Withheld from critics, presumably so that co-creator Ryan Murphy could protect the viewing experience for audiences without access to Wikipedia, current television, or semi-recent history, Netflix’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is an annoying hodgepodge. (That’s the last time I’ll use that full idiot title, one of several things Netflix messing should have prevented.)
One can appreciate the cast in Dahmer – particularly Richard Jenkins and Niecy Nash; Evan Peters, despite an excess of familiarity on his part – and respecting that Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan have tangible and meaningful things to say here, while also feeling that the 10-episode series is haphazardly structured, never finds a good middle ground between exploration and anticipation, and probably never would have existed had admiration for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story been more universal.
Dahmer – Monsters: The Story of Jeffrey Dahmer
Bottom line chilled, but repetitive.
air date: Wednesday, September 21 (Netflix)
Pour: Evan Peters, Richard Jenkins, Molly Ringwald, Michael Learned, Penelope Ann Miller, Niecy Nash
Creator: Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan
It’s not that Versace wasn’t admired, but most critics, myself included, compared it negatively to the previous season, The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. Over the years of looking back, I’ve really appreciated the points that Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith made in Versace and the relative elegance of the character study that enabled the series’ reverse narrative. I’m sure if we’d all been properly admiring the season, Murphy and co. wouldn’t have felt the need to say, “Look, you didn’t get my last fragmented 10-hour interrogation of the intersection of killing and racism, focused on reclaiming the names and identities of the victims from the notoriety of the perpetrator – so I’ll try again with more hand-holding.”
As in Assassination, Dahmer finally begins in 1991, when prolific serial killer, necrophile, and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (Peters) picks up Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown) at a Milwaukee-area gay bar and takes him back to his dingy apartment, where absolutely everything is a red flag: there’s a blood-soaked drill, a tank full of dead fish, a foul stench, a mysterious blue transport drum, and a VCR playing The Exorcist III. Tracy – historical spoiler alert – escapes and calls in the police, and it’s quickly discovered that Dahmer murdered 17 young men and did horrific things to them, mostly young men of color, over the course of three decades.
From there we follow Jeffrey’s progression from antisocial boy (an excellent Josh Braaten) to dissecting teenager to serial killer, albeit never in chronological order because everyone knows chronological order is for squares and Wikipedia. We witness his relationship with his caring but distracted father (Lionel by Jenkins), his unstable and mistreated mother (Penelope Ann Miller), his barely sketched stepmother (Shari by Molly Ringwald), his church-going grandmother (Catherine by Michael Learned ), various victims and the neighbor (Nash’s Glenda) who kept calling the police about the smell and continued to be ignored.
Across five episodes directed by Carl Franklin, Clement Virgo, and Jennifer Lynch, Dahmer keeps doing the same loops through Jeffrey’s behavior, which I would describe as “increasingly nightmarish,” except once you tell the story in semi-random order, you lose any character progression implied by “increasing”. So it’s all just a nightmarish but monotonous miasma in which Jeffrey drinks cheap beer, fixates on someone, masturbates inappropriately and then does something horrible, although at least the series keeps us in suspense as to what a horrible thing he’s going to do. This build-up of tension from “Will he eat this victim?” or “Will he have sex with this victim?” turns audiences into ghouls, an indictment of gaping bystanders that I might find more compelling if it weren’t coming from the creative team behind tens of seasons of American Horror Story and the network behind grinning, long-form documentaries on every serial killer imaginable.
Smarter observations come in the second half of the season, starting with the episode “Silenced”. Written by David McMillan and Janet Mock and directed by Paris Barclay with more empathy than voyeurism, Silenced tells the story of Tony Hughes (excellent newcomer Rodney Burnford), presented here as perhaps the only victim with whom Jeffrey has any trace of a real relationship had . It’s by far the best episode of the series, an uncomfortably sweet and sad hour of television that probably should have been the template for the entire show. Tony was deaf, and by placing a black, deaf, gay character at the center of the narrative, the series gives voice to someone whose voice has all too often been excluded from staring serial killer portraits.
It’s obvious that Murphy and Brennan want this to be an important insight from Dahmer, but unlike something like When They See Us, which had a similar message, to turn “The Central Park Five” into individuals with names and personalities , Dahmer does it to maybe two or three of the non-Jeffrey characters. The second half of the series is meant to be, but the show can’t get out of its way. For example, there are pointless and long-winded and manipulative asides about Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy getting more screen time than at least 10 victims. This is just pandering to the serial killer obsessive and undermines several series themes. I would add that focusing on such things and reducing most victims and their families to their pain is closer to exploiting that pain than honoring any memories.
Or take Cassandra, the episode built around Nash’s Glenda (the actress simultaneously avoids the comical cadences that made her a star and delivers two or three lines of incredulous dialogue that will make some viewers cheer ). It’s a good episode because Nash is so good, but it can only come to Glenda’s mind with the help of a subplot starring Jesse Jackson (Nigel Gibbs) to spell out themes the writers are unsure of previously set became.
That’s the problem. I know why, intellectually, Dahmer does a lot of the things he does. I just wish it trusted its own ability to do it.
The first half of the season is as repetitive as it is partly because it seeks to clarify the number of different points where Dahmer could have been caught or his appetite diverted. “All these red flags,” laments Lionel Dahmer. True story! Could the real story have been told in two episodes instead of five? Why yes, especially in a series that wants to be about the stories we don’t know, as these five episodes are essentially the story we know, anchored by Peters delivering a performance full of uncomfortable dead eyes is, but except in “Silenced”, never surprising. After winning a well-deserved Emmy for breaking away from the eccentricities and airs of the Murphy Cinematic Universe in Mare of Easttown, Peters returns to the performance you’ve come to expect, albeit with an inconsistent Midwestern accent, in Dahmer.
The second half of the season aims to nail the totally uncontroversial assessment that Dahmer got away with his crimes because he was a white man who primarily hunted economically disadvantaged people of color. The Milwaukee police, possibly the real villains of the play, missed many opportunities to stop things because they didn’t care about the race and economic status of the missing, didn’t want and couldn’t have a stake in the sexuality of those involved strove to show support in the affected neighborhoods.
That’s hard to dispute as a fact in this case – besides, it’s the EXACT subtext of much of Versace – and I’d say Dahmer makes the point pretty clearly. Then, in the last few episodes, with Jesse Jackson and others, the show keeps letting people come out and say it. Overstate it once, shame on anyone in the audience who didn’t already get it. Do it twice, shame on you for not trusting this audience. Do it three times, shame on Netflix’s development leaders for not saying, ‘Yeah, we’re fine. Go on.” But again, Ryan Murphy loves to show and tell (over and over again), and in a world where too many storytellers forget to do the former entirely, should we be grateful, I think?
Guided through a different editing process, there is an intelligent interrogation of Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes, the real individuals involved, and the consequences here. It is often lost or hidden. I hope that the dramatic decisions and the decision to let the series self-promote don’t result in Niecy Nash, Richard Jenkins, Rodney Burnford and the show’s major points being lost as well.