“…’kay.”
According to Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, this is how Jeffrey Dahmer, the most infamous serial killer in American history, accepts his fate: not with a bang, but a murmur. Given that this is the tone of voice through which he lived his entire miserable life, it doesn’t come as a surprise. But its matter-of-factness is still striking, still somehow more disturbing than if he’d made a big fuss. After all he’s done, after all he’s put people through, when he’s finally staring death in the face himself, it’s just… “…’kay.”
To be fair, that’s not all he says to Christopher Scarver (Furly Mac), the schizophrenic inmate who, outraged by the racist implications of the murders committed by Dahmer and fellow convict Jesse Anderson (a wife-killer who tried to pin the crime on the proverbial Unidentified Black Males), believed he had been told by God to kill them in turn. When Scarver accuses the beaten-down Dahmer of enjoying the pain he’d inflicted on his victims, Dahmer pipes up: “I drugged them first, so they wouldn’t feel anything.”
To me, this is an even more fitting set of final words for writers Ian Brennan, David McMillan, Reilly Smith, and Todd Kubrak to put in Dahmer’s mouth. Throughout the series, he’d always sought to come up with some mild-mannered explanation of what he’d done, his inability to relate to other human beings always rendering these attempts awkward, formal, phony-sounding (though there’s little indication that Dahmer lied at all after his arrest). Even after being knocked flat by a punch, as his killer-to-be approaches with a metal bar, Jeffrey is still just calmly explaining his methods and rationale.
Scarver may not have bought into Dahmer’s jailhouse conversion to Christianity, but the show appears to argue that Jeffrey himself did. After he is baptized, with the approval of the prison chaplain (who agrees with Jeff that the bad guys in the Star Wars movies are more compelling because they’re “better written,” which once again reads like Dahmer preemptively striking against its critics), the part of him who pulls pranks on other inmates, who revels in his fan mail, who makes sick jokes, who attempts to sell his autographs to other prisoners while sweetening the deal with nude selfies sent in by female fans, is gone. In its place, we’ve got a guy who seems truly bummed to be summoned to work detail because it interrupts his private Bible study.
(It should be noted here that the show strongly implies that Dahmer’s murder was orchestrated by a guard. I mean, would you be surprised?)
But in the end it doesn’t matter. Scarver beats Jeff’s head to a pulp, once again pretty graphically compared to the violence we’ve seen, or haven’t seen, before. This is how Lionel Dahmer finds him when he comes to the prison to see the remains.
“I love you,” he says to his son’s ruined corpse. “I loved you since the day you were born, and I love you till the day that I die.” He sobs, as he so often has.
And what are we to make of Lionel, in the end? His love for his son is, again, genuine, as is the forgiveness he extends to him when Jeff asks during a prison visit. His guilt is real, too. But he’s so maddeningly thick in so many other ways: in his obvious peevishness that people feel his book was an attempt to cash in on the pain of the victims’ families, in his ongoing battle with his ex-wife Joyce, which culminates in his successful legal quest to prevent her from having his brain examined for abnormalities by researchers. The bromides he and the judge in the case offer about “closure” ring hollow.
That’s true across the board. There’s no closure for the group of mothers who gather with Shirley Hughes, though they wind up laughing over a comic book in which Dahmer is depicted battling Jesus. (“I hope Jesus whups Jeffrey Dahmer’s ass.”) There’s no closure for Sounthone Sinthasomphone, who’s alone and miserable at his own son’s wedding due to his continued thoughts of Dahmer until his guest Glenda Cleveland manages to cheer him up. And there’s no closure for Glenda either, who tries and fails to persuade the city to build a memorial on the vacant lot where her and Jeff’s apartment building once stood. (Closing titles tell us no such memorial has ever been built, before showing the names and faces of all of Dahmer’s official victims.)
Harder to reconcile with reality is the portrayal of John Wayne Gacy, the prolific serial killer responsible for the deaths of 33 young men and boys that we know of. Not that I’m crying any tears over an unsympathetic portrayal of Gacy, whom even Dahmer recognizes as loathsome for hiding behind Christianity while denying that he committed any of his murders. (Gacy’s last words were, genuinely, “Kiss my ass.”) The killing we see him commit is graphic and savage, more so than just about anything we’ve seen Dahmer do up until this point, and that’s fine, that’s a valid choice for a show about serial killers to make. The decision to portray him in full clown regalia during the end stage of the murder, however, is sensationalistic and inaccurate; as best anyone can tell, Gacy only dressed as “Pogo the Clown” for public performances as such. A small thing perhaps, but for a show that seemed determined not to depict its titular killer as some kind of supervillain, turning Gacy into a real-life Joker is an uncharacteristic lapse in judgement.
But all things considered, it’s a small lapse. Ian Brennan, Ryan Murphy, Evan Peters, Niecy Nash, Richard Jenkins, and their collaborators have created one of the most harrowing, most viscerally upsetting, television shows I’ve ever seen. And when they finally turn the violence against its primary perpetrator, they make it hurt, they make it hard to look at. In the end, there’s nothing glamorous about this dead man who caused the deaths of so many others, who shuffled and stumbled his way through life, whose presence at the center of a vortex of homophobia, racism, bad policing, bad medicine, bad parenting, and pervasive isolation tells us so much about how what this country values, and how it rewards those who fail to measure up.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.