Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

Yet people are watching it in droves. For weeks it has been Netflix's top show in Ireland.

(Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes is also in the top 10 this week.) In time a psychotherapist will write a paper called Hunks, Houses and Homicide: The Irish Psyche in a Time of Netflix, and it will all make sense. Of course, as I’ve written before, the world of Paw Patrol is a dystopia in which the emergency services are outsourced to mechanised dogs and everyone bows to the whims of a financially independent child. So, in a way, our children’s sense of the future is even darker than ours. As an Irish Times intellectual I am unwholesomely obsessed with the Irish psyche, and the Netflix top 10 feels like as good a place as any to explore that psyche’s gibbering, gurning id. There’s a void at the centre of the show, and what we’re left with is unnerving, upsetting and philosophically empty. ‘Inexplicably There Is a Serial Killer’ is the thesis statement. Dahmer’s life is presented as a meaningless jumble of biographical details that make his crimes no more or less explicable than before you saw this programme. It’s clear from the start that Dahmer is pretty bad at serial killing, body disposal and police evasion and that he slapsticks his way through it for so long because of institutional racism. I start suspecting the whole show’s an advertorial, that Budweiser did some research, found its main demographic was ‘people who are like Jeffrey Dahmer’ and decided to roll with it. Even in the world of serial killing, it seems, white mediocrity rises to the top. It has all the makings of a network sitcom. Sadly, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story is actually yet another prestige series about a famous person from the olden days made by the television auteur Ryan Murphy.

In roughly 10 hours, the series takes the audience through the life of an infamous serial killer and how he was able to avoid the police long enough to take the ...

Despite these claims, the series does a respectable job of bringing awareness to how the victims lived as young men. These Hollywood representations trap the families of the victims in a state of perpetual suffering as they keep having to relive the loss of their loved ones, all while reading internet frenzies fascinated with the heinous crimes. Critics feel the show glorifies the Milwaukee Cannibal and forces the families of the victims to relive their pain through the big screen. Nash also depicted the exasperation of the Black community as a whole, whose cries for protection and pleas to be acknowledged by the local authorities were largely ignored. It captures Dahmer’s arrest, the unveiling of multiple dismembered body parts and the disturbing photographs that led to his undoing. He blew audiences away with his ability to capture the gruesome compulsions that overcame Dahmer while incorporating human qualities, such as his awkwardness and self-doubt.

Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is the latest biographical drama by Netflix. The show is created by Ryan Murphy, who is known for being the ...

The premise of the show breaks down the many killings of Jeffrey Dahmer between 1978-1991 in the point of view of his victims. While the show does well from a Hollywood perspective, you can’t help but feel mixed about it when it comes to an inadvertent exploitative perspective. “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is the latest biographical drama by Netflix.