Ryan Murphy, the creator of series like ‘Glee’, ‘Nip/Tuck’ or ‘American Horror Story’, gets into the mind of the Milwaukee cannibal in what is his best series for Netflix
Glenda is watching TV, but she can’t stop her eyes from falling on the vent just above the TV in her apartment. For years, through that fence, the noise of the neighbor sneaks in, whom she has heard in the wee hours of the morning using electric knives and mixers. She also gets a stench that makes her nauseated and sometimes makes her vomit. Her neighbor is Jeffrey Dahmer, a guy of few words, introverted and weird, who often brings young people to his apartment in Milwaukee. Jeffrey was arrested on July 22, 1991. It was not because the police listened to Glenda, who had called numerous times to complain about the noises, smells and even screams coming from the apartment next door, but because Tracy Edwards , his last victim, whom he seduced with the promise of giving him $50 if he would let him photograph him, managed to escape when Jeffrey had tried to handcuff him. After fleeing the dilapidated apartment block, she came across a couple of police officers who decided to show up at the murderer’s house. Along with a large bucket full of acid and remains of what appeared to be a human being, the agents found photographs of bodies and the identity cards of the victims.
Precisely for that episode begins ‘Dahmer’, the new series that Ryan Murphy has developed for Netflix with one of his regular collaborators, Ian Brennan. Accustomed to the excess and visual delirium that usually accompany Murphy’s productions -‘Glee’, ‘American Horror Story’, ‘Nip/Tuck’, ‘Hollywood’, ‘Pose’ or ‘Feud’ are some of them-, ‘ Dahmer – Monster: the story of Jeffrey Dahmer’, which is the complete title of the series structured in ten chapters of about 50 minutes each, surprises with its sober and forceful staging, a puff of smoke, stale air and dirty that weighs on the viewer for much of the footage. After a first chapter where the tension is unbearable -those silences that Evan Peters, in Dahmer’s skin, handles like nobody else or the sordid and suffocating aspect of the apartment are vehemently installed in the retina-, Murphy and Brennan strive to tell the story story of this serial killer who killed at least seventeen young people between 1978 and 1991 and who also practiced necrophilia and cannibalism with his victims.
With jumps back and forth in time, the fiction is presented in a fragmented way, as if trying to reconstruct the intricate and perverse mind of the so-called Milwaukee cannibal, a not particularly intelligent psychopath whom the Justice and the security forces and the Order was given more than one chance. Thus, we witness a difficult childhood, in a broken family, dominated by the constant fights between Lionel and Joyce, his parents, and the absence of the first, whose work as a chemist led him to spend a lot of time away from home. It was around this time that Jeffrey became interested in viscera, something his father encouraged, collecting and dissecting roadkill, seeing that it was one of the few subjects the kid was curious about. After his parents divorced during his senior year of high school, he ended up spending the summer alone at the family home in Ohio. Embraced by alcohol, he beat his first victim to death, a hitchhiker he convinced to have a few beers at home before taking him to a concert.
Years later, his second victim would be charged in a hotel, after blocking his way in all the saunas in Milwaukee, given his tendency to drug his flirts at night. From there he devised a modus operandi that he would repeat often: he seduced boys in gay clubs, even offering them money, and took them to his apartment or his grandmother’s house. Once there, he drugged them and then strangled them to later carry out all kinds of outrages with the corpses. Marginalized and lonely, on four occasions he even drilled holes in the skulls of his victims to inject hydrochloric acid or boiling water into their frontal lobes to try to turn them into zombies at his mercy. Despite the macabre of the subject, the fiction does not recreate itself in explicit violence, although it continues to be certainly unpleasant.
Playing all the sticks
The best thing about ‘Dahmer’ is that they haven’t stopped there. The series delves into the failures and mistakes made by the institutions, which on several occasions turned a blind eye to the man also known as the Milwaukee butcher due to a mixture of racism – fourteen of Dahmer’s victims belonged to various ethnic minorities – and homophobia. . Thus, he only spent ten months in prison when he brought a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy to his house and started playing him. The Police also preferred not to interfere when several neighbors of the apartment block in which he lived reported that there was an underage boy with obvious signs of having been drugged. Persons in the apartment, they accepted the explanations of Jeffrey, who assured that he was of legal age. Dahmer explained that he was her boyfriend and that they had gotten into a fight, which is why he was drunk. He was 14 years old and they didn’t even check if Jeffrey had a background check – creepy to hear the actual phone call to the police.
The series also addresses the consequences that such a case had for the community and the feeling of helplessness that the relatives of the victims felt. And it even delves into the feeling of guilt of some parents who did not know or did not want to see the horrible monster that their son was transforming into, who in the mid-nineties became a celebrity of the macabre, sending autographs to the fans who requested it by letter. Perhaps the best series that Murphy has given to Netflix since he signed five years of exclusivity with the platform.
#Sleazy #Dahmer