The Jeffrey Dahmer Story: unflinching horror unwatchable
This series about a real-life killer who drills holes in people’s skulls could not be more gruesome. What does it say about viewers that it is trending as No.1 on Netflix?
There’s something about indefatigable writer and director Ryan Murphy that demands the utmost respect. While hugely successful, he’s always been drawn to the extremes, a crusader constantly pushing boundaries, placing outsiders at the centre of his shows. He’s still working off a $300m deal with Netflix, saying in interviews he was once “somebody who couldn’t sell a script and was being told that everything I did was too gay or too out-there”.
He irks many critics as much as his public loves his transgressiveness, clamouring to watch people they would rarely encounter in their own lives. “I only wrote or created shows that I really wanted to watch, so they inevitably had gay characters and trans characters and minorities,” he says. “And I made them the leads instead of the sidekicks, because that is what I did in my own life.”
Murphy gave us the outrageous Nip/Tuck, reimagined the TV musical with Glee, and pioneered the contemporary anthology series with American Horror Story. His seven-hour The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, then a brilliant new take on the true crime genre with often alarming contemporary resonance, topped a memorable awards season by winning the best documentary at the Oscars.
Feud was another ratings hit, offering a seductive, insightful look at what lies behind legendary personality conflicts, beginning with the devious and quite delicious eight-part Feud: Bette and Joan. It was the story of the nasty rivalry between Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) during their collaboration on the black thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Pose then brilliantly explored the cutting contrast between different segments of life in New York in the 1980s: the LGBTQ community’s irrepressible ball culture, and the rise of the Trump-era upper class with its ostentatious displays of wealth and power.
Then The Assassination of Gianni Versace arrived. It was not quite the hit of the earlier OJ Simpson series but Murphy’s determination to spotlight the homophobia and discrimination that hampered the police investigation into his killing touched a nerve.
Murphy appears to have attempted something similar with his latest for Netflix, the ungainly titled Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, created with his frequent collaborator Ian Brennan. Again, he wants to look at the way a notorious crime interconnects with race by examining the hateful Dahmer from the perspective of his victims, most of whom were black. And he shows how the police and the media failed by allowing one of America’s most notorious serial killers to continue his murderous spree in plain sight for over a decade.
The series has arrived oddly for a Murphy show. It landed suddenly, with no promotion, no interviews with Murphy or his leading actors, no Hollywood-style premiere with attendant press.
There is an interview shared by Ryan Murphy Productions with Evan Peters who plays Dahmer with an extraordinary sense of verisimilitude. “We had one rule going into this from Ryan that it would never be told from Dahmer’s point of view,” Peters says. “As an audience, you’re not really sympathising with him. You’re not really getting into his plight. You’re more sort of watching it, you know, from the outside. It’s called The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, but it’s not just him and his backstory. It’s the repercussions. It felt important to be respectful to the victims, to the victims’ families; to try to tell the story as authentically as we could.”
Dahmer is hardly an unknown figure to anyone who follows the now seemingly interminable annals of TV’s true crime. If you’re a fan, you’ll know he was deranged and dangerous, preying on society’s most vulnerable, in a murderous period from the 1980s until 1991 when he was finally caught. Dubbed the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, he murdered 17 innocent victims and treated their bodies in unspeakable ways, often involving necrophilia, dismemberment and cannibalism.
He drilled holes into the skulls of some of his victims, and injected hydrochloric acid or boiling water into their brains. There were remains of victims in his freezer when he was eventually caught, and he admitted to eating many of his victims’ organs, especially their hearts and thighs, and confessed to consuming at least one victim’s bicep.
The first episode of the series, directed with creepy style by Carl Franklin, begins in July 1991, the year Dahmer was finally arrested, at the grim Oxford Apartments in Milwaukee. It opens not with the serial killer but with his neighbour Glenda Cleveland (Niecy Nash) trying to enjoy her nightly TV watching, but constantly interrupted and disconcerted by the noise issuing from a small metal vent in her wall.
The noise of drilling, sawing and banging fills her small apartment and her demeanour as she stares at that vent suggests this is hardly a one-off occurrence. We then cut to Dahmer’s next-door one-bedroom apartment where he is cleaning a bloody saw in a small sink, washing blood from his hands and arms.
It’s obvious a killer has been at work. The camera picks up details on his workbench – knives, a drill, gloves, a large bottle of bleach and some sort of aquarium.
He leaves the heavily bolted apartment and Cleveland confronts him in the dimly lit hallway. “Excuse me, Jeff, I gotta say that smell is worse than ever,” she says. “Is it?” he replies, and we see his face for the first time, that odd stare. “Well, you know I had that bad meat, the little freezer I got,” he stammers. “I forgot my goldfish died.” He then wanders into the street, the lampposts full of tattered missing-person posters, and it’s clear, if we didn’t know, that we are near the end of his murderous regime of killing.
But one more attempt is to come. Dahmer finds his next potential victim, a black man called Tracy Edwards (Shaun Brown) in a gay bar. He takes him back to his dingy apartment, offering cash in exchange for his company and the possibility of some photographs. There are red flags everywhere: the terrible smell, the many empty beer cans, the large drill by the sink, the aquarium containing dead fish and a copy of something called The Satanic Bible. As it dawns on Edwards this is no place to be, he is partially handcuffed. After being threatened with a butcher’s knife, incompletely drugged and forced to watch highlights from The Exorcist III, Edwards manages to escape. The frightening encounter leads to Dahmer’s eventual arrest.
I refrain from giving too much detail but the arrest is a sharp reminder of how a series of systemic police failures over an extended period, inflamed by a high level of homophobia, allowed Dahmer to continue killing.
The first episodes of the series are extraordinarily slow. I fought my way through two more chapters and became caught up in a kind of serial-killer torpor, nightmarish viewing, waiting for the next horrible thing this Dahmer would do. “How many more will we have to watch?” I kept thinking.
It quickly becomes eerily monotonous as we wait for Dahmer to eat somebody. We do at least get to meet his awkwardly caring father Lionel, superbly played by Richard Jenkins, who shows Jeffrey how to clean and preserve animal bones using bleach. Penelope Ann Miller plays his somewhat tormented mother. Dahmer’s parents were constantly involved in bitter domestic disputes.
I got tired, too, with what seems a kind of fixation on the character Murphy and his colleagues create, a fetishisation of Peters playing Dahmer. He drinks cheap beer, is fond of crushing the cans, is usually half naked, sweating heavily, constantly masturbating, and spending vast amounts of screen time lining up his next victim.
There’s an argument about serial-killer TV that as a form of popular entertainment it introduces us to fear and horror but in a controlled environment where the threat is exciting but not real. It offers a thrilling form of escapism.
Not this show. It is overly long and manipulative – an unflinching account of maliciousness and malevolence that is unwatchable.
Strange thing is, Dahmer is now Netflix’s No.1 trending show.
Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, streaming on Netflix.
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