True crime has become a recurrent trend in current culture. Netflix has turned it into a cottage industry, producing drama films, mini-series and docu-series based on all sorts of true crime cases that have been eagerly watched by the masses upon their release. Go onto any podcast service and in the top ten there’ll be at minimum two true crime podcasts. The true crime sections of bookstores are always filled with new looks into the psyche of deranged killers and criminals at large. It seems that society has a macabre fascination with serial killers in particular. Some are more famous than politicians or athletes — not everyone knows who Alex Scott MBE is, but ask them who Harold Shipman is? Chances are they’ll know that.
With this over saturation of serial killer media comes an issue — and it’s one encapsulated by the news that Ryan Murphy, as part of his mega deal with Netflix, will be producing a drama about the life and crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer with Evan Peters in the lead role. Peters is the next in a long line of leading men with dedicated female fanbases to take on the role of a serial killer. Recently, Des on ITV cast David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen, often called “The British Jeffrey Dahmer”. Before that, Zac Efron was cast against type as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. The casting of these actors means that immediately a fanbase that might not have an interest in serial killers will be looking into this particular drama for an actor they often idolise and find attractive. As such, their sympathy will often be with that character.
This is a recurrent issue within the film and television media, that people are more concerned with the killer and their psychology instead of the victims of their crimes. For someone like Dahmer this is even more problematic, given that his victims were often young gay men, most of them people of colour. In creating portrayals of killers it appears that a bid for understanding can often become sympathy. It’s not that we should demonize serial killers — many of whom suffer traumatic upbringings, are minorities themselves, and have mental illnesses — but we should be careful how we portray these true events.
Dahmer himself recently had a film made about him called My Friend Dahmer, based on the graphic novel of the same name by John “Derf” Backderf. The novel and the film both explore Backderf’s high school time and his “friendship” with Jeffrey Dahmer. This is long before he was the serial killer we know now, but in his childhood he was a troubled, clearly unwell young man that by his own admission Backderf used for his own amusement. The film is not a sympathetic look at the trauma that forged Dahmer’s heinous acts, but more a portrait of someone failing to see the signs of another person who needed help. It is less a serial killer origin story than an examination of the horror that can be puberty.
The film wisely ends before Dahmer’s first murder. The film is not interested in that, but in the person Dahmer was before. Ross Lynch, perhaps best known for his role in the Disney Channel series Austin & Ally, portrays Dahmer. The fact that he’s nigh unrecognisable in his role and that it is not a film with subject matter akin to that seen on the Disney Channel might have helped stop people from romanticising someone who will become a killer.
What My Friend Dahmer avoids that other films fall into is turning Dahmer into a folk hero — something that has happened to the likes of Ted Bundy far too much. Understanding and sympathy are two different things, and narrative cinema and documentary can offer starkly different portraits. John Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile attempts to tell the story of Ted Bundy through the eyes of his girlfriend Liz Kendall (Lily Collins) and how she was seduced and charmed by him to the point she could not have thought he was a killer of women.
Like Lynch, Efron has a large following from his time spent as a total beefcake heartthrob. The difference though is that Efron is portraying someone during their reign of terror. Bundy was charming, certainly, and moderately handsome (compared to most serial killers), but this is exaggerated by Efron’s movie star good looks and excessive charm. Whereas Bundy was belligerent and arrogant without cause, Efron is endearing and cute. Berlinger has previous experience dealing with Bundy, having made the docu-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. The issue here is that the avenue taken by him also fails to note the women that he attacked, raped, and murdered. This is made more complicated by the casting of Zac Efron in the role.
By the end of the film, Bundy has seduced two women before our eyes and even won the respect of the judge of his case. For an audience member who might not know the true story of Bundy, the film blurs the line between his lies and the truth to the point where Bundy is not only charismatic, he’s downright loveable. Only at the end does Berlinger hint at the true darkness of what Bundy did, but by then an entire film of Efron’s winning smile has taken the focus away from women who were brutally and horrifically murdered.
It begs the question: can you ever portray a serial killer on screen without the focus and sympathy being on them? It’s the route taken, albeit for more practical reasons, by David Fincher in Zodiac. The Zodiac Killer, active in the 60s and 70s through northern California, was never caught but even so Fincher’s film focuses on the endless toil and work that goes into an investigation with almost no leads and the toll it takes on those involved.
In focussing on the three men involved — cartoonist Robert Greysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), detective David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), and reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr), he shows that victims of serial killers aren’t just those murdered. Moreover, Fincher only shows Zodiac attacks where there are survivors and thus accounts of the event rather than speculation — as such we only see the Zodiac attacking three people. Fincher shows remarkable respect by only showing people who survived instead of guessing how people acted in their final moments, but it also puts the focus on another aspect of serial killers: the mental scars they leave on those they affect. After all, the tagline for Zodiac ran as There’s More Than One Way to Lose Your Life to a Killer. Greysmith’s obsession with the Zodiac killer and the killer’s threats to Paul Avery’s life both cause them to forfeit reason and their personal lives. Avery is shown becoming paranoid, devoid of his usual cocky attitude as he awaits what he accepts is an inevitable death, while Greysmith’s interpersonal relationships take a nosedive as he relentlessly searches to solve a puzzle with no answer. Their lives are forever ruined by the faceless Zodiac.
Toschi, though, might provide the most astute insight into the process of deciphering how to adapt serial killers onto the screen. Toschi is shown attending the premier of Dirty Harry, a film that was partly inspired by the Zodiac murders. Toschi is forced to watch a Hollywood version of himself track the Scorpio killer and ultimately succeed in delivering swift and deadly justice. This provides him with a reminder that he hasn’t done that, he hasn’t solved the case, and brought closure to the families who have had their lives ruined by this man. But, in showing Dirty Harry we see that perhaps the key is to make fictional versions of serial killers loosely drawn from real life. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs is partially drawn from both Bundy and Ed Gein. Gein also provided the inspiration for Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
All of this circles back to Ryan Murphy and the prospect of his new Dahmer project. Murphy has previously dabbled in serial killers, with American Horror Story: Hotel providing him the perfect set up to introduce several well known serial killers — Aileen Wournos, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, and guess who: Jeffrey Dahmer — showing up for campy self referential fun. The issue here is Murphy’s penchant for making awful people sympathetic by the use of LGBTQ status — most recently the villainous nurse Ratched was made sympathetic in his miniseries for this reason — goes double for Dahmer.
Serial killers are not folk heroes. There is nothing admirable about Charles Manson despite how often he’s used as a template for films. There’s nothing likeable about Bundy. Despite illness and a struggle with his own sexuality, there’s nothing to pity Dahmer for. As the great film critic Roger Ebert once said “movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” If that’s true then filmmakers should be careful to whom they generate empathy. Not everyone deserves empathy for their crimes, especially against minorities, and not everyone warrants immortalisation. Occasionally our desire to understand can be confused with condoning actions, we should seek to find a way to honour victims, not perpetrators.
