Monster – Dahmer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story may be controversial, but there's no denying that the Netflix series has grabbed people's attention. The series dominated the streamer's top 10 in the week after it was released, even as relatives of its victims spoke out against the show. Now, there's Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. This three-episode docuseries aims to provide more insight into the twisted mind of one of America's most infamous serial killers. Instead, he offers a grim catalog of horrors that focuses on the killer at the expense of those he killed.
Monster – Dahmer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story attempts to walk a difficult line. On the one hand, it is the portrait of a murderer. On the other, it is an examination of the lives of his victims and the institutional failures that allowed him to get away with it. But the Ryan Murphy series sometimes feels more exploitative than insightful, a problem that is amplified in Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes.
"I felt like I was Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs," says Dahmer's attorney, Wendy Patrickus, at the start of "Sympathy for the Devil," the first of the docuseries' hour-long episodes. It's a throwaway line, but one that gestures to the enduring fascination with Dahmer. The Oscar-winning The Lambs was released just a few months before Dahmer's arrest. It focused on a cunning and erudite serial killer with a taste for human flesh. At the time, people were eager to draw comparisons between Anthony Hopkins' terrifying character and the real-life "Milwaukee cannibal." The connection may even have helped the film clean up at the Academy Awards, the Los Angeles Times noted.
Star: Jeffrey Dahmer
But as this docuseries shows, Dahmer was not Hannibal Lecter. In the recordings of his extensive conversations with Patrickus, what emerges is the image of a disturbed man with little understanding, or perhaps unwillingness to reveal, what motivated his behavior.
“I was wondering why they made me do all the murders,” he tells his lawyer after she asks what he was thinking. "What he was looking for that would fill the emptiness he felt."
The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes is the third installment in the Netflix series Conversations with a Killer. (Previous installments focused on John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy.) He seems to want to find out "what made [Dahmer] tick," as Patrickus says in episode 3. But he never provides a satisfactory answer to that question, perhaps because there isn't one to be sure that Dahmer was damaged in some fundamental way. But any mental illness he has had does not excuse his horrible actions.
Dahmer's unbiased and emotionless descriptions of his crimes are chilling. They suggest, as his attorney Gerald Boyle observes, that he had no remorse for what he did. But Conversations With a Killer persists in the idea that a lonely man's pathological fear of abandonment drove him to kill, hinting that he was unable to resist his deathly desires. When it chooses to emphasize the long period between his first murder in 1978 and his second murder almost a decade later or its attempts to sublimate his impulses through religion, the series comes close to painting him as a victim. of forces beyond his control. Occasionally, there are references to his ability to charm, manipulate, and deceive those around them. But the Dahmer in director Joe Berlinger's series appears more as a passive actor in his own life than a terrifying predator.
Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes strives to produce a meaningful insight into the psychology of his subject. But he manages to deliver lurid details about Dahmer's crimes. We see the contents of the freezer where he stored various body parts (thankfully hidden in paper and plastic). There are also photos of the skulls of the people he killed and brief, blurry images of the Polaroids he took of his victims. We learn that he showered in the same bathtub where he hid the bodies. At one point, he describes in detail his hair-raising efforts to transform 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone into a zombie that he could keep alive for his own purposes. It's the rubberneck of real crime at its worst.
Ultimately, the most compelling parts of The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes are when Dahmer doesn't speak at all. As expected, no relatives of the victims participated in this project. But reporter James Causey provides context for how the racial dynamic in Milwaukee helped Dahmer get away with it. Other segments highlight how his crimes reverberated in the city's small gay community, where everyone knew each other. The police were not interested in seriously investigating crimes against homosexual men.