✔️ 2022-10-07 05:15:00 – Paris/France.
In 1987, Jeffrey Dahmer tried to dig up a corpse. He was 27 at the time, and although he had already killed two young men – eaten part of them, dismembered them, cleaned their bones – he was trying to be “a good boy”. He hadn't killed for nine years. And maybe I would have gone on without doing it if what happened hadn't happened. What happened was that he saw an obituary of an attractive boy and went to the cemetery with the intention of digging him up and sleeping with his arms around him. He did not understand. The ground was too hard. No, it wasn't so, he told himself. If he wanted to sleep hugging someone who couldn't leave him, he was going to have to kill them himself. "The first two were accidents," he said in his confession. The others he killed conscientiously. He wanted to stop being alone, he said. But it never was, really.
There is an infinity of powerfully precious things in dahmer (Netflix), something like the return of the most detailed and macabre Ryan Murphy – or shouldn't the series be part of his brilliant US crime anthology, american crime story?—, although the most remarkable and fascinating thing is his point of view. Because we tend to think that the serial killer - in this case Jeffrey Dahmer, the lonely kid who started by dismembering a roadkill and ended up murdering, dismembering and devouring 17 kids, chosen from among the invisible, Afro -Americans, Indians, Latinos and gay, like him – he is not part of a family that loves him, nor does he have neighbors who hear him crush bones through the ventilation grate – fundamental and miraculous is the character played by Niecy Nash, Glenda Cleveland – but they are there, like the rest of society.
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The quantum detail of this kind of nonfiction TV that Murphy works every time - he did it with OJ Simpson, and with the murderer of Versace - challenges, reformulates and magnifies the power of what Truman Capote invented in in cold blood -the non-fiction novel— precisely in an attempt to understand the monster, Perry Smith, but also Richard Hickock, those responsible for the Clutter massacre, reconstructing the figure of the murderer from what surrounds the event. A process of humanizing the inhuman that valorizes the horror of an impossible empathy: that of the condemnation of the monster that lives with itself. Yes, everything is practically unbearable in dahmerfor the viewer is both inside and outside the murderer's head, as in Capote's classic, but going further, much further.
Like an object from another planet that has struck ours, devastating it, in its own way, smashing families — its own and those of its victims —, a community — at the epicenter of which are the neighbors of its building, but that reaches a neighborhood, and by extension, a kind of neighborhood - a country - that keeps making the exact same mistake of looking away when what's happening doesn't affect the straight white man - it's is how Dahmer is treated in Murphy's intrusive, quasi-experiential non-fiction—directed here largely by the daughterJennifer Lynch [cuyo padre es el cineasta David Lynch]—. The world on which Dahmer walked must be recomposed in its path as it would after a natural disaster. And this is where the historiographical part of the irresistible creator of posealways attentive to blind spots, whether due to their condition queer or marginal, dispossessed – of American history.
Jeffrey Dahmer, in August 1982. Donaldson Collection (Getty Images)
“Dahmer is a metaphor for the nation,” says Reverend Jackson, who tried unsuccessfully to turn the case into a step forward, in some sense, by acknowledging those who never had a voice in America. It's a past Black Lives Matter shockingly accurate: recorded are all the times Jeffrey's neighbor Cleveland called the police saying someone was killing someone in the apartment next door and what they could think of him say was go check it out before calling them 'Bad Police,' the Reverend says, 'underserved communities, and voiceless blacks and Latinos who have no use raising their voices because they won't be heard,” he continued. And he said it in 1991 but he could say it today, which touches the heart of a still unscrupulous country.
That Dahmer's father confesses to having felt exactly the same impulse as his son - without following it - and never shared it with him, raising a wall of assumptions and pretenses with his tortured son, also pulls in some way sort against the danger of solitary confinement, and its infinite possibilities of destruction. No, Jeffrey Dahmer wasn't alone, he just thought he was, and he walked away from the world, blowing it up in the process. “I was born this way, I don't think anything did this to me,” Dahmer says, and unable to find another way out, he begs, “Can you send me to the electric chair? There are even more sinister details in the documentary The Tapes of Jeffrey Dahmer —which comes out this Friday, also on Netflix—, but the truth is already there.
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