Jeffery Dahmer: More questions than answers

This week, millions of mass media consumers across the world have taken a macabre fascination in the life and mind of a prolific serial killer from America’s Midwest. His name was Jeffrey Dahmer.

For those of you who haven’t yet boarded the incredibly creepy and deeply unsettling ship that is the HS Dahmer, I’ll give you a brief account of the life and times of the man known as ‘The Milwaukee Cannibal’, and I’ll share a lock of observations and questions that the show fired up for me.

Last week, a new series appeared on Netflix called, ‘Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’.

It tells the story – or, truer to say, its own version of the story – of one of America’s most infamous, intriguing and utterly disturbing serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Going by the show, Dahmer seemed to strike most people as a superficially odd, unsocial, and generally downright rare boy.

However, his bookish specs, blonde hair and not-entirely-unattractive appearance meant that, for all his obvious strangeness, most of his victims, unfortunately, seemed to take him for a fairly innocuous fella at first.

Where one might hope that a cannibalistic murderer would exude all the instantly alarm-bell-raising sadistic creepiness of Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, Dahmer just seemed (to most people anyway) like your everyday oddball – with the exception, probably, of his family and a neighbour.

But, between the years of 1978 and 1991, Dahmer admitted to murdering and dismembering 17 men and boys, oftentimes boiling, frying and (yes, you’re not so slow) eating the flesh of his victims.

In my eyes, the Dahmer story seems like America at its absolute worst; the nadir of the Land of Opportunity.

If the ‘American Dream’ is the flag that the states fly proudly above their sun-soaked porch, then the Dahmer story is the body they keep buried deep beneath their basement.

It is the diseased underbelly of the Golden Eagle; the splattered blood upon the Star Spangled Banner.

Now, obviously, Jeffrey Dahmer is not representative of the average American, or even of the very alienated, isolated and disturbed American.

But, his story contains a lot of the stuff that makes America seem fundamentally tragic and weird to the average Irish person.

It’s full of the classic vices, pitfalls and psychological deformities of modern America.

The Dahmer story is gluttony, perversion, loneliness, violence, isolation, insanity, disconnection, jealously, and a thousand other existential chasms, all badly papered over by the empty offerings of a rampant and inept capitalist regime that holds no answers or remedies for the lost and broken.

It’s Budwesier and Coke, state fairs and college campuses, dreamy romance and tough love, all trying their best to keep the lid on a spitting pot of sickness or evil or both. It’s hard to imagine Dahmer existing outside the corrupt and impoverished American ethos that rules the world he lived in.

And it’s this question of evil and illness which becomes one of the most interesting raised by the show: Where does the blurry, hotly-disputed border between these two things lay?

Is a man who conducts a campaign of cannibalism from the basement of his grandmother’s suburban dwelling, by definition, evil? Should he be treated as a monster or a patient?

For most people, not least the ruined families of his 17 victims, the answer is probably a straightforward one.

But, at times in the show, it becomes tempting to see Dahmer as a victim of his own neurology; an inmate imprisoned by the processes of his own diseased brain.

Then, at other times, such a sympathetic reading seems completely unconscionable, wrong, ludicrous.

In those moments, it seems clear that Dahmer is the devil incarnate; slouching through the streets with full knowledge of the difference between good and evil, but choosing to exercise his poisonous will to bring suffering upon the world.

For me, the show threw up a lot of questions about choice and compulsion, free will and determinism, retribution and rehabilitation, evil and illness.

However, while the questions arose endlessly, answers were – and remain – far more scarce.