When I was a young and dumb English major, I wrote my undergraduate thesis on depictions of cannibalism in literature. American literature contains a surprising amount of cannibals: To read Herman Melville is to believe that life’s main struggles will come in the form of elusive whales and meeting people who want to eat you.
My thesis adviser suggested I think about updating my source material a little bit — bring it out of the 19th century — and so in addition to poring over fat novels written by bearded dead men, I also examined, as primary texts, the journalism covering Jeffrey Dahmer’s arrest and trial. I pawed through old USA Today headlines blaring “Nightmare in Milwaukee,” through clippings of People magazine describing the heads in the freezer, through anonymous interviews with nauseated policemen, all of it.
I mention this because you would think if anyone were going to be first in line to watch Netflix’s new fictionalized series, “Dahmer,” it should have been me. But it was only a few weeks ago when Netflix announced the show had become its second-most watched show, ever, that I finally gave over a full working day of my life to this series. And since English majors rarely get to make practical use of their studies, well, here we are.
Advertisement
Is “Dahmer” a good show? Television critics can decide that. As a Midwesterner, I’ll comment only to say that Evan Peters nails the accent. Is “Dahmer” a show that should have been made? You don’t even have to start an episode to become convinced that the answer is no. Relatives of the serial killer’s 17 victims have been vocal in saying the show retraumatized them. Rita Isbell, the sister of Erroll Lindsey, said she was dismayed to see her impassioned courtroom speech to Dahmer — officers had to restrain her from attacking him — reenacted word for word and transformed into a meme.
All along, show creator Ryan Murphy argued this wasn’t his intent. The showrunners were making a redeeming kind of Dahmer series, they said. Theirs would bring the focus away from Dahmer and onto his victims and to the racist and homophobic systems that failed them. One episode focuses entirely on the life of Tony Hughes, a deaf aspiring model. The Sinthasomphone family — Dahmer murdered one of their sons and molested another — make regular appearances throughout the series. It’s an obvious attempt to transform the boys from police reports into human beings.
The flaw in that thinking is that a 2022 viewer doesn’t need help humanizing Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims or their families. They were people like we are, with dreams and aspirations like we have. When these young men and boys were killed, their families reacted with the grief we can all explicitly understand.
‘Dahmer’ is not a story that needs retelling on a television show
What we cannot understand is why a person would eat people. And that’s what the show, despite its claims of centering on the victims, spends most of its time doing: querying, in great visual detail, how Jeffrey Dahmer got to be Jeffrey Dahmer. Was it watching his mother lie on her bed, corpse-like, after a pill overdose? Was it dissecting roadkill with his dad in the name of scientific experimentation?
Advertisement
In one scene Dahmer goes fishing and, while learning to gut his catch, squeezes the entrails between his fingers and watches them ooze. It’s meant to be disgusting — it is disgusting — but we’re also meant to understand that Dahmer finds it titillating. The camera lingers on the fish, and the image returns throughout the series.
This is what I remember from my days as a young and dumb English major studying cannibals: the lingering. The way that journalists at the time, like Murphy’s production now, slobbered over all of the details in Dahmer’s horrible apartment — the femurs, the torsos, the vats of acid and the skulls in the filing cabinet — as if it was us, the reader, preparing for a good meal rather than Dahmer preparing his wretched human ones.
This is the delicate line with any depiction of a serial killer. To make them compelling characters, they must be three-dimensional characters. To be three-dimensional, we must understand them. To understand them, we have to see the world through their eyes. Soon, you’re six-episodes deep into Dahmer’s mind, listening to him explain that he’s a much better man than killer-clown John Wayne Gacy, because unlike Gacy he drugged his victims before dismembering them.
Advertisement
Too many think pieces have already been written about America’s collective fascination with serial killers. But at least a part of it is our endless appetite for understanding the inner workings of evil men. How did society fail them? How did their parents fail them? Was it the mother’s fault? (We always think it’s the mother’s fault.) How did they feel when they killed? How did they feel when they didn’t kill? I cannot even picture a world in which we treated evil men as the one thing we can never seem to treat them as: unspecial.
While watching “Dahmer” I vaguely remembered reading — back in my thesis-writing days — a scholarly essay about the way cannibalism was eroticized in Melville’s writings. The writer argued that in 19th century literature, cannibalism was described in the same way that certain taboo sex acts were described: as forbidden violations of the body. The taboo sex acts could not be described in polite company, but cannibalism could. The other day I went Googling for this article to see I’d remembered it right. Yep, there it was, with a snappier title than most academic papers: “Lovers of Human Flesh.”
“Cannibals and lovers both pay exceptional attention to the body of their desired,” wrote the author, Caleb Crain, describing the shared vocabulary of hunger found in both discussions of cannibalism and carnal pleasures: Killers bite victims and lovers nip at their paramours. We salivate over people we’re attracted to the same way we do over meals we want to eat.
Advertisement
Of course, it’s a different kind of salivating: A lover’s drool is different in every way from the drool of a maniac sharpening his knives. But I couldn’t help but think of “Lovers of Human Flesh” as I let one “Dahmer” episode bleed into another, and millions of households around the country did the same.
The line between revulsion and attraction is fine sometimes. But watching Dahmer won’t teach you anything more profound about that. It will only teach you that we don’t need more series about cannibals.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmqssSsq7KklWR%2FcX6RaGhpZ2FtfLi02GagrGWUlrWusdFmqqGnp2K9sLzUpZirZw%3D%3D
- ←Previous Post
- NextPost →
