![]() ![]() The sixth installment of the series, “Silenced,” directed by Paris Barclay, takes a formally inventive turn in centering the life and family of one of Dahmer’s victims, Tony Hughes, who was Black and deaf the episode privileges Hughes’s perspective by falling almost entirely silent for long stretches as Hughes and his friends happily banter and trash-talk in American Sign Language. Dahmer’s Black neighbor, Glenda Cleveland (played by Niecy Nash), repeatedly and fruitlessly attempts to alert authorities to the stench and bizarre noises emanating from Dahmer’s apartment. Fourteen of Dahmer’s seventeen murder victims were boys or men of color, including ten Black victims, and “Dahmer” extensively dramatizes how racism and homophobia-both structural and individual, and particularly at the level of law enforcement-enabled Dahmer to continue to kill for so long. Murphy’s “Dahmer” does attempt to widen the sociological frame. But so much content has already been wrung from Dahmer’s life and crimes, including multiple feature-length films, documentaries, and memoirs, that a certain fatigue should have settled in by now. It’s hardly surprising that a Ryan Murphy production, especially one that promises terror and gore, would attract a blockbuster audience. Subscribers logged nearly two hundred million hours watching the program in its first week of release-more than three times as many hours as Netflix’s next most popular series. But beyond the exactitude of gesture, dialect, and gait is a sense of strange and paradoxical familiarity: the slow realization that “that guy” somehow became that guy.Īfter Netflix released the ten-part miniseries “Dahmer,” on September 21st, it became far and away the streaming service’s most-watched title of the week and its biggest-ever series début, despite receiving little advance marketing. Evan Peters’s performance as the serial killer in Netflix’s “Dahmer-Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” is technically precise those almost imperceptible and extremely regional tcks of breath that punctuate the ends of Dahmer’s sentences, for instance, are pure distilled Lake Erie. He was a beige, recessive spectre who didn’t blend into his surroundings so much as he blended into himself his occasional bouts of attention-seeking revealed either a profound misunderstanding of social cues or a trollish disregard for them. He went to high school with your older brother-maybe he was on the bowling team maybe the only class he passed was shop-or he lived down the street with his great-aunt, or he worked the late shift at the 7-Eleven. ![]() If you grew up on the lower rungs of the white middle class in the Rust Belt of the second half of the twentieth century, you knew a guy like Jeffrey Dahmer. ![]()
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