Dahmer may be the most grueling drama I’ve ever covered, and its sixth episode, “Silenced,” is one of the saddest hours of television I’ve ever seen. Anchored by a tremendous, heartfelt, achingly vulnerable performance by deaf actor and former reality TV star Rodney Burford, it offers the corrective that Dahmer has needed by giving one of the killer’s victims his own story, then slams the door on it, as you knew it must. That knowledge does not soften the blow one bit.
This is the story of Tony Hughes, a deaf gay Black man whom we first meet as a literal newborn. In an echo of Dahmer’s own story, misprescribed medication ordered by a pediatrician causes Tony to completely lose his hearing while still a baby.
I’m not going to say “nevertheless, he leads a full and mostly happy life,” because duh, why wouldn’t he? Deafness is not some kind of curse. Nor is Tony portrayed as some kind of perfect saint. He’s just a basically nice guy, you know? He hangs out with his friends, who are both gay and deaf like him. (One of them later falls victim to an unexplained murder.) He loves and gets along well with his family, which includes a pregnant sister who plans to name her baby daughter after him, and his mother Shirley (an affecting Karen Malina White), from whom Tony seems to get his charm, kindness, and sense of humor. (Not her religious faith, though, but it must be said she tells Tony about telling off her pastor when he preaches that AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality.)
And like any young guy, he likes to go out and drink and dance and, hopefully, meet someone — only he’s not interested in quick hookups, at least not at the stage of life during which we really get to know him. For one thing, dealing with any hearing guy is a big hassle, since as he and his friends discuss over pizza after an unsuccessful club night, hearing guys see deaf guys as either “a project or a charity case.” For a hookup? It’s barely worth the effort.
But more importantly, Tony’s at a point in his life where he really wants to get serious, about both his love life and his career, especially after his friend’s murder puts things in perspective for him. He relocates to the college town of Madison, both because the presence of a school for the deaf there means he’ll be able to find friends and work easier, and because student photographers might be able to help him put together the portfolio he’ll need to make a go of things in New York down the line someday. There’s an entire sequence in which he gets rejected for jobs almost immediately due to his deafness, only to stumble across a friendly manager at a clothing store who’s happy to talk to him, in American Sign Language no less, because his own sister is deaf. His joy upon getting the job — jumping up and down on the sidewalk, pumping his fist — is infectious.
So is so much of what he does, and this is where Burford really shines. He gives Tony’s rapport with the people he cares about so much warmth it seems to radiate out of the screen — with his buddies, his mom, his sisters…and with Jeffrey Dahmer.
Because the problem is that even though he’s moved to Madison, he still comes home every few weekends to visit his family and hang out with his friends at the clubs. Which is where a handsome, if “basic,” blonde white guy with big glasses makes eyes at him, leading his friend to encourage him to go over and strike up a conversation.
Amazingly, they do more than just talk and drink and go back to Jeff’s place for the inevitable. Tony actually refuses to go that first night, not because he’s spooked by or disgusted with Jeff in some ineffable way, but because Jeff is absolutely hammered, and you get the sense that Tony feels that going home with him would be inappropriate.
Instead, they meet up at a later date, for a date! They go to a Glamour Shots and Tony poses for pics while Jeff watches; eventually the photographer even hands Jeff the camera to take a few shots of his own. They get food and sodas and flirt with an earnestness that could melt your heart, especially when you read between the lines of the things Jeff writes to Tony as they communicate with written notes. “You must be the most interesting person I’ve ever met!” he tells Tony, before writing “Is it exhausting to have to work so hard to be understood?” You get the feeling Jeff’s wanted to talk to someone about this very topic his entire life.
Anyway, Tony is a positive influence on Jeffrey. He stops drinking alone and on weekdays, he tells his dad and stepmom when they come for a visit to his shockingly clean apartment. (Well, shockingly clean by Jeff standards.) “I’m happy,” he tells them. It seems like he means it!
And the whole time, the whole time, this is going down, you just feel like screaming at him. Get your goddamned act together! This guy is nice, funny, smart, handsome, interesting, and most importantly, he likes you! He’s willing to give you the time of day when you’re not both wasted! You could have had a real relationship here, you goddamned mutant!
Of course, it’s already too late, far too late, for that. Jeff cleans up his apartment for the dual purpose of impressing his visiting dad and stepmom and also Tony, yes. He refrains from drugging Tony when the poor guy finally comes over. They have normal-person sex and go to normal-person sleep. But when Tony has to leave for work back in Madison the next morning, Jeff reaches into the bedside drawer next to the nice clean bed where they spent a nice normal night and pulls out a bloody hammer, sitting atop a pile of polaroids of nude, dismembered bodies.
There would never be any going back for Jeffrey, there would never be some Mr. Right that could come along and save him from himself, or save anyone else from him. When he chose to start killing, his fate was set in stone, and so was Tony’s.
Though Jeff initially lets Tony leave without attacking, Tony has to return to the apartment because he forgot his keys, and Jeff can restrain himself no longer. In the episode’s closing act, his distraught family — completely ignored by the cops, who ask his mom if Tony had any history of fucking gang activity — lead a search for him, a search to which Jeff anonymously donates money. (It’s a ghoulish act, echoed by a call he places to another victim’s family to tell them to stop looking for him since he’s disappeared into “the Vortex,” a reference to a macabre board game Jeff made up as a kid called Infinityland, which he and Tony play using animal wishbones as game pieces.)
And after we see his mother staring and crying at the dining room table chair where Tony used to sit, Jeff cooks and eats Tony’s liver. It’s the first act of cannibalism we see him commit, and it’s deployed at the most emotionally upsetting moment imaginable.
(A brief aside: I reflected while watching this episode on how the purpose of Jeff’s drinking has evolved throughout his life. As a teenager, he drank to suppress his urges, to numb his pain. Of course he became a full-blown alcoholic in short order, so at a certain point the motive for drinking becomes less relevant than the biochemical compulsion to do so. But as an adult, whether at the clubs or the bathhouses or taking guys back to his place, he drinks not to suppress his urges, but his inhibitions; not to numb his pain, but his guilt.)Empathetically but unsparingly written by David McMillan and Janet Mock, directed with painstaking restraint by Paris Barclay, this is a bravura episode of television. But I find it hard, so hard, to recommend. To watch it is to see something beautiful destroyed.
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.