I’m sick of true crime.
Specifically with Netflix’s Sept. 21 release about Jeffrey Dahmer.
I’m tired of Hollywood exploiting people’s lives for entertainment, especially when it comes to Dahmer's victims.
“DAHMER” is produced by Ryan Murphy, best known for “American Horror Story,” which is an award-winning anthology series, and follows the life of the real-life serial killer and sex offender who committed the murders and dismemberments of about 17 boys and men from 1978-91.
The series is obviously capitalizing off of the craze of true crime, a nonfiction genre of media where the author examines an actual crime, detailing the actions of real people associated with criminal events.
Every time I am on TikTok, I am bombarded with videos on my feed of people detailing any number of crimes that I may have not known about.
The bombardment of true crime videos, even if I cater my algorithm to omit them, keeps popping up on my social media platforms. It feels like I can’t escape it.
Granted, I have read about true crime stories myself through the Wikipedia pages of Dahmer and other serial killers like Ted Bundy because my brain cannot comprehend the horror of their actions.
True crime has been around for a long time. The fascination with cruelty has always interested society, take Truman Capote’s 1966 novel “In Cold Blood,” which is about the true story of a murder.
In the modern age, the further sensationalization of those crimes are in a vacuum and completely ignores the people affected so people can trade it in for entertainment.
That is clear with “DAHMER.”
Families of Dahmer's victims have called the series “retraumatizing.”
“I’m not telling anyone what to watch, I know true crime media is huge [right now], but if you’re actually curious about the victims, my family (the Isbell’s) are pissed about this show. It’s retraumatizing over and over again, and for what? How many movies/shows/documentaries do we need?” Eric Perry, a cousin of Dahmer Victim Errol Lindsay, stated in a Twitter post last week.
The series profits off the murders and the traumas of the victims and their familes respectively, as Dahmer intentionally preyed on vulnerable gay, Black and brown men and boys.
Not only do the creators of “DAHMER” profit on the stories of people who have expressed their desires for series like those not to be made but they also exploit those stories for their morbid curiosities.
White people exploiting the pain of Black and brown people is unsurprising to say the least, the lack of care and attention given to the victims’ stories has allowed for an environment of disrespect to fester and grow.
A tweet directly from Netflix writes about a scene featuring Konerak Sinthasomphone, which was pulled from real-life events.
Sinthasomphone was a 14-year-old boy and victim of Dahmer’s who managed to escape but was returned to Dahmer’s home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin because police ignored the pleas of the Black women who found Sinthasomphone bleeding and naked, according to an Aug. 2, 1991 Seattle Times article.
“Can’t stop thinking about this disturbing scene from DAHMER where one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims finally manages to escape . . . and the police actually bring him back inside the apartment. Now on Netflix,” Netflix stated in a Sept. 21 tweet.
Former officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish dismissed the incident as a domestic dispute between “homosexuals” and ignored the women who noticed the obvious pain Sinthasomphone was in, for Dahmer’s testimony, according to a July 27, 1991 New York Times article.
The officers were fired and suspended without pay, but later were reinstated after appealing their terminations. Balcerzak retired in 2017, according to a June 15, 2017 report from WTMJ-TV, a local news channel in Milwaukee.
Using the gross injustice of Sinthasomphone’s murder to advertise the show leaves me in an inexplainable state of rage.
To disguise the blatant advertising as disgust truly just takes the cake. It also works.
“DAHMER” debuted at No. 1 on Netflix with it being viewed for more than 196 million hours on the streaming app, according to a Sept. 27 Variety article.
The gross exploitation of these victims’ stories continues on and it opens the floodgates of social media to their stories.
When you go through the trending search of “DAHMER” on Twitter, you’ll mostly run across people making jokes about the show instead of being disgusted by his crimes.
While true crime seems noble in its intentions, it is inherently exploitative because it does not bring the survivors or the families of the victims into the fold.
It ignores their voices while profiting off of it for entertainment purposes.
In a Sept. 29 Twitter post by YouTuber Not Even Emily, she highlights a trend going around the internet of white women bragging how they were “unfazed” by Dahmer’s crimes, unbothered by his depravity toward his victims with one woman even wearing earrings featuring Dahmer’s face.
In a Sept. 28 TikTok, a person made a video about their attraction to actor Evan Peters, who played Dahmer, writing “How am I supposed to hate Jeffrey Dahmer if Evan Peters is making him so attractive.”
What happens to the people whose stories become so public?
When does the public decide the agency over the victims and their stories?
Do they belong to us? My answer is no.
I will not be watching “DAHMER.''
Those are stories that will be told until kingdom come. It is high time true crime shifts away from the exploitation of those crimes and starts to include the survivors and the families of victims with care and support.
Shows including “DAHMER” are representative of the complicated ethics of the genre of true crime because they skim over the systemic flaws of our criminal justice system.
It ignores the socioeconomic and cultural factors of everyone involved, in favor of morbid curiosity and entertainment.
