Who Is Dahmer Even Made For?

me it feels like at least once a year a streaming show will appear seemingly from nowhere and become a phenomenon overnight this year that show was Dahmer and honestly even having seen it that's still kind of baffles me I guess the writing should have been on the wall given the ever increasing popularity of True Crime over the last decade but really who could have guessed that one of the most popular shows not just of this year but of all time on Netflix would have been a show about Jeffrey Dahmer well Ryan Murphy that's who that's right let's just address the elephant in the room here this show is spearheaded by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan the co-creators of Glee Ryan Murphy also being one of the co-creators of American Horror Story the show that I've been infamously harsh toward in fact it's basically the only thing this channel is known for at this point that being said it has been over a decade since American Horror Story released and I'd hate to Define someone's creative output solely by what they made 10 years ago all of my negative feelings toward AHS aside I really wanted to give Dahmer a fair chance and go in with an open mind the names attached did have me somewhat hesitant but after the overwhelming success of the show plus the divisive critical reception I really felt like I had to see what the show was all about does Dahmer deserve its success and did the creative voices behind the show grow it all in the past decade well yes and no [Music] I have to admit watching this right after re-watching American Horror Story asylum was like a breath of fresh air apart from a few key scenes this series was surprisingly restrained the show is not as fixated on shock value as I expected going in at least not when it comes to the portrayals of the more grisly stuff that occurred really for a show about Jeffrey Dahmer it's shockingly light on Gore and on-screen violence the horrifying acts that occur are more often implied than shown and I think those scenes are more effective because of that I really enjoyed how methodically paced and tonally consistent this series was compared to the usual Baroque and gratuitous style that Ryan Murphy employs in work he's involved in all without losing a lot of the things I did enjoy about his previous work like the cinematography Great Performances not just from Evan Peters from literally everyone and also the transgressiveness of the material and its socio-political comment Terry I think the more subdued approach shows that on some level everyone involved had some semblance of respect for the events that took place and were at least mindful about how to portray them in terms of gratuity overall I would say this is probably the best work I've ever seen from this creative team [Music] now comes the part that's probably going to make people mad at me so before I say anything just know that one there will be spoilers for Dahmer if you can even call them that plus I'm going to give a very fair content warning we're going to be talking lightly about some very heavy subject matter so look on screen if any of the following topics put you at risk of harm please click away from the video now and lastly this is just my perspective on things I'm not trying to speak for anyone else or come to anyone's defense or attack anybody I'm not trying to give a definitive take on the show I'm just sharing my own personal feelings on it and unfortunately I feel this series also embodies the worst aspect of American Horror Story and that's being exploitative [Music] foreign [Music] if there was one thing in AHS I was most negatively critical of that was the show constantly using one-to-one Recreations of real world violence right alongside horror tropes to scare and entertain its audience and while I think it'd be a gross oversimplification to say that's exactly what Dahmer does it still feels that way a lot of the time just with a slightly different execution being a true crime show the entirety of the show is predicated on adopting filmmaking techniques from character studies dramas and horror films to tell a real world story and don't get me wrong there's nothing inherently incorrect with this in my eyes it's not as blunt and tasteless to me as putting spooky monsters and the horrors of World War II side by side and treating them as exactly the same thing but it does present interesting creative and ethical challenges a lot of times in great fictional stories what happens is the story itself display is a tiny aspect of reality and through the lens of fiction makes it feel larger and pulls it more clearly into Focus refracting reality back to us in a way that makes it feel more truly understood what Dahmer and other reality-based entertainment attempts to do is take big picture reality and inversely use this fiction to try and compress that reality into its narrow lens in both cases you're left with similar results both are distortions of reality the difference is in their approach where one feels enhancing and the other feels inherently reductive I feel like the goal that's trying to be reached in this reductive approach is to tell the story in a way that can be intuitively and emotionally understood by the audience without reducing it down to the point where it excludes important details or doesn't feel like it's truly telling the full story even though it never really could Dahmer as a show really struggles with this balance and it's clearly something that was weighing on everyone's Minds behind the scenes I wanted to make sure that we as viewers got to truly sort of understand how a situation like this takes place not just through Jeffrey Dahmer's eyes but Through The Eyes of people who had their own hopes and aspirations and dreams heavy is the head that wears the crown to tell this story that comes with a lot of responsibility because you want to make sure you get it right it felt important to be respectful to the victims to try to tell the story as authentically as we could we had one rule going into this from Ryan that it would never be told from Dahmer's point of view to be fair to everyone creatively involved I don't envy them that is a hard line to ride and everyone is bound to walk away with wildly different interpretations for me they made a few missteps that soured the entire entire experience for me I feel like if Ryan Murphy's one rule for the show was truly what Evan Peters says it was then they didn't do a very good job sticking to it in the first half now this isn't always the case but as audience members we are sort of trained to rely on a central character to be our perspective throughout a show or movie and what character becomes Centric to the story is really important in works like Dahmer this is something that David Fincher's True Crime projects like zodiac and mind Hunter have always been great at the Zodiac Killer is not the central character of zodiac the film is centered around an ensemble of journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle mine hunter isn't a show centered around Ed Kemper or Charles Manson it is a story involving them told through the perspective of an ensemble of FBI agents and when it comes to writing your central character at least in fiction a piece of advice you'll always hear is make your most interesting character yours Central character the writers of zodiac and mind Hunter found clear ways to make their respective Central characters compelling mostly because they're very well defined in nuanced but also due to the fact that what drives these characters is the same thing that compelled us to watch them the characters like us have that Natural Curiosity a lot of us seem to have about trying to understand these outlandish and heinous crimes but with all that in mind just looking at the events that inspired Dahmer from a writer's perspective which of these characters sounds more interesting a completely normal person who's just trying to live their life and tragically dies young or a cannibalistic serial killer who gets away with his crimes for nearly an entire decade the show recognizes this and tries to have its cake and eat it too it focuses on Jeffrey Dahmer for over half of the series because he's an interesting character a very interesting literal real-life murderer that means to taking over half the focus of the show away from the other characters aka the very real people he killed their families and the community who was impacted as a result the show later switches perspectives somewhat in the second half focusing more on victims and the community but it creates this really jarring feeling since the show can't seem to find the right balance of perspectives it can't highlight one point of view without diminishing the other like imagine being Tracy Edwards right now that you you escape being murdered just to be reduced to an audience surrogate in a creepy horror sequence you don't learn anything about him how he feels his dreams his experiences all you know is that he's smart and resourceful that he narrowly escapes Dahmer and is responsible for Dahmer being arrested for his crimes do you see how in this scenario his character basically only serves Dahmer's story that's why trying to squeeze reality into the confines of fictional storytelling structure can feel so reductive especially like I said when the first half of the series is dominated by Dahmer's perspective [Music] when it comes to how the show handles Dahmer himself it feels humanizing at best fetishistic at worst and mythologizing somewhere in between the first five episodes spend so much time insisting the significance of past events in Dahmer's life in so much as showing how his every methodology and motivation is traced back to his past in some way to the point where it feels like a comic book villain origin story in fact this entire first half essentially feels exactly like Todd Phillips's Joker I mean come on Am I Wrong a misunderstood mentally ill man who doesn't have proper societal or parental support who fantasizes about finding love who then commits heinous acts of violence which comes with a lot of the positives of a piece like Joker like challenging the audience to understand the man himself and more importantly the factors that led to creating him and how that reflects the world around us today but it also comes with a lot of the negatives like the blunt and overly simplistic ways in which the information is presented where it feels like there's no room for audience interpretation at all Dahmer takes a lot of artistic Liberties and Visually embellishes a lot of his story which feels ham-fisted in the same way Joker does to me it's almost like it's insisting you kind of feel bad for the guy what else is showing all this traumatic stuff that happened to Jeffrey Dahmer supposed to Garner out of the audience other than sympathy or at least understanding again I respect it in the sense that it is a challenge to the audience to humanize this person we've all deified as a quote-unquote monster as the title aptly says there's a lot of important dialogue to dissect from the first half of the show how systemic issues like poverty racism and homophobia played a role in Dahmer's crimes going ignored how societal standards of perform masculinity may have led both to Dahmer feeling victimized as well as his father not being fully emotionally equipped to provide proper support and vulnerable vulnerability for his son who desperately needed it which is encapsulated by a wonderfully performed well-written and emotionally evocative Diner scene also it does attempt to highlight how Dahmer is an anomaly not because he's this evil deity but because he doesn't fit into a predetermined neatly defined societal box we as a society did not know what to do with a Jeffrey Dahmer and we still wouldn't in its best moments this show is humanizing and explorative of Dahmer without feeling like an endorsement of him but it's all so hard to defend when the entire execution just feels so intuitively wrong to me since we're talking about a real human being who did the things that he did all the artistic embellishments and the operatic poetic tone that often gets employed ultimately only really seems to deify Dahmer in the same way he has been for decades it sort of feels like the show is just shooting itself in the foot and doing all of the Good Will it builds up it feels reductive of the story surrounding Dahmer especially in regards to the victims Jeffrey Dahmer's life was a case study not a character study if anyone could truly understand Jeffrey Dahmer's point of view they'd become him it's honestly a waste of time to even attempt that the show itself comes to the same conclusion but we'll get to that later all that to say I found the show at its best not when it is using the victims as a tool to tell Dahmer's story but using Dahmer as a tool to tell the victims stories [Music] as I mentioned previously the second half of the series shifts Focus away from Dahmer's perspective and onto the perspective of those impacted by him in fact this change in Focus comes in the form of an emotional punch to the gut with episode 6 silenced this is easily my favorite episode of the entire series and it seems I'm not alone in feeling that way incidentally I ended up watching this episode twice once alone and again with someone else and both times it got a pretty visceral reaction for me I think I can illustrate the real strength of this episode just from this simple observation when I was watching it I was so invested in Tony Hughes and felt so immersed in his perspective that for a moment I completely forgot I was watching a show about Jeffrey Dahmer and once I remembered where this story was headed I felt damn near sick to my stomach when I watched it again with another person I could tell they were also becoming invested as the story progressed and as soon as the poster showed up that said photographer seeking models they said out loud oh no that is how this story would end isn't it the inevitability of Tony hughes's death is used as a depressing reminder that this really happened as opposed to it being used purely for drama or suspense Tony is portrayed as a human being with dreams in ambition as opposed to being used only as a tool to service Dahmer's story the story is centered first and foremost around Tony and how that beautiful story was cut tragically short because of Dahmer also side note the board game scene is one of the best written parts of the entire show it tells you everything you need to know about Tony and Dahmer as characters their intentions their feelings and their relationship in one brilliant scene however this episode still comes with its own set of caveats for one there are conflicting stories about how long Tony Hughes and Dahmer actually knew each other and how close their relationship actually was as far as I can tell unless the people creatively involved with the show had information not accessible to the public every conversation in this episode is fictionalized including the entire board game scene I just praised which means they also fabricated the idea that Dahmer was being rehabilitated by his relationship with Hughes that he stopped drinking and killing people because he finally had someone in his life who loved him I promise things are turning around for me new friend in my life Jeff gosh I'm happy even if Dahmer did know Tony Hughes for an entire year as a witness report suggests he killed six people in that time on top of all of this Tony hughes's mother Shirley Hughes has spoken out against the Dahmer series both in principle and in execution I obviously can't and wouldn't want to negate her experience purely based on my own experience all I can say is that while I found a lot of the characterization of Tony just as condensed transparent and somewhat ham-fisted as a lot of the stuff centered around Dahmer and while it's clearly taking just as many artistic Liberties and is also basically just as exploitative at the very least it all feels in service of a story worth telling and it tells that story with a mostly consistent perspective it's honestly a refreshing change of pace not just for this show but for the True Crime genre in general I really wish this was the focus of the entire show oh I wish these were the stories we were telling all of the time if we absolutely have to reduce reality to genre and there's no way to stop ourselves from doing that or getting past the inherent constraints of that approach then I'd personally prefer we do it like this [Music] episode 7 onward things just kind of continually get muddled for me as the show bounces From perspective to perspective again the stories of Dahmer's family the neighbors and the community are all important stories that are more than worth telling but it still leads to feeling disjointed because Dahmer gets his own dedicated first half of the show in the second half just sporadically picks and chooses who it wants to focus on there's a lot of valuable insight and commentary in these episodes showing how the victims struggle to process their grief showing them testifying in court showing Dahmer's father's struggle with his own place in creating his son the community activism and their demands for justice Etc all of it is captivating and contemplative and again feel like stories worth telling yet it still can't help but feel misguided in a lot of ways especially in episode 9 which was almost maddening to watch because it's clearly making meta commentary on exploitative pieces of media about Dahmer highlighting how he's been mythologized by media and how [ __ ] up it is that victims are constantly being re-traumatized by reminders from biographies or comic books or quote-unquote fans of Jeffrey Dahmer and it's like [ __ ] is that not exactly what we are watching right now it's like they're making him into a superhero Jeff Dahmer isn't a superhero you turned Dahmer into the Joker for Christ's sakes some Halloween story says the show that conveniently dropped nine days before the start of October come on now I know that you said you tried to reach out to like 20 different families and got no response but how did you think these real people you're portraying were going to feel seeing Dahmer's face plastered all over the home page of Netflix and seeing it break streaming record after streaming record probably the same way they felt getting copies of unauthorized biographies to sign and seeing people take pictures in front of the apartments just as you've depicted I'm not trying to come out here and be offended on anyone's behalf but it is clear in hindsight given everything that the victim's loved ones have said themselves that this series did not land the way they intended it to in this episode sticks out like a sore thumb because of it foreign [Music] is capped off by an ending that feels completely non-conclusive the series seems to concede that trying to understand what Jeffrey Dahmer did and what made him do it is a fruitless Endeavor that it is a better idea to just honor the victims and allow their families and the community to heal there is a temptation to try to know and know definitively why someone like Jeffrey Dahmer is what he is there are no easy answers when it comes to someone like him you'll never know why he did what he did I believe it would be beneficial to the public and all concerned that there be closure and that this matter is resolved once and for all and we move on which just begs the question what was the point of any of this why was this made who is it even for who wanted this was it made for us the audience for our entertainment because if so that's kind of sleazy and gross to put it politely was it made for the victims because that kind of blew up in everyone's face was it made to make us contemplate the broader socio-political implications of these events if so was a lot of the first half in the sometimes overly dramatized approach even necessary what approach would be the best approach when it comes to real events like this is there any way to make a series like this without being inherently exploitative where do we draw the line is Schindler's List exploitative Michelle Hanukkah seems to think so um [Music] Indian film we and Spielberg's concentrations do you agree John um perfect [Laughter] um is Titanic exploitative the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was based on serial killer Ed Gein Joker's Subway shooting is eerily reminiscent of a real event that occurred in New York City in 1984 what about that is that wrong because we turned that into a comic book movie Dahmer is a series that just begs more questions than answers in both good and bad ways also don't believe for a second that I don't recognize the irony in this video I want to take full accountability for a few things here one I watched the entire series I supported it mostly because of the controversy surrounding it but still I am complicit in the show's success I'm not above anyone in the audience Here I Am the audience I'm not immune to that natural inclination towards the Macabre I am just as simultaneously horrified and curious about why these things happen what drives a person to do things like this and what it all means means two despite complaining incessantly over the course of the video and disagreeing with the show on a fundamental level from an ethical perspective I admittedly am somewhat ashamedly enjoyed this series it is brilliantly written well directed incredibly acted contemplative explorative and sometimes even deeply insightful television granted the only reason I can really say that is because I have the privilege of being very distant from these crimes I wasn't even born until after Jeffrey Dahmer died If This Were a completely fictional series I'd have no issue saying that this is easily the best show I've seen all year unfortunately even though the show is technically still a fictitious depiction of these events it is based in reality and comes with a ton of baggage as a result if this video proves anything it's that unpacking that baggage kind of just proves to be an endless exhaustive and often hypocritical even the creative team behind this show who I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt had immense respect for the events and a wealth of talent and resources at their disposal couldn't perfectly hit the mark I can end this video Simply by saying [ __ ] this show I disagree with it on a fundamental level even if some of the aspects are incredibly well executed on a technical level this show don't go watch it don't go support it but that would kind of be a waste of time at this point wouldn't it we've already lost the war and really who's to say what the lasting impact of this show will be all anyone can really say for certain is that given the show's massive success it's clear that people are hungry for this genre and that we will definitely be getting more all I can personally hope is that true crime audiences are engaging with this stuff thoughtfully in that much like American Horror Story was a stepping stone to more thematically thoughtful and nuanced horror shows Dahmer will beat the stepping stone to more thoughtful and nuanced True Crime

Channel: meeptop

Views: 2,594,277

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Id: MKLN6pMFoXY

Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 06 2022