The Temptations of Jeffrey Dahmer

 

"If Dahmer sought to get to Hollywood by writing and starring in his own movie, given the fictionalized treament of his actions, he more or less succeeded."
—Richard Tithecott, Of Men and Monsters, 1997

"America's serial killer moment has been mined for ore, turned into relentless media, analyzed, obsessed over, given birth to countless podcasts, the sound of droning voices with blood in their throats."
—Jarett Kobek, Motor Spirit, 2022

1.

When the 10-episode series Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story arrived to Netflix in late September, it quickly became one of the streaming site's most popular offerings. By the end of the second week, it had become, according to Variety, Netflix's "ninth most popular English-language TV show of all time" with "at least 56 million households [having] consumed all 10 episodes (approximately 8.8 hours total) of the limited series thus far." As I write this now, a month after the show's premiere, it remains the fourth most popular TV show on Netflix in the U.S.

(On October 7, Netlfix released the latest in its Conversations with a Killer series of documentaries, this one devoted to Dahmer, but while I expect it got viewed by a lot of people, it did not gain the attention or viewership of the dramatized series.)

The success of Dahmer—Monster has led to much discussion of the show, and that discussion, I'm sure, has increased interest in it. The show and the discourse around the show exist in symbiosis, fueling each other. This is at least as true of the negative responses as the positive: the choice to write about it, pro or con, is a choice to bring attention to it. (As I am doing here.) 

With Dahmer, at least, it has always been thus. From the night he was arrested in July 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer has been an attention machine.

In Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer, Richard Tithecott ends by writing:

The myth of the serial killer is one whose single meaning is unclear but which can serve us by validating particular ways of evaluating ourselves, of policing ourselves. It can serve to explain how and why our society is put together the way it is, to illustrate its preoccupations, anxieties, and fantasies. It is a myth which figures society as a battlefield and individuals as warriors, either victorious or defeated, either natural oppressors or natural victims. It is a myth in which victims are represented in contrast to the glamour, mystery, and power of those who brought their lives to an end.

One of the things I appreciate about Dahmer—Monster is that it engages with this idea of the multiplicity of meanings possible to any serial killer (and to the mythic idea of the serial killer generally). More importantly, the arc of its narrative seeks to deglamourize and disempower the figure of the killer in favor of his victims. The show's desires are clearly torn, however, between wanting to capitalize off the grisly fascination Dahmer provokes and wanting to rebalance our attention away from the macabre details and toward the immense pain and suffering Dahmer's actions caused. The tension between those desires is an honest one, one that anyone with an interest in the Dahmer case, or crime stories generally, ought to reflect on. 

Tithecott connects discourse around the Dahmer case to Michel Foucault's discussion of Bosch's Temptation of St. Anthony in A History of Madness (Tithecott uses Madness and Civilization, the highly abridged version which was at the time of his writing the only edition available in English). In Bosch's painting, St. Anthony is besieged by demons in the form of grylli (animal-human combinations) which, unlike earlier representations of the St. Anthony story, seem to be figures tormenting his mind rather than his body. Foucault writes (in Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa's translation): 

The gryllos is madness made Temptation: all that there is in him of the impossible, fantastical and inhuman, all that indicates that which goes against nature or the seething mass of a senseless presence immanent in the earth is the source of his strange power. ... The animal realm has moved out of range of all domesticating human symbolism, and while it fascinates mankind with its disorder, its fury and its plethora of monstrous impossibilities, it also serves to reveal the dark rage and sterile folly that lurks in the hearts of mankind.

Tithecott notes that contemporary discourse views the serial killer less as an animal than as a savage, and thus the figure of the serial killer serves an important role in demarcating the borders between savagery and civilization while simultaneously highlighting the savagery that lurks within civilization. Animal or savage, nonetheless, the serial killer is — as Dahmer so clearly shows — madness made Temptation. 

The serial killer is always a figure of indulgence: the person who gave in to their worst impulses. It is easy to fit them into a Christian mode. They are the weak, tempted, fallen. Dahmer is especially powerful here because of his identity as a gay man. Stereotypically, of course, gay men are associated with femininity, and in sexist discourse femininity is associated with the weakness of Eve. Dahmer particularly fits the mold of Eve because he was tempted toward monstrous knowledge. Why did he dismantle corpses? Because, he said in various confessions and interviews, he wanted to know how they worked and what it felt like. He did not (in such a version of the story) murder out of anger and hatred, he murdered out of curiosity. His experiments with bodies were an extension of his father's chemistry experiments.

Part of the reason Dahmer's case gained so much publicity is that it fell perfectly within certain crossroads of the zeitgeist. In the winter of the year he was captured, right around the time he was dismembering a 17-year-old victim, American movie theatres were home to Silence of the Lambs, with Anthony Hopkins' soon-to-be-Oscar-winning performance as Hannibal Lecter fueling the public's serial killer imaginings shortly before Dahmer's own activities became international news. Additionally, Dahmer's sexuality played to the heightened awareness (and fear) of gay men that the AIDS crisis had unleashed throughout American culture.

Tithecott chronicles the vicious homophobia that runs through so much of the 1990s writing about Dahmer. He quotes reporter Anne E. Schwartz, who wrote in her 1992 book about the crimes: "Many of Dahmer's victims went to a stranger's apartment because they wanted to make a few bucks by taking off their clothes and posing nude. The youths who left gay bars with men they didn't know were leading lives full of risks and, in the end, were killed as a result of their own negligence and recklessness. They were looking for nameless, faceless sex." Tithecott quotes a police union lobbyist who said in 1991, "These gays all choose the life-style which gets them killed." These words had often been said about AIDS victims; now they were said about Dahmer victims.

In Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide, Philip Jenkins explores the way the concept of the "gay killer" (killer who is gay and/or killer of gays) is almost coterminous with the concept of the "serial killer". It is undeniable that at the same time gay liberation was a movement in the United States, hundreds of gay men were killed, often by people like John Wayne Gacy and Dennis Nilsen — men who were, to some extent or another, homosexually inclined. The reasons for this proliferation are many and complex, but certainly among the reasons was that many gay men had at best tenuous relationships with their families, society saw gay men as aberrant and not as full citizens, and gay men's disappearances/deaths were less likely to be investigated. (Homophobia is literally deadly.) Racism has a similar effect, and Dahmer's case demonstrates the ways that multiple marginalities merge to create appealing targets whose disappearance is less likely to be noticed or cared about by authorities. And even when corpses are discovered, if they are corpses of the abject, are they grievable?

In media, law enforcement, and psychological discourse, homosexuality becomes alibi and explanation for grisly fate. Promiscuous men become promiscuous killers and perverts can't expect better. Dahmer's capture came at the height of this melding of concepts, a time when gay killer and serial killer easily slipped into synonymy.

Much like AIDS, Dahmer was seen by some people as just what gay men deserved, perhaps even a useful antidote to the poison of queerness. Jenkins quotes a letter received by a gay newspaper in Milwaukee (originally cited in Dvorchak and Holewa's Milwaukee Massacre): "I don't care if you queers die of AIDS or dismemberment. Do us all a favor and hurry it up, okay? I hope Dahmer gets off on a technicality."

2.

"...I’ve learned too much about serial killers and they’re a pretty narrow, drab bunch. When I was first thinking about them, though, I invested them with a kind of weird imaginative splendor..."
—Peter Straub, 2012

The first feature-length dramatization of the Dahmer murders that I am aware of was The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer, a low-budget movie that was the subject of an episode of Maury Povich's shout-fest show where a couple of victims' family members were set against the filmmakers. After Shirley Hughes, mother of victim Tony Hughes, complained that the film left out the victims' names, writer and star Carl Crew asked, "Do you think that you're any more special than the other families of other victims that have been killed by other serial killers that have had movies made on them?" Later, with hatred and contempt in his face, he says to her, "Is your son starring in this movie? No!" Though Crew comes off as a reprehensible waste of molecules, his questions get at a primary problem for any crime story: we find criminals more interesting than victims. 

There are countless people killed by serial killers; for all the expressions of empathy we make — most people at least pretend to care about victims more than Carl Crew did on national tv in 1991 — it's the killers that hold the culture's attention, the killers we want to see as the stars of our movies.

Though it does not escape this trap, one of the things Dahmer—Monster does well is help us grow tired of Jeffrey Dahmer. Evan Peters gives an excellent performance as Dahmer, impressively capturing Dahmer's blank blandness. Digging into his life story is not ultimately very interesting. The blankness of a person like Dahmer, though, is partly what compells fascination: he is easy to inscribe meaning onto. Because the acts were so ghastly, we want to believe the person who committed those acts was interesting.

Dahmer—Monster begins where our fascination begins: the killing. Except, not quite. The opening shots are of Dahmer's neighbor, Glenda Cleveland (Niecy Nash), watching tv and listening to the noises coming from the other side of the wall. Glenda is, in many ways, the most important character in the series. Though we soon cross the wall and see the blood-covered saw that is making the noise, we don't see Dahmer's face for a little bit. He begins for us the way his victims end up for him: not as a person but a body. The first dialogue is Glenda stopping Dahmer in the hallway to complain about the smell. We see her discomfort, her fear, her frustration. Next, we see missing person posters outside the bar that Dahmer goes to: posters of his victims. People are searching. Dahmer, meanwhile, is hunting. We see how it plays out.

As viewers (voyeurs), we know what to expect. We have seen the blood and the saw. We know the Dahmer story (killer, cannibal) and so when he opens the refrigerator, we have an idea of what might be in there. We have a sense of his victim's fate. Every step, every gesture is heavy with meaning and thus suspense. We know a lot, but we don't know which of Dahmer's victims this scene is depicting, so we don't know what to expect other than nothing good. We know we're not watching his first victim (the smell, after all...), but we don't know whether this is his last.

The first episode is almost unbearable even for someone as desensitized as myself because it plays out in (more or less) real time. This is not the entertainment we came for. We wanted to see some killing and some allusions to cannibalism, the good fun violence of serial killer entertainment. ("Fava beans and a nice chianti!") We didn't want to be trapped in the apartment with Jeffrey Dahmer.

"What're you gonna do?" Dahmer's victim (played by Shaun J. Brown) asks.

"Told you. We're gonna watch a movie, I'm gonna take some pictures, gonna pay you." He puts a videotape of The Exorcist III on. He holds his victim back: "Don't leave!" The man sees a large blood stain on the mattress. Dahmer watches the movie.

We are watching a movie of Jeffrey Dahmer watching a movie. It is excruciating. We want to leave.

(Screams on the Exorcist III soundtrack sound like screams through Glenda Cleveland's walls in Dahmer—Monster.)

We begin to get a sense of the physical space. We know which room is which. We know the furniture, the decorations. We know where the door is. This place of horror is becoming familiar to us.

We watch as the victim takes off his shirt and tries to seduce Dahmer so as to trick him. For at least a moment, we are Dahmer: enchanted by this body. A lovely body. How horrible to be seduced, to yearn while Jeffrey Dahmer yearns. This is not the entertainment we wanted. (Some killing, some cannibalism.) "I want to watch the movie now," Dahmer says.

"Hey, you know," the victim says. "I don't like horror movies, honey. They scare me."

"What's so scary?" Dahmer asks. "Death is, uh, just a part of life."

We see a tear roll down the victim's face. He looks across the room at a large blue barrel.

"You scared of the movie or of me?" Dahmer asks.

"The movie. It's a scary movie."

"Am I weird?"

"No, you're not weird."

"Okay."

(Are we weird? For watching this?)

"So," the victim says, "what movie is this again?" 

We might be thinking the same thing.

3.

The first episode of Dahmer—Monster continues with the victim's escape, and if we know the story of Jeffrey Dahmer fairly well, we know that the night being depicted is July 22, 1991, the victim is Tracy Edwards, and Jeffrey Dahmer is about to become one of the most famous people in the world.

Even if we know the story fairly well, we might wonder why Dahmer in the scenes with the police keeps highlighting that he's gay and that the photos the police discover in his beside table are "some gay stuff". This first episode gives us the moment where Dahmer's life changes forever, but it does not give us context. The later episodes bring that context in, showing us, for instance, that Dahmer found great success by insisting on his homosexuality, which tended to make the police back off. He'd had great success with a previous escapee, a 14-year-old victim the police returned to him.

Though we don't yet have any context in the first episode, our desire for explanation gets teased and even parodied. In a room with police officers, Jeffrey's father, Lionel Dahmer (Richard Jenkins), says, "Well, he was always a ... he was a strange boy. ... When his mother and I divorced, that was very hard on him...." 

The detectives stare. "Is there anything else you would like to tell us?" one says.

"When he was young," Lionel Dahmer says, "I think he was four, he had a hernia operation. He was never the same after that."

Echoing our own incredulity at this explanation, the detective says, "A hernia operation?" But we know what the detective knows, and what Lionel does not. We know what Jeffrey Dahmer did.

The scene is magnificently constructed: written with care, acted thoughtfully, directed with confidence. "Can you tell me a little about what he did?" Lionel Dahmer says, reminding us that this is one of the last moments before the name Dahmer itself will become a synonym for monstrosity. In this moment, Jeffrey Dahmer's father is thinking that his son committed an ordinary, familiar, normal crime.

"You're aware your son is homosexual, yes?" Ah, so not exactly a normal crime. But still...

"When the police arrived to arrest your son, they found various items around the apartment that indicate your son has committed multiple murders."

"What items? What are you talking about?"

"There was a human head in his refrigerator."

As the items are described in voiceover, the camera returns us to the apartment. This is a standard move in true crime shows. The crime scene, the evidence. We are in comfortably gruesome territory here, the form is familiar, and now our most voyeuristic desires are fulfilled: we see (briefly) the head, we get to look in the vat of liquified body parts. Now we've got the movie we wanted!

But soon our desires are frustrated by a return to the interrogation room and Lionel Dahmer's face. We watch as he listens. "We believe he ate some of his victims," the detective says. Lionel Dahmer just stares — at us.

The detectives leave him alone to "process" the information they have shared with him. We stay in the room. We watch Lionel Dahmer drink coffee, think for a moment, then fight tears and convulsions of sadness, confusion, repulsion. He takes a deep breath.

We return to Glenda Cleveland, now watching her own apartment building on tv. The sound from the tv mingles with the sound from outside. People are gathering. The events at the Oxford Apartments are already locally famous.

A police officer tells Glenda that the building is a crime scene and she needs to leave her apartment. "Where exactly am I supposed to go?" she asks him. He has no answer. "Wait," she says as he turns away. "How many did you find?" He doesn't answer. The episode ends.

The next few episodes answer Lionel's question about what his son did and Glenda's question of how many bodies the police found. The episodes move fluidly back and forth in time, giving us Dahmer's childhood alongside his adulthood. These episodes are all written by the show's creators, Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, and the first three are directed by Clement Virgo. But then the series makes a slight shift, moving to director Jennifer Lynch for the fourth episode and spending a bit more time in Dahmer's late adolescence and early adulthood. We begin to feel like perhaps we understand him, in whatever way there is to understand that which it feels reductive to say we "understand".

The series makes a larger shift in the sixth episode, where another new director comes aboard (Paris Barclay) along with two new writers: David McMillan and Janet Mock. The focus of the series shifts significantly. It is the story of a victim, Tony Hughes (Rodney Burford). 

I am tempted to say that the only episodes of Dahmer—Monster that we really ought to watch are episodes six, seven, and eight. Each is a character study, more or less self contained. Episode six lets us understand a victim, it shows his life, it makes us like him and his family, it helps us see him as a human being and not a statistic or a name in a book we read or a movie we watch because we want to know about the terrible things Jeffrey Dahmer did.

Episode 7, titled "Cassandra", is about Glenda. It is sad and infuriating, because it shows how hard she tried to get the police to intervene and stop Dahmer from killing people. Niecy Nash's performance here and throughout the series helps us feel Glenda's terror, desperation, anger, and sadness while we also admire her determination. She is the conscience of the show and a better person than most of us who are watching it. This episode, too, is directed by Jennifer Lynch and written by Ian Brennan, David McMillan, and Janet Mock.

Episode 8 (written by Brennan, McMillan, and Murphy) is the only one directed by Gregg Araki. Its focus is Lionel Dahmer. Richard Jenkins has long been a cherished character actor, and this episode gives him an opportunity to shine. Araki directs with restraint — this is more the Gregg Araki of Mysterious Skin than The Doom Generation (I love both movies) — and seems to know that he has good material and a great actor to work with, so the director's job is not to get in the way.

These three episodes let us see, to some extent, the real human toll of Dahmer's actions. They expand the story beyond the individual, helping us recognize that the story of serial killers is not only the story of one sick person, but of the community they come from, the communities they hurt, the systems that enable them. These episodes achieve what the film My Friend Dahmer perhaps sought to, but could not, because the story of Jeffrey Dahmer is not a YA novel with a horror story sequel. (Jeffrey Dahmer the child is no more interesting than Jeffrey Dahmer the adult, and using him to tell a story of the ups and downs of high school is hardly insightful.)

After watching episodes 6, 7, and 8, I thought: What might the show have been if it were only these episodes? I was attracted to the radicalism of that idea. Tell the story of Dahmer's effect, not his crimes. We don't need to know more about his crimes, we need to know more about his victims, his neighbors, and the aftermath. That's where our attention and empathy ought to go.

Having watched all ten episodes, though, I see that the purpose of Dahmer—Monster is more ambitious (for better or worse) than that. As we see from breaking down the progression of the first episode, it is trying to use our morbid voyeuristic tendencies to get us to question those tendencies, to make us reflect on our sympathies and fascinations. By the end of the series, it seems to be questioning the whole genre of which it is a part. There's a clever element of metanarrative to it, especially since the show is on Netflix, which has had so much success with true crime documentaries and docudramas.

I truly don't know whether I think it's worth it. I admire the show's overall goals, its technical achievement, and the care with which it explores its stories. But I keep thinking: what if it were just the episodes about Tony Hughes, Glenda Cleveland, and Lionel Dahmer? What would a public steeped in serial killer obsession make of a show about Dahmer's crimes that was not focused on Dahmer himself?

I keep thinking of something Richard Tithecott wrote in Of Men and Monsters, citing a 1991 issue of People magazine: "We call what occurred in Dahmer's apartment 'unimaginable horror' and then do our utmost to imagine it, demand to know every detail."

4.

As we seek meaning for Dahmer (or any other serial killer), we also hold out the possibility of Evil, that catch-all term for terrible mysteries beyond psychology, a grab-bag for all the horrors that live beyond the heaven and earth of our philosophies. 

Richard Tithecott points out that serial killers strengthen our idea of individuality and individual responsibility, since the serial killer is a person whose deeds are (in the mythology, at least) the result of individual choices and individual desires — which is one reason, perhaps, why serial killers are so common and popular in the United States, the land of rugged individualism. (The serial killer is the contemporary site for the murderous impulses that fed the frontiersmen who slaughtered the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We don't call them serial killers; we call them pioneers.)

Evil is a religious belief or a handy adjective; it is not a useful analysis. If anything, it is the frustration of analysis, the failure of analysis. There is nothing to do about evil except throw some holy water at it. And then what?

If we label something evil then we must destroy it. That is the only possibility. There is no question of reform, no question of empathy, no question of examining systems or histories — evil just is, and our job is to stop it. All you can do with evil is snuff it out, and you must do so at whatever cost. 

Evil is why Dahmer had to be judged sane. Insane evil is chaos, and there is far less pleasure in punishing chaos than in punishing something more calculating, logical, knowable: something that provokes a horror we can deal with, a horror we can work through and get to the other side of. Tithecott writes: 

The construction of the sane and evil monster is the latest sign of our current desire to seek a language of condemnation which brings closure, of the desire for the distinctions of our "selves" from our "others" to be complete and lasting. Sane beings motivated by evil can be imprisoned or capitally punished and estranged from the rest of us. Our latest monster allows us to morally condemn at the same time as we give his acts the appearance of intelligibility and therefore responsibility. The cause of the crimes, evil, is inexplicable, beyond scientific investigation, but the acts themselves are the acts of a sane man. We are thus freed from a tangle of legal and psychiatric discourse which is perceived as protecting those whose actions are deemed gratuitous, beyond causal intelligibility, discourse referred to in a National Review editorial on the Dahmer trial entitled "So Guilty They're Innocent!"

Evil is a projection that is also an abstraction. It is the stuff so awful we can't even really think about it, at least not in any way we are willing to admit in polite company, and so it takes on occult properties. We can sense the evil in someone, we can feel the evil emanating from objects in proximity to evil deeds and evil doers, we know the evil shadows that haunt the places where evil acts occurred. It's all in our minds, but still hard to deny it as somehow real. Real enough. Real to us.

Evil lets us test our sense of ourselves as good — because that is so often the story we tell: I am a good person; or at least, I am trying to be a good person — and by looking at evil we strengthen our sense of that evil as other than us, outside us, beyond us. I am not Jeffrey Dahmer. My life may be many things, some of them unpleasant, but at least I am not Jeffrey Dahmer. Because Jeffrey Dahmer is evil.

And yet we are also attracted to evil. (Well, maybe not all of us. I am writing here in the dangerous second person plural. Separate yourself out from this plurality if you need.) People collect serial killer souvenirs. Sites of serial murder become tourist attractions. People fall in love with serial killers. The famous ones, from Ed Gein to Ted Bundy to John Wayne Gacy to Jeffrey Dahmer, become celebrities.

In the documentary The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, the police detective who first interrogated Dahmer says that once Dahmer decided to confess, he leaned in to the detective and said something like, "What I am about to tell you will make you famous." Dahmer knew he was about to go from being somebody living in a cheap and ugly apartment in a neglected corner of a neglected city, somebody without one friend in the world, somebody utterly unknown and inconsequential — to being somebody famous, likely to be remembered by history, and able to carry other people along with him in the shadow of his infamy. He would become the human embodiment of evil.

5.

Despite its length and the depth that length allows, Dahmer—Monster does not give the police officers much individual identity, does not spend time showing the effect of the case on the members of law enforcement who came in contact with Dahmer, does not highlight the ins and out of the investigation.

This narrative indifference to the police may be one reason why so many pundits and thinkpiecers pronounce discomfort with the series. Serial killer stories usually have a stronger element of police procedural. The police serve as a buffer between viewer and monster. If you desire narratives that reinforce the idea that the police exist to serve and protect, you can't get much better than the serial killer mythos: cops vs. murderers who will murder forever until the cops catch them. It's first terrifying, then comforting. Within the procedural framework, the monster will get caught, the evil will get eradicated. We can indulge our voyeuristic desire to know the details of the crimes while also knowing that we are safe. Most such narratives admit there may be some bad apples in the police force, but the bunch itself is not rotten. No matter what, thanks to the good cops, we are protected.

In Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, David Schmid points out that one of the reasons homosexuality and violence are so often linked in true crime narratives is that "true-crime writers often adopt a law enforcement perspective when discussing queer lifestyles and cultures." 

Anne E. Schwartz, whose homophobic depiction I quoted above, worked for eight years in the public relations office of Milwaukee PD, which makes her erstwhile advocacy for the police understandable — and also her transmission of homophobia, which was present in the policing. But the evidence shows that you don't have to become a spinmeister for the cops to still be telling the story their way.

Toward the end of Dahmer—Monster, two events get juxtaposed: a small award ceremony for Glenda Cleveland, honored by the Milwaukee Police as a heroic citizen, alongside a big celebration of the two police officers who returned a naked, wounded 14-year-old boy to Jeffrey Dahmer. The ceremony for Glenda Cleveland is in some side room of police headquarters, with folding chairs and a cheap lectern and painful fluourescent lights, a couple police officials on hand, scattered applause. The event at which the police officers are celebrated is a grand affair, with a stage and stage lights, people in their best clothes, dinner tables and waiters, an ocean of applause.

The police officers who returned a naked, wounded 14-year-old boy to Jeffrey Dahmer returned to their careers. One of them became president of the police union.

The choice of Dahmer—Monster to de-emphasize the police procedural elements of the story is a powerful and effective one. For an illuminating comparison, place Dahmer—Monster next to the recent British mini-series Des, a dramatization of the interrogation and prosecution of Dennis Nilsen.

Des focuses on the police and to a somewhat lesser extent Nilsen's "biographer", Brian Masters, who also wrote a (rather Freudian) book about Dahmer, one that includes Nilson's own (Hannibal Lecter-like) reflections on Dahmer's motives and meaning. With an aesthetic that screams Quality and Seriousness, Des gives us a relatable hero in DCI Peter Jay, a man who just wants justice but gets held back by bureaucracy. He's the kind of good copper (and not so good family man) we've seen in countless shows, movies, novels: diligent, a bit obsessed, messy in life but brilliant at his job, a man whose greatest care is the people he serves. He is a receptacle for our admiration, a vessel to carry us through the story, protecting us, the viewers, as he protects the people in his jurisdiction. 

The series builds a bit of suspense through the question of whether Dennis Nilsen will succeed in his bid to be sent to a mental institution rather than locked up for life in a prison, and we the viewers are positioned to cheer for him being found entirely sane and entirely guilty. Justice wins and Nilsen gets incarcerated and we can feel good about the basic systems of justice even as we question the judgment of the bureaucrats who were concerned about the budget. We can indulge our carceral fantasies, turn off the tv, and sleep well at night.

Des offers an opportunity for David Tennant to show off his truly impressive ability to inhabit a character, but ... for what? The show makes a few gestures toward honoring the victims, but we don't ever know much about them. Similarly, it gestures toward its characters reflecting on their own fascinations and actions, but it doesn't does anything with these reflections. It never makes us question why we are watching it. It never makes us wonder, as Dahmer—Monster does, whether we would be Glenda Cleveland or a gawking fan or a cop who returns a naked 14-year-old boy to a murderer. Ultimately, Des is an empty exercise, a bunch of people playacting and indulging in aesthetic wankery. It's the kind of media that ought to be condemned by the people who make it their job to condemn such things, and yet it got mostly very positive reviews (90% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes!). Meanwhile, it is the far superior, far more unsettling, far more conflicting, and far less conservative Dahmer—Monster that has been called "irresponsible" and "exploitative".

6.

Around the time I started watching Dahmer—Monster, I also read Jarett Kobek's two recent books about the Zodiac Killer, Motor Spirit and How to Find Zodiac. The first is an examination of the evidence in the Zodiac case and a contextualization of that evidence within its historical era. The second is a proposed (and pretty convincing) solution to the question of who Zodiac was. I am not especially interested in the Zodiac case, though David Fincher's movie Zodiac is one of my favorites of the last couple decades; what I appreciate about Fincher's film is that it is less about Zodiac than about the obsessions that horrendous crime can create in people. (Similarly, another masterpiece, Bong Joon Ho's film Memories of Murder.) What led me to Motor Spirit and How to Find Zodiac was less anything to do with crime than with an appreciation for the author. I really enjoyed Kobeck's book Only Americans Burn in Hell (notes on that here) and was curious to see how he would approach writing about murder and history.

One of the things Kobek's work on Zodiac shows is that Zodiac stopped killing once he knew he could keep getting attention through threats and by stoking paranoia. Eventually even his desire for attention dissipated. Writing in Motor Spirit of the May 3, 1974 postcard that he claims as the final Zodiac correspondence, Kobek says: 

For as long as there is the postal mail, there will be letters from The Zodiac. But the genuine issue original is retired. He isn't dead [in 1974], no suicide, didn't go to prison, not in jail, not in a mental hospital. ... There were so many predictions and diagnoses. Zodiac wants to be caught! Zodiac can't stop! Zodiac is a gibbering psychotic! Zodiac's sexual dysfunction will bring him to heel! Nonsense offered by hacks, people with the same desire as Zodiac, people hoping to see their names in print. The killer did the murders, Zodiac wrote the letters, Zodiac stopped writing. Zodiac got away. Zodiac won.

Serial killers are not geniuses. They are rarely even interesting people, more often blanks of broken personality where a person ought to be. Yet we want them to be supervillains. I have great admiration for some of Thomas Harris's books, for movies made of them (Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs primarily), and especially for Bryan Fuller's tv show Hannibal — but I know Hannibal Lecter is a fantasy character. That's the only reason he's any fun.

One of the most powerful and disturbing films about murder, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, was inspired by the story of Henry Lee Lucas, who at the time the film was written had confessed to hundreds of killings. The Texas Rangers were excited to have both a historically signficant criminal in their clutches and to be able to clear a phenomenal number of murder cases. They treated Lucas like a celebrity and even a colleague, and when questions were asked about Lucas's confessions, the police who held him doubled down on their assertion that they had captured the worst serial killer in history. Eventually, the truth had to come out, and now we know Lucas likely wasn't even a serial killer. (There's a Netflix show about that, too.)

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer remains a penetrating exploration of human depravity, a cinematic achievement as great as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but even though it tried to document reality, it ultimately proved to be a movie inspired not by actual crimes but by Henry Lee Lucas's fantasy of himself as a serial killer.

The mingling of fantasy and reality goes back to the origins of the serial killer figure. We find myth and fantasy obscuring fact in the story of the man sometimes called "America's first serial killer", H.H. Holmes, who was born Herman Webster Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire in 1861. While Holmes was certainly a murderer of at least two or three people, and definitely an eccentric and a conman, the image of him that has accrued over the years as a bloodthirsty mastermind living in a "murder castle" is an image based more on myth than fact — a myth Holmes himself sought to perpetuate. (It's unlikely that his actions in reality even fit the definition of a serial killer.) In H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, Adam Selzer shows just how much of the received idea of Holmes as demon has been based on yellow journalism, sensational speculation, and sheer fiction — to the extent that Selzer says Erik Larson's hugely popular Devil in the White City is, at least with regard to Holmes, more novel than nonfiction:

it was a hell of a read and transformed Holmes from an also-ran murderer into one of the great American supervillains. Larson’s interpretation of Holmes as a serial killer, in the modern sense of the term, immediately became the starting point for how Holmes was perceived. Two hundred victims, portrayed as an exaggeration by Larson, became the low estimate that one read in Internet articles and on TV programs. The stories of Holmes that Larson freely admitted came from his own imagination would be repeated as fact in countless future articles. By the 2010s, Holmes was the subject of numerous documentaries, podcasts, blog posts, TV shows, and more.

Larson is a wonderful storyteller and Devil in the White City a compelling narrative; it would not have been nearly so compelling if it were based more on the known (and knowable) facts of Mr. Mudgett's life.

Often, the ways tales of real murder get told demonstrate that tellers and audiences both seem to want the fantasy more than the reality. Kobek is particularly strong on this element of serial killer mythology. For instance, on Ted Bundy:

When he's caught, he's so average, so boring, that no one can reconcile the non-entity with its crimes. Society invents a new story. Ted's a genius, Ted's really handsome, Ted's charming. He's not what you'd expect! But Ted's none of these things. He's not hideous. But Ted's nothing special. He's not a genius. He's a reasonably well-educated White male adult who speaks with a dialect shorn of any obvious lower economic markers. ... Ted Bundy is the dog's breakfast of heterosexuality, representative of the equation's inherent imbalance. For every thousand remarkable women, the individuals who are smart or funny or beautiful or capable of amazing things or all combined, there's about one reasonably decent guy. Before he's revealed as a serial killer, that's how people see Ted. He's that decent guy. Ted's the default choice. He's the compromise. ... He's remarkable in the least remarkable way. Ted's not the dog's breakfast. Ted's two eggs and bacon spiked with a lethal dose of arsenic. He's a shitty little guy who likes to kill, who cuts off women's heads and has sex with the result. The cognitive dissonance of the good provider being a mass murderer is so profound, and threatens to expose so many uncomfortable truths about heterosexuality, that the press transforms Ted into a beautiful stunning genius.

It might even be simpler than what Kobek says there. It might just be that we desperately want the story of serial murder, which feels so large and incomprehensible, to be about something more than drab little men.

7.

"Crimes, their victims and their perpetrators, sadly define the times in which we live. There is no puzzle, only pain."  
—David Peace, 2003

The serial killer is madness made temptation — but whose madness, whose temptation?

I am grateful to Dahmer—Monster for where its journey takes us, for the aid it gives in analyzing and then refusing the temptation of fascination, but I find myself yearning for a different, more nihilistic vision, one that admits that the search for meaning in abomination is itself an abomination: David Peace's Red Riding quartet of novels and the trilogy of films based on them, stories of newspaper reporters and police officers in Yorkshire around the time of the "Yorkshire Ripper" murders. (The later novels in the series are the only works of fiction I can remember giving me nightmares.)

The films are each deliberately different, with not only separate directors but consciously diverging styles and film stocks (1974: 16mm, 1980: 35mm, 1983: digital), yet they are united in what Mark Fisher called their Gnostic vision of "corrupt matter characterized by heavy weight and impenetrable opacity". Though the books and films all focus on investigators and investigations, there is no glory here, only incompetence, corruption, violence, and rot. Nothing much good comes of any of it.

I suppose I am thinking about the Red Riding books and movies because having made it this far on the journey of exploring Jeffrey Dahmer and serial killers generally, I feel like I've only circled back. I feel like Eddie Dunford at the end of the first Red Riding story turning his car around and driving into the police lights. Not revelation, just resignation. 

We've made it around ... what? Encircled an emptiness. Not an abyss, not a funhole, not a Zen nothingness, just the blank stare of the murderer, a person who never became much of a person.

We have been tempted by the serial killer to give him attention.

We have been tempted to be fascinated. Tempted to investigate. To seek meaning.

It is a temptation to refuse.