Entry #4: Evan Peters Turns the Dahmer Screw Another Notch
The actor's recent Golden Globe win triggers the scolds. And reconfirms art's ability to help us contemplate the insensible.
“Only utopian liberals could be surprised that the Nazis were art connoisseurs.”
—Camille Paglia
EARLY THIS WEEK, Aquarian actor Evan Peters won a Golden Globe award for his lead performance in Ryan Murphy’s 2022 production Dahmer. (I refuse to type out the entire idiotic title).
When Peters’s win was announced, half of the internet experienced vapors and conniptions.
A statistic to sit with as you read this entry: The 10-episode Netflix series is the second most streamed show in television history.
In researching my novel—a love story—about Jeffrey Dahmer, I spend a designated amount of time each week on Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter, trawling various forums, blogs, and subreddits devoted to Dahmer. Results vary.
Often I discover obscure facts and oddities—good fits for embellishing my novel—on other days, only nonsense.
What’s consistent is my fascination with the ironclad hold that Dahmer has on the public’s imagination—thirty years after the fact.
Some of these online accounts are forums for civil discussions about Dahmer’s life pre- and post-conviction.
A good amount of back-and-forth is also devoted to Dahmer’s 17 victims. Attempts to comprehend their bad fate—which led them to Dahmer’s door
The particulars on Dahmer are often super-granular. Speculating on what he was eating as a child. The brand of socks he wore to school. And on and on.
Lists and charts are popular: his favorite beers and rock bands, television shows, and fast food. His grades in school, his job history, and how often he shopped for fish at his local pet store.
A recent post displayed a full set of Dahmer’s dental x-rays, warning that he should have removed his wisdom teeth.
Items found in his prison cell after his murder included Bibles, grape-flavored candy, Beethoven and Mozart cassettes, hundreds of fan letters, and a bottle of English Leather cologne (he did have a Libra ascendant after all—a charming devil).
All of this pushes beyond the bounds of garden variety ‘true crime’ fascination. Fame, especially if notorious, summons the strangest woodwork creatures.
A phenomenon that cannot be denied: there’s a beguilement about Dahmer’s physical appearance that generates an aura of exemption around his persona.
This exemption allows the fascinated to blindspot his crimes and focus solely on Dahmer as a sex symbol.
This fixation has fostered another online subset—perhaps the most bizarre: the world of Dahmer art fandom.
Blogs and subreddits for groupies to share homemade images, illustrations, memes, cartoons, and, more frequently, AI-generated visions from the world of Midjourney.
The image below was created by feeding the newfangled AI app prompts like: Jeffrey Dahmer, glamourous, Emmy Awards, tuxedo, smiling.
The visual possibilities on Midjourney are as unlimited as the boundaries of the robot’s imagination.
As mentioned, the online response to Evan Peters’s Golden Globe win this week was, for the most part, incendiary.
Many individuals expressed outrage that Peters was nominated for a series that ‘should never have been created in the first place!!!’
Others exploded into red-alert meltdowns about why there was no mention of the victims in Peters’s acceptance speech.
Their logic is that without Dahmer’s victims, there would have been no role for Peters to embody.
The more I considered this notion, the more bizarre it seemed. I couldn’t imagine Peters announcing: “I’d like to thank Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims for the opportunity—”
Peters, a sensitive actor attached to an artistic project caught in a battle between popularity and condemnation, understood the ‘no-win’ vice he was wedged in.
And from the expression on his face—when his name was announced as the victor—you’d the impression that he didn’t expect to win. And possibly, that he’d hoped that he wouldn’t win.
(Nix that final reflection, he is a Hollywood actor, after all.)
Peters was already familiar with the outraged Tweets and jeremiads denouncing Ryan Murphy for having created the show, a series that Murphy explained in an interview was a passion project, ten years in the making.
Several meditations come to mind amidst the ongoing umbrage after Peters's Golden Globe win:
Art is not subject to morals. The Dahmer Netflix series did what art has done for centuries—explored the human condition via dramatic tragedy.
My friend, the novelist John Calendo, commented:
“People don’t trust art and feel that art must teach a lesson. They consider for art to exist that it must pull its weight.”
My response: Correct. Also, non-artists cannot acknowledge the lawlessness of the imagination.
The concept of art superimposed with ‘teaching lessons’ has become annoyingly shrill with the assent of the internet and the proliferation of ‘woke’ culture.
Predators and prey. Nature’s impersonal heartbeat booms beneath the veneer of civilization. Transgressors and victims, the fallout.
The victims of school shootings, wars, corporate maleficence, police brutality, childhood cancer, things falling from the sky, suicides—and yes—the victims of madmen and madwomen.
Calendo again:
“Dahmer’s victims are beside the point. They are tragic accidents and statistics. Yes, we acknowledge them. But Dahmer is the interesting figure—that bundle of unleashed emotions that created a serial killer. He’s the ball of confusion we try to make sense of.”
Western culture has a poorly developed relationship with nature’s feral dimensions. Destruction, decay, and death counterpoint everything we cling to in life. But there is no Kali or Shiva in America.
Jungian Marie-Louise von Franz mentions how if children are prohibited from reading stories about evil characters, the children will invent stories of their own and share them.
This is the budding psyche’s way of coming to terms with archetypes that are bestial and sometimes fatal.
As I wrote in entry #1 of this diary:
“To comprehend Dahmer is to pay tremendous credence to the power of fantasy and what happens in a person’s life when fantasy obliterates Freud’s reality principle—the ballast that civilized humans situate their lives around.”
Dahmer biographer Brian Masters writes:
“Once fantasy becomes more beloved than reality, it cannot be held in check, and risks breaking through the barrier into real life. People from the real world are often unaware of the terrible danger they run in coming close to such intensity.”
Aside from the rubber-necking response that the grotesquerie surrounding Dahmer provokes, it is his feral imagination’s breaching of boundaries that fascinates us most. Why?
We each possess the potential for madness and murder. We each house impersonal instincts that slink around the reptilian branch of our brain.
Jeffrey Dahmer, the person, was the reptilian brain brought to life—and living down the hall from you as that ‘nice, shy guy.’
An artistic creation like Netflix’s Dahmer allows us to contemplate the cruelty of nature in the safety of our homes. Dahmer the series is apotropaic art.
Culture critic Camille Paglia writes:
“Literature’s endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson. Their status as fiction…intensifies our pleasure by guaranteeing that contemplation cannot turn into action.”
Congratulations to Evan Peters for his triumph in portraying tragedy for our ‘contemplation.’
And we await news of Peters’s starring role in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
Another of art’s escape valves that quell our savage ids.
Until next time!
I've seen every documentary on Dahmer (that I'm aware of) and personally, I thought Evan Peters' acting was superb. Doesn't make much sense to me that people are outraged because he didn't mention the victims. WTF. Acting is his job. His career. He won an award for doing a good job. I doubt few, if any, of the "public," especially those who watched the documentary could even name the victims.
I'm quoted above as saying "“Dahmer’s victims are beside the point," which sounds heartless and irresponsible. It needs context:
Nobody wants to be remembered as a data point in a series of murders. The story that captures the imagination is the story of the killer. Why, how, and his ability to elude capture.
In such tales of off-kilter minds there is always a fascination that turns on what if it were us. What if we were the killer. What if we met the killer. It is not in the deaths of his victim's that we can understand an extreme of human nature like Dahmer, but in his twisting journey to become an obsessional killer ... or is it, a tale not of becoming but of manifesting what was always there?
In Dahmer, we are confronted with the reality of evil. Evil is a term burdened with a religious glaze. This is no reason to dismiss it out of hand. Evil, as this piece suggests, is something real and innate. We need no psychobabble to wish it away, no futile fretting over an unfortunate childhood, as if had only this happened instead of that Jeffrey Dalmer would be a fulfilled man. There is something feral about evil, embedded in the primitive mind bereft of tribal allegiance to the human condition and the evolved morality of living with others.
Evil, and the way it confounds us, is the fascination that looms over our interest in transgressive figures like Dahmer. And in this contemplation, the victims are merely the data points, not the pivot points, of the story.