![]() The childhoods of most mass murderers are always scrutinized for such explanation, and they usually provide grim reading. If it does, it might lie in the stubborn but elusive promise underlying most true crime: that the perpetrator and his acts can be, to some extent, “explained.” ![]() It’s quite possible that “Dahmer”-despite brilliant performances from Nash, Peters, and the great Richard Jenkins as Dahmer’s father, Lionel-has no real justification for its own existence. A significant share of the social-media response to “Dahmer” has been condemnatory, with relatives of victims speaking to what they see, understandably, as the inherently exploitative nature of the project. The sustained, decades-long interest in Jeffrey Dahmer, of course, is mostly and simply due to the ghastly nature of his crimes, which included necrophilia, cannibalism, and horrendous cranial experiments performed on his unconscious victims. And, while the series takes plenty of liberties with the facts of Dahmer’s life, one of its most shocking scenes is virtually a transcript of a real event: the night in May, 1991, two months before Dahmer was finally apprehended, when Milwaukee police officers literally handed an escaped fourteen-year-old victim back to Dahmer, over the protests of the three Black women who had summoned the police in the first place-Cleveland, her daughter, and her niece-and despite the fact that the boy, a child of Lao immigrants, was naked, bleeding, and incoherent. The sixth installment of the series, “Silenced,” directed by Paris Barclay, takes a formally inventive turn in centering the life and family of one of Dahmer’s victims, Tony Hughes, who was Black and deaf the episode privileges Hughes’s perspective by falling almost entirely silent for long stretches as Hughes and his friends happily banter and trash-talk in American Sign Language. Dahmer’s Black neighbor, Glenda Cleveland (played by Niecy Nash), repeatedly and fruitlessly attempts to alert authorities to the stench and bizarre noises emanating from Dahmer’s apartment. ![]() Fourteen of Dahmer’s seventeen murder victims were boys or men of color, including ten Black victims, and “Dahmer” extensively dramatizes how racism and homophobia-both structural and individual, and particularly at the level of law enforcement-enabled Dahmer to continue to kill for so long. Murphy’s “Dahmer” does attempt to widen the sociological frame. But so much content has already been wrung from Dahmer’s life and crimes, including multiple feature-length films, documentaries, and memoirs, that a certain fatigue should have settled in by now. It’s hardly surprising that a Ryan Murphy production, especially one that promises terror and gore, would attract a blockbuster audience. ![]() Subscribers logged nearly two hundred million hours watching the program in its first week of release-more than three times as many hours as Netflix’s next most popular series. But beyond the exactitude of gesture, dialect, and gait is a sense of strange and paradoxical familiarity: the slow realization that “that guy” somehow became that guy.Īfter Netflix released the ten-part miniseries “Dahmer,” on September 21st, it became far and away the streaming service’s most-watched title of the week and its biggest-ever series début, despite receiving little advance marketing. Evan Peters’s performance as the serial killer in Netflix’s “Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is technically precise those almost imperceptible and extremely regional tcks of breath that punctuate the ends of Dahmer’s sentences, for instance, are pure distilled Lake Erie. He was a beige, recessive spectre who didn’t blend into his surroundings so much as he blended into himself his occasional bouts of attention-seeking revealed either a profound misunderstanding of social cues or a trollish disregard for them. He went to high school with your older brother-maybe he was on the bowling team maybe the only class he passed was shop-or he lived down the street with his great-aunt, or he worked the late shift at the 7-Eleven. If you grew up on the lower rungs of the white middle class in the Rust Belt of the second half of the twentieth century, you knew a guy like Jeffrey Dahmer.
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