It is worth wondering how a new “serial killer”-themed cultural event would be able to stoke controversy in an era that should otherwise be fatigued from this kind of thing. A quadruple-digit number of serial killer-related cinematic ventures have taken place since the early 1990s, and, in the case of notorious murderer / cannibal / necrophile Jeffrey Dahmer, plans for such were in the making almost as soon as the stench of decomposing flesh had been cleared out of unit 213 on Milwaukee’s North 25th Street (as Robert Conrath reports, “television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour”).[1] The new Dahmer miniseries available through Netflix may be one of the most determined of all these thousands of film offerings; a ten-act drama with each episode hovering around an hour’s length. Yet, for all the time allotted to “stretch out” with the subject matter, it is not exceptionally repulsive (more gore can be seen in certain Game of Thrones battle sequences than in most of this series run) nor unusually conciliatory towards its main subject. If anything, the anxiety over dusting off this thirty-year old subject may relate to the fact that, in the 21st century, psychopathologies are not even close to being exceptional (see for example reports that up to 80% of the total population will experience a diagnosable mental health condition at some point in their lives). This translates to increased odds that someone in the general viewership might be profoundly unable to process what they have seen, and few want to be credited with providing the inspirational template for a fresh round of headline-garnering butchery.
So, again, when a product like this succeeds in being “green-lit” for mass public consumption, and then successfully courts that mass audience, it can’t have been without a concerted “risk vs. reward” calculation (and let’s not forget that the streaming service playing host is still nursing wounds sustained from accusations of child exploitation, via the Cuties debacle). More importantly, perhaps, is the gamble on the possibility that the audience will see part of themselves in this dramatization. I feel that, if we want to know what distinguishes this work from the stacks of competing serial killer dramas, then it’s essential to understand what specific personality traits it successfully reflects back upon ourselves.
Few of us, of course, have taken life to the delirious extremes Dahmer did: repeatedly murdering those who refused to pacify his raging separation anxiety, then possessing them by sleeping with their corpses or photographing their dismembered remains, then consuming their flesh and further memorializing these rituals through aestheticized acts like painting their skulls. Yet significantly more of us can understand or empathize with the formative experiences that built up to these events: the perpetual rejection and isolation stemming from the failure to articulate your desires, the problems that ensue when solutions to this quandary are less readily available than the ability to get ‘blackout’ drunk, the weird types of self-experimentation that ensue once you are “freed” from the idea that anyone is taking an active interest in you. That the examples in this latter inventory may contribute more to acts of extraordinary sickness and sadism than “innate evil” is still, I think, an idea that does not register as often as it should: ours is a society fixated upon the “authentic, inner you,” and as such does not take into account the action of extreme, random psychological circumstances nearly as often it should.
My personal take on the Dahmer phenomenon is that it resonates with the general populace for reasons other than the need for an irrational monster - “boogeyman” or “Gothic double” - to shock them into accepting their comparatively mundane realities. Nor do I feel this particular round of renewed interest owes itself mainly to freak show appeal, i.e. “watch the awkward ‘incel’ crumble under the weight of his own singular obsessions”… this in spite of the battalions of trolls now meme-ing the rediscovered Dahmer as part of their tiresome quest to cause offense for its own sake. I don’t feel that cultural phenomena of this kind can succeed without at least some degree of positive identification with the “monster”, along the lines of what fellow serial murderer Dennis Nilsen suggested in the epilogue of his autobiography (whose working title, Epic Nobody, might have been a fine alternate title for the Dahmer series):
I was capable of killing my fellows, not because I was a monster but because I was human. And therein lies the true horror. There is no suffering like the truth of seeing one’s own face in life’s mirror and I am not sorry that I looked.[2]
Dahmer makes numerous concessions to what David Schmid referred to as “multi-accentuality,” namely an ability for this phenomenon to be analyzed from nearly any ideological standpoint, “guarantee[ing] the adoption of serial murder by groups as diverse as policy makers, social / cultural critics, politicians, law enforcement personnel, true crime writers, novelists, filmmakers, and so on”.[3] Academics in particular have apparently delighted in adding to the inventory above, to make sweeping statements like Brian Jarvis’ contention that the serial killer genre’s “commodification of violence is inseparable from the violence of commodification.”[4] In Schmid’s reckoning, it is hardly surprising that serial killers grow into “celebrity” status while acting as reflecting surfaces for so many aspects of modern civilization (and its discontents). Dahmer, to be certain, makes good on this “multi-accentuality” via its use of several different narratives based on racially discriminatory policing, homophobia, broken homes, addiction, and consumption of ultraviolence as a kind of self-affirming entertainment: for added effect, it shuffles the chronology of the events in the Dahmer case as they actually occurred, so as to more effectively de-center the narrative.
As much work clearly went into this, however, I feel this provides the audience with too many convenient exits from the kind of self-interrogation that Nilsen demands above, and which even middling “true crime” literature can occasionally muster. I believe this kind of filmic recreation should at least attempt to unveil the potential within ourselves to become the monsters we claim to hate, and to ask the questions that critic Jacob Golomb sees as central to Joseph Conrad’s novels (i.e. “Can you pull your authentic self together when you lose all support? Will you survive or go under?’”)[5]
This sort of grim affirmation isn’t absent from Dahmer if you look for it, but it is all too easy for it to be drowned out by paeans to our societal institutions’ complicity in extreme sadism. There must be very few viewers these days among the American mass viewership who don’t feel themselves to be the moral superiors of corrupt cops, chronically disengaged parents, and rubbernecking creeps trafficking in “murderabilia,” so this sort of deflection dulls much of Dahmer’s potential to transcend its time even while making it a fairly immersive viewing experience.
Indeed, Dahmer’s intent to eventually “explode” the view with multiple perspectives is admirable, but ultimately feels forced into providing a sense of continuity with very current sociopolitical concerns: this narrative strategy feels like too deliberate an attempt to inoculate the producers against the usual claims of victim exploitation, particularly when the social justice message rings loud and clear towards the end of the series. As such there is a lot of “money left on the table”, so to speak: missed opportunities to more artfully investigate Dahmer’s personification of what we could call the “evil of banality.”
The reversal of this phrase, Hannah Arendt’s famous pronunciation of Adolf Eichmann’s “banality of evil,” has often been applied to historically severe perpetrators of sadism when, rather than exhibiting a demonic irrationality, they instead go about their grisly work while “never mak[ing] up their minds to be good or evil.”[6] While this attitude does come through in both Dahmer’s real-life confessions and in this series’ dramatized action, there could have been yet more investigation of how dullness itself becomes a spur to antisocial violence; how the frustrated attempts to develop experientially lead to a kind of compensatory destruction. Several events in this series (Dahmer’s resignation to repetitive jobs likely beneath his level of intellect, seemingly featureless sessions of extreme alcohol consumption, and even the admission to his father that he enjoys having time to think alone in jail), all suggest an experiential terrain so devoid of peaks and valleys that unorthodox, highly dangerous measures are needed to see if anything indeed lies beyond it. The poignant twist here, though, is that those desperate measures end up creating more of the same: in Steve Finbow’s reckoning, Dahmer’s victims, reduced to “copies of copies of copies of objects of desire, to be mut(il)ated into yet more copies,”[7] become yet more features in a non-communicative, sterile landscape of banality.
This is not to say that Dahmer’s signature actions were owed entirely to a life in which flatness of experience became the fuse for explosive violence, as is relayed in biographer Brian Masters’ written study The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. I concur with Masters’ argument that unshakable traumas, such as Dahmer’s double hernia operation in his early childhood, were instrumental in instilling a life-long terror and helplessness in him (Dahmer would later confess to Dr. Judith Becker that, upon reviving from anesthetic, he felt as if his genitalia had been cut off). Strangely, this pivotal event is only briefly referenced in 10+ hours’ worth of the Netflix series’ footage, whereas we get extended treatments of events that were accelerants for the flames of Dahmer’s destructiveness rather than root causes (again, we are referred to the willfully negligent actions of the Milwaukee police). Dahmer’s early traumatization certainly must have instilled in him a mania for complete control, so as to prevent anything like this happening ever again. Once more, though, his murderous and necrophiliac tendencies, based as they were in an absolute non-reciprocity of his actions, guaranteed his being condemned to a more mentally distorted and viscera-soaked reality (albeit one which remained every bit as non-responsive as the greyscale banality he presumably wanted to escape).
The compulsion to achieve total control is relayed well enough in Dahmer, but maybe more poetically at various points throughout Shrine. Therein, Masters illuminates just how much the re-assertion of control was central to Dahmer’s actions, even when he was not in the thick of his spree of necro-lust (e.g. “the very fact that Jeff Dahmer held his murderousness in check for nine years testifies to the intensity of his fight to control and not be controlled.”)[8] The shrine from which Masters’ book takes its name, a monstrous memorial that the killer hoped to eventually form from a black table and the skeletal remains of his victims, would be “a place for meditation…where I could feel I was drawing power from an outside source.”[9] Masters elaborates:
Dahmer’s shrine would be his creation, the only one in his entire existence. It would be beautiful, bound by the mystical absolutes of symmetry (as his drawing shows), and it would be his ultimate exercise in control. He knew all about the beauty of things, and nothing whatever of the love that gave them life. Sitting before the table, alone with his relics, he would have control over his life at last, over sex, the world, the past, power through the absolute beauty of death.[10]
Dahmer’s erection of a vile reliquary to confirm his total control brings us back to the question of just what this series might reflect back at its modern viewership. This would-be culmination of his career in violence feels to me like a more undiluted manifestation of behavior that can be witnessed at any second in a society of insecure, hyper-dependent technophiles. The present need to incessantly document / record experiences that are still in progress betrays how much vital here-and-now experience, with all its risks and uncertainties, is devalued in favor of a more “pliant” zombie reality that can be re-edited and re-assessed until it better fits the idealized vision of the recorders. The steady use of bludgeoning, authoritarian disclaimers in social media posting (e.g. “I don’t know who still needs to hear this…,” short declarative sentences repeated a dozen times or more, emphatic “handclap” emojis stuck between blocks of all-caps text) also hint at a need to use language to control, coerce, and silence rather than to communicate. The tidal surge of popular media like digital pornography, including dramatized fantasy scenarios that would have appealed to someone with Dahmer’s inclinations (see esp. porn based around fantasies of “hypnosis” or other eliminations of the submissive partner’s reciprocity), also forms part of a vast necrophile landscape wherein coercion consumes communication. Some may feel they are “drawing power from an outside source” in this realm, but in reality they are simply self-intensifying their own experiences until they mutate into something pathologically damaging.
Some technical aspects of the series do need to be discussed, as they are also relevant to this project’s reflecting the attitudes of the present time. While it is impressive in its recreation of events for which filmed and photographic evidence exist (the closing “impact statements” of victims’ families at Dahmer’s trial, some mercifully extinct early ‘90s fashion trends), great liberties have been taken with re-telling events that were verifiable but less part of the public consciousness. These are in fact too many to list without derailing this piece completely, and so maybe just one episode - the murder of deaf/mute Tony Hughes – is worth mentioning for what this story seems to imply. The writers and producers clearly agreed with scribe Masters in that Hughes was “especially to be pitied,” as he is the only of Dahmer’s victims to merit nearly a full episode’s worth of back story colored in with bold aspirations of love and vitality. This does have the desired effect of rendering his demise to be particularly cruel one, and also provides some genuine innovation in being an episode-length filmed drama conducted largely with subtitled American Sign Language. All that aside, though, existing accounts of Hughes’ and Dahmer’s meeting paint a picture in which Hughes has become Dahmer’s prey after a single meeting at Club 219: he did not, in actuality, play Dahmer’s paranoiac childhood game “Infinity Land” with him, nor accompany him on multiple occasions to lunch and to a DIY photography salon.
Rife with falsehood though it is, the episode focusing on Hughes is perhaps the most effective in the series for the contrast it provides between the character of the victim and that of the predator. Hughes is shown throughout as an indomitable spirit accepting his disabilities as challenges rather than curses, and as an intrepid individual whose trajectory takes him to new towns, pursuits and relationships. The more this is shown to be the case, the more Dahmer’s “evil of banality” comes into perfect focus: spiraling endlessly inward and gradually pruning himself of connections to anything outside of his possessive obsessions, he becomes (in the terminology of his precursor Nilsen) a “monochrome man” whose one-dimensionality and lack of real self-inquiry, we are told, made him a hideous anomaly for his time. Now, in the 21st century where technological saturation has paradoxically shaped the most emotionally disconnected generations ever to have existed, Dahmer seems less like an aberration than the listless, hollowed out apotheosis of our evilly banal new world.
[1] Conrath, R. (1996). ‘Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption’, in John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (eds) European Readings of American Popular Culture, pp. 147–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
[2] Nilsen, D. (2021). History of a Drowning Boy .West Sussex: Red Door Press
[3] Schmid, D. (2005). Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[4] Jarvis, B. (2007). “Monsters Inc.: Serial Killers and Consumer Culture.” Crime Media Culture 3(3); pp. 326-344.
[5] Golomb, J. (1995). In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London / New York: Routledge.
[6] Arendt, H. (1978). The Life of the Mind. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
[7] Finbow, S. (2014). Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia. Winchester / Washington: Zero Books.
[8] Masters, B. (1993). The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer. Hodder and Stoughton: Coronet Books.
[9] Jeffrey Dahmer in conversation with Dr. Kenneth Smail, November 18 1991.
[10] Masters (1993).