Dahmer Disappoints

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

I doubt that anyone would sit down to watch a ten-part docudrama dealing with a cannibal serial killer and expect to be "entertained,"  but a reasonable expectation would be for the viewer to be swept up in a compelling tale of sadistic cruelty as the dark heart of an evil man was laid open for close examination.  A show that requires ten hours of my time should pull me into the story and be engrossing.

Ryan Murphy's Netflix production of "Dahmer - Monster:  The Jeffrey Dahmer Story" reminds us twice in the title that it is the "Dahmer" story, an American true-crime drama that is already basically well known to most of the country.  The show focuses on the horrible crimes - murder, necrophilia and cannibalism - committed by a young white man living in an economically depressed neighborhood of Milwaukee in the late twentieth century.  Over a thirteen-year period the perpetrator, Jeffrey Dahmer, murdered seventeen young men, slept with some of their corpses, cut up their bodies, and cooked and ate some of their body parts.  The material is there for an "engrossing" tale, one that would "compel" us to sit and watch, even if the material is truly disgusting and repulsive.    

But the Netflix version of "Dahmer" somehow misses the mark, and after viewing all ten episodes I came away feeling that I was no more enlightened on the subject of the "monster" criminal than I would have been if I had just read his Wikipedia entry.    

The story as presented on Netflix just did not reach out and engage me in the way that I thought it should.   As the credits rolled at the end of Episode Ten I did not feel that I had any deeper insight into the villain or his victims than I did prior to watching the series.  Perhaps the material was too well known and there was little room for new insights.  Or maybe it was a general lack of direction brought about by the six writers and five directors scattered among the ten episodes.  Or maybe it was too much reliance on the details of the story and an understatement of the environment in which it occurred.  (Could we have been given a better feel of the time and the place and the milieu in which Jeff Dahmer operated?)

The history that "Dahmer" was based on is horrendous and scary, yet the overall feel of the series was not scary - just repulsive.  Everything seemed subdued, even the rage of the families, and the racism and cronyism of the police felt like it had been dialed down for the production.  The film had a hard edge, but that edge was not sharp.

"Dahmer" was not the "engrossing" or "compelling" series that I was hoping to experience.   It was, in fact, a ten-hour disappointment.