[ad_1]
Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes is the third in Joe Berlinger’s Conversations with a killer a series where he presents never-before-heard audio interviews with famous serial killers; Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy were featured in the first two editions. S Dahmer scripted series that sit atop Netflix’s Top 10, the timing of this release is no accident.
Kickoff: Wendy Patrickus looks at the camera and begins to tell the story of how, as a young attorney in 1991, her boss, Gerald Boyle, told her to go interview one of his clients: Jeffrey Dahmer.
The gist: Most of the documents are built around conversations Patrickus had with Dahmer after he was arrested in Milwaukee in July 1991. As most people know, his apartment was filled with body parts in various states of decay, plus a massive pot, which he may have used to cook the remains of the men he killed. His first killing occurred in Ohio, where he killed and dismembered Steven Hicks in 1978. He moved to Milwaukee to live with his grandmother and even joined the military, but began killing again in 1987; his second victim was Stephen Twomey.
Around these conversations, we hear from local reporters, from Patrickus and Boyle, from E. Michael McCann, the Milwaukee County District Attorney who prosecuted Dahmer, along with one or two of his childhood friends.
The conversations paint the picture of a man whose religious family background causes him to struggle with the fact that he is gay. But in addition, he always wanted control in whatever sexual encounters he had and had control fantasies involving sex with unconscious and dead men.
What shows will it remind you of? As mentioned earlier, this is the third entry in the Conversations with a killer series and they are all structured in a similar way.
Our opinion: For those of you who are completely turned off by the hit Netflix series Dahmer – and there are many – they can get a more satisfying view of Dahmer through The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes. You can hear Dahmer himself, and even though you know everything he’s saying is from his twisted point of view, it’s still the best way to even get inside the mind of someone who’s been this sick.
As with most serial killers, Dahmer sounds perfectly normal, even remorseful for the thoughts that led him to kill his victims, many of whom were men he picked up from gay bars in Milwaukee. There was shame in his sexuality, shame in his desire to control his victims, and shame in the impulses that drove him to kill and dismember.
What we still don’t hear in the first episode is what impulse drove him to go the extra step of cooking and eating the parts of his victims and wanting to keep those parts in his Milwaukee apartment instead of getting rid of them like he did did with the remains of some of his first victims.
It’s also amazingly disturbing to hear his defenders, especially Patricus, talk about Dahmer as if he were just someone they knew. “He called me Wendy and I called him Jeff,” Patrickus said of the bond they formed while she interviewed him in his defense. It takes a hell of a lot of personal integrity to look at Dahmer and see him as a person and not just a depraved killer; it was a skill Patricus needed to have in order to get the information out of him, which he succeeded. But it’s still annoying to hear him called “Jeff” throughout the episode.
Sex and Skin: Talking about Dahmer struggling with his sexuality is pretty harrowing. One thing we weren’t sure about, though, was whether some of the interviewees used this as a reason for him to kill, dismember and eat his victims. If so, it feels like a huge, not-so-informed leap.
Separation: “My urges were … clearly beastly,” Dahmer says of how his impulses drove him to kill more and more people after 1987.
Sleeping Star: Patrikus gets the nod here, mainly because of how relaxed she describes being face-to-face with Dahmer during these interviews.
Top pilot line: Berlinger used flashbacks to show Dahmer talking to Patrickus in prison. We think they’re a bit more intrusive than he intended. Even though they are wordless and shot in a way that should look a little abstract, they still stick out.
Our call: EXACTLY IT. If you want to get inside the mind of Jeffrey Dahmer, there’s no better way than to hear from the killer himself and Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes gives viewers more than enough opportunity to hear from Dahmer about the impulses that drove him to kill.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting, and technology, but he’s not kidding: He’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and elsewhere.
[ad_2]
Source link