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Actor Evan Peters as Jeffrey Dahmer
Photo: Netflix
There is probably no other genre that has become as popular in recent years as true crime with all its varieties – the starting shot for the hype was eight years ago with the »Serial« podcast about the convicted murderer Adnan Syed, who is making the headlines again because a judge ordered his immediate release after twenty years in prison.
Countless other formats followed, also on TV and stream;
most recently, the series »Only Murders in the Building« makes fun of exactly this hype, in which three residents without much criminal flair try to put together a true crime podcast.
Director Ryan Murphy has also been riding this wave for years. His specialty is fictionalizing real old cases. Murphy is behind successful formats such as "American Horror Story" and "The Assassination of Gianni Versace".
Together with Ian Brennan, he is now retelling the case of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer for Netflix.
In Milwaukee, Dahmer had committed 17 murders of men and youths over a 13-year period in the late 1970s.
Most of his victims were black and homosexual.
Dahmer lured his victims to his home, drugged and brutally murdered them, had sex with them, photographed their bodies and kept their bones and skulls - in some cases eating their organs and muscles.
So much for the facts that made the case a media event in the 1990s.
"I want to eat your heart"
The series now begins - as so often with Murphy - with the end.
In 1991, Dahmer met Tracy Edwards in a bar and invited him to his shabby apartment, where all the warning signs were already there: a blood-smeared drill, dead fish in the aquarium, a blue transport barrel, the foul stench.
Again he tries to stun his victim, again he watches "Exorcist III";
he puts his head on Edwards' chest, wanting to hear his heartbeat, and says to him, "I want to eat your heart." But Edwards escapes, managing to get the police's attention.
Here, in the first episode, Murphy tries to shed light on the interesting questions about this plot: Could the serial killer have been able to commit his crimes for so long because the police didn't care about gay and black men?
Because black people and
people of
color
lived in the district?
So is Dahmer's story also the story of a police failure?
Because Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Evan Peters in the series, who is celebrated online for his performance, but whose game is somewhat repetitive), had already attracted attention several times before the murders.
He masturbated in public, was sentenced by a court to a year in a reformatory followed by a five-year probation for sexual assault and the seduction of a minor.
His neighbor (Niecy Nash) later brought to the attention of authorities during the murder phase that strange noises and smells were coming from Dahmer's apartment late into the night, but nothing followed.
And so the first episode ends at least with the hope of wanting to tell a different kind of story - from the point of view of the victims, for example.
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Unfortunately, this hope is not fulfilled.
Dahmer only touches on another narrative style, but then he succumbs to the attraction of the perpetrator's perspective, although there are already several film productions, documentaries and books about the serial killer.
This is also reflected in the aesthetics: it's always dark, gloomy, everything was obviously shot in a - supposedly - powerful sepia filter.
Dahmer always felt like an outsider, had no friends, was bullied, and started drinking at an early age.
His parents (played by Richard Jenkins and Penelope Ann Miller on the show) kept fighting, got divorced and left him alone in a house for three months after that – the mother took off with the little brother, the father broke up with his new girlfriend in a motel.
When he is later expelled from college and the army, Dahmer checks in with his grandmother with a mannequin.
All of this is told in recurring loops, but in the end they can't really grasp the character and don't go beyond the cliché.
It takes six episodes before this psychogram is finally broken - thanks to the script written by »Pose« producer and writer Janet Mock.
The episode focuses on the story of victim Tony Anthony Hughes.
But it remains the exception rather than the rule - this series has nothing new to add to the Dahmer case other than the usual horror.
