I talk to Rob Henderson about Episodes 1-3 of the new Netflix miniseries Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (video here). I begin and end the conversation by talking about why watching the series and bringing attention to it makes me uncomfortable. What does it do to the families of the victims to make an artistic depiction of Dahmer’s life? Why should more attention be given to the story of a murderer than not only those of his his victims, but those of the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived? Don’t we end up retraumatizing innocent people, while also glorifying those responsible for heinous crimes? I don’t think there’s a good answer here, and let me just say I feel guilty about doing this.
Nonetheless, my job is to provide interesting content, and I promised Rob we’d do a few episodes on Dahmer, so here we are. The series is one of those that has a high disparity between the opinions of critics and reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes. We discuss why that is. Given that most of Dahmer’s victims were black, and police had opportunities to stop him before he was ultimately caught, the facts of the story definitely support a woke narrative. But given the source material, the show thus far avoids being overly preachy. Me and Rob also like the fact that it does not try to present some kind of narrative in which Dahmer is a victim of society, but mostly stays true to the facts and lets the viewer make up his own mind.
Talking about the Dahmer story leads us to discuss our own experiences with the police, and why we’re sympathetic to cops and react so strongly to liberals bashing them. I tell Rob about the time I got arrested for drunk driving short before my twenty-first birthday.
This episode is being released as paywall-only first, but will be made available to everyone after a week. See here for the audio. If you like what you see, I highly recommend you subscribe to Rob Henderson’s Substack.
Should We Talk about Serial Killers?