RYan Murphy was supposed to be Netflix’s big hit, the successful super-producer capable of turning every new show into an international event. It’s fair to say that it didn’t quite work out – none of his Netflix shows landed with all of his series’ impact elsewhere – and now we seem to have reached a new nadir. Murphy’s latest series, the heavy hitter Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, appeared on Netflix this week out of nowhere, to no fanfare.
Dahmer has just arrived. There was no premiere. No media had access to the preview, none of the show’s stars were made available for an interview. Unless you caught the cursory trailer that slipped online five days before the show was released, you’d be forgiven for not knowing it existed at all.
Usually this is a sign that a platform wants to bury a show. This raises the possibility that the series was commissioned in good faith, but something went so wrong along the way that Netflix thought it best to draw as little attention as possible.
And maybe it is because, whether by accident or design, Dahmer is an almost impossible sight to watch. A biopic of Jeffrey Dahmer, a man who killed (and occasionally ate) 17 victims over a 13-year period from the 1970s to the 1990s, the series seems almost pathologically incapable of finesse. The early episodes in particular are a display of all the worst tendencies the true crime drama genre has to offer.
Very long stretches of the series pass without any insight or analysis, instead letting things unfold at a macabre pace as if Wikipedia had decided to fund dramatizations of all of its worst entries. The series also seems to be aware of this, cutting itself into a fractured timeline to distract you from its macabre trail of murder.
Evan Peters, usually so good elsewhere, plays Dahmer in a really confusing way, like he accidentally watched the whole Joe Pera Talks with You as part of his research process. Even its looks borderline exploitative, taking on the kind of hazy, desaturated feel of a disappointing Saw sequel.
Worst of all, to some extent, is the series’ choice of direction. What Ryan Murphy’s murder shows — especially The Assassination of Gianni Versace — do so well is reclaim the lives of victims. By being murdered, these people are stripped of an inheritance. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they’ve done. They will always be just a photo and a name in a list of victims, an entire existence defined only by how it ended. The only good thing a show like this can do is steal the spotlight from the killer and show who those people really were. But Dahmer, for the most part, is sadly too enamored with his star attraction for that.
Dahmer is undoubtedly fetishized here. The misery of his apartment lingers, even to the bloodstains on the mattress. We see him gutting his first fish, skinning the creature in a gynecologically distressing way, so he can gaze at its organs. We see him topless and slippery with sweat. We see him masturbating several times. There’s a sequence where Dahmer takes a store mannequin to bed and caresses it for free while KC’s Please Don’t Go and the Sunshine Band play in the background.
In all honesty, the series improves towards the end. In the second half, the monofocus shifts and Jeffrey Dahmer retreats into the background. One episode is devoted to the life of Anthony Hughes, a deaf man who was found dead by the hands of Dahmer. We also see the effect the murders had on Dahmer’s parents, which allows Richard Jenkins (who plays Dahmer’s father) to give a barnstormer performance. Jesse Jackson appears, putting the story in a more political perspective (after all, one of the reasons Dahmer got away with it for so long was the police’s tendency to brush aside legitimate concerns in the black community).
But this comes after five long hours of deeply nauseous viscera at surface level. A show about the worst in humanity doesn’t have to be entertaining to watch, but Dahmer seems actively delighted to see how obnoxious it is, as if that was the sole purpose of doing it. No wonder Netflix didn’t want to advertise it.
Then again, at the time of writing, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was Netflix’s most-watched series, which shows what I know. Who needs nuance when there’s a bloodthirsty audience?
