Held back by critics, presumably so co-creator Ryan Murphy can protect the viewing experience for audiences without access to Wikipedia, recent television, or semi-recent history, Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is an infuriating waste. (This is the last time I’m going to use that completely stupid title, one of the many things Netflix should have had the means to prevent.)
One can appreciate the performers in Dahmer – Richard Jenkins and Niecy Nash in particular. Evan Peters despite his over-familiarity with the series — and respects 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 quite finding a happy medium between exploration and expectation, and probably never would have existed if the adoration for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story had been more universal.
Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
The Bottom Line Creepy but repetitive.
Air Date: Wednesday, September 21 (Netflix) Starring: Evan Peters, Richard Jenkins, Molly Ringwald, Michael Learned, Penelope Ann Miller, Niecy NashCreators: Ryan Murphy & Ian Brennan
It’s not that Versace wasn’t impressed, but most critics, including myself, compared it negatively to the previous season, The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. In years of hindsight, I really understood the points that Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith were making at Versace, and the relative elegance of the character study that the show’s reverse narrative allowed for. I’m sure if we were all properly admiring the season, Murphy and company wouldn’t feel the need to say, “Look, you didn’t understand my final 10-hour fragmentary interrogation at the series’ intersection. murder and race, with a focus on reclaiming the names and identities of the victims from the reputation of the perpetrator — so I’ll try again with more hand-holding.”
As in Assassination, Dahmer begins at the end in 1991, as prolific serial killer, necrophiliac and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer (Peters) picks up Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown) at a Milwaukee-area gay bar and brings him back . in his dingy apartment, where everything is a warning sign: There’s a drill soaked in blood, a tank full of dead fish, a foul stench, a mysterious blue mission drum, and a VCR playing The Exorcist III. Tracy—story spoiler alert—escapes and takes on the police, and it’s quickly discovered that Dahmer, over the course of three decades, had murdered and done gruesome things to the bodies of 17 young men, mostly young men of color.
From there, we follow Jeffrey’s evolution from antisocial young boy (a wonderful Josh Braaten) to dissection-loving teenager to serial killer, though never in chronological order, because everyone knows that chronological order is for blocks and Wikipedia. We witness his relationship with his caring but distracted father (Jenkins’ Lionel), unstable and abusive mother (Penelope Ann Miller), his ill-conceived stepmother (Molly Ringwald’s Shari), grandmother who went in church (Michael Learned’s Catherine). various victims and the neighbor (Nash’s Glenda) who kept calling the police about the smell and continued to go missing.
For five episodes, directed by Carl Franklin, Clement Virgo and Jennifer Lynch, Dahmer runs the same loops over and over through Jeffrey’s behavior, which I’d call “increasingly nightmarish,” except that once you tell the story in semi-arbitrary order , you lose any of the character progression implied by “increasingly”. So it’s all just a nightmarish but monotonous miasma in which Jeffrey drinks cheap beer, gets fixated on someone, masturbates inappropriately, and then does something horrible, though at least the series keeps us in suspense as to what horrible thing he’s going to do. This build-up of tension through the “Will this victim eat it?” or “Will she have sex with this victim?” amazes audiences, an indictment of unrelenting viewership that I might find more convincing if it weren’t coming from the creative team behind multiple seasons of American Horror Story and the network behind feature-length documentaries about every serial killer imaginable .
Smarter observations start coming in the second half of the season, starting with the episode “Silenced”. Written by David McMillan and Janet Mock and directed with more empathy than voyeurism by Paris Barclay, “Silenced” tells the story of Tony Hughes (excellent newcomer Rodney Burnford), who is introduced here as the only victim with whom Jeffrey has had traces real relationship. . It’s easily 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 been too often shut out of the crazed portraits of serial killers.
It’s clear that Murphy and Brennan want this to be a staple from Dahmer, but unlike something like When They See Us, which had a similar message of turning “The Central Park Five” into people with names and personalities, Dahmer maybe does that with two or three of the non-Jeffrey characters. The second half of the series is supposed to be that, but the show can’t get out of its own way. There are pointless, long and manipulative asides about Ed Gein and John Wayne Gacy, for example, that get more screen time than at least 10 victims. This is just an inconvenience to obsessive killers and undermines a lot of 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 eschews the comedic beats that made her a star and delivers two or three lines of incredible dialogue that will have some viewers cheering). It’s a good episode because Nash is so good, but he’s only able to get into Glenda’s mind with the help of a subplot involving Jesse Jackson (Nigel Gibbs), there to pick up on themes the writers aren’t sure they’ve previously established. .
This is the problem. I know why, on a spiritual level, Dahmer does many of the things he does. I just wish he would trust his own ability to do them.
The first half of the season is so repetitive in part because it wants to make clear the number of different points at which Dahmer could have been caught or his appetite changed. “All these red flags,” laments Lionel Dahmer. True story! Could the true story have been carried over to two episodes instead of five? Why yes, especially in a series that wants to be about the stories we don’t know, since these five episodes are very much the story we do know, anchored by Peters giving a performance that’s full of uncomfortable, deadpan horror, but , except from “Silenced”, never fails to amaze. After Peters won an Emmy-worthy escape from the eccentricities and thrills of Murphy’s Cinematic Universe in Easttown Mare, he returned to the performance you expect in Dahmer, albeit with an inconsistent Midwestern accent.
The second half of the season aims to capture the completely uncontroversial assessment that Dahmer got away with his crimes because he was a white man who primarily preyed on economically disadvantaged men of color. The Milwaukee police, possibly the real baddies of the piece, missed many opportunities to stop things because they didn’t care about the race and economic status of the missing people, wanted no part of the sexuality of anyone involved, and couldn’t be bothered to show support for affected neighborhoods.
That’s hard to dispute as a fact in the case – plus, it’s the EXACT subject of much of Versace – and I’d say Dahmer makes the point pretty clear. Then in the final episodes, with Jesse Jackson and others, the show continues to have people come out and say it. Paraphrase it once, shame on anyone in the audience who didn’t get it already. Do it twice, shame on you for not trusting this audience. Make that three times, shame on the Netflix development execs for not saying, “Yeah, we’re already good. Go ahead.” But then again, Ryan Murphy likes to show and tell (over and over), and in a world where too many storytellers forget to do the former entirely, I guess we should be grateful?
In a different editing process, there is a smart interrogation of Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes, the real people affected and the consequences here. It is often lost or hidden. I hope that the dramatic choices and the decision to let the series promote itself, don’t cause Niecy Nash, Richard Jenkins, Rodney Burnford and the valid points of the series to be lost as well.
