’t believe the press that this is some
kind of celebration of him or tries to humanize Jeffrey Dahmer. And for those of you who wanted to make an
argument to ‘defund the police’ Dahmer may be the most unlikely support from
entertainment you will ever get. It
makes clear in no uncertain terms that when it came to the Wisconsin Police in
the 1990s ‘no lives mattered’. That’s
the message you should take away from it and we need to applaud it, even if we
hate the idea of how its expressed.
My score: 4.5 stars.
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