A year ago, all of my friends were talking about this show called ‘Monster — The Jeffrey Dahmer Story’. I was tempted to watch it too; sat through a few scenes with my roommate as she talked about how disheartening the death of the deaf model was, but I eventually stumbled upon a video that made me promise myself that I won’t watch True Crime Shows.
The video was titled “Who Is Dahmer Even Made For?” In his video, meeptop, a YouTuber talks about how ‘reductive’ Dahmer feels and how focusing on him for the first half of the story subverts the audience's focus from the victims to him. It’s bad enough that the victims here only serve Dahmer’s story, how they are just that — victims — without whom Dahmer wouldn’t have the ‘legacy’ he did — but it’s worse how the story humanizes him, how by the end of the season you end up empathizing with him. I remember talking to a friend about this series, about how I’d thought it was unethical and she also admitted that the story was written in a way that made it easy to feel sympathy for Dahmer.
The point is we don’t need to ‘understand’ the minds of criminals. This need to “understand” them might lead us to justify their actions; to blame it on the environment. This can make us think that if they’d been given help, they wouldn’t have gone and killed the people they did. A paper published in 2020 titled “Serial Killers: Biology vs. Environment” concludes that, “it is a special mixture of certain genes, environment, and it also greatly depends on the individual on whether they will become a serial killer. It is not just genes or the environment but the right combination of factors that contribute to this conundrum.” The justification that studying the character of Dahmer or Bundy or any other killer for that matter might help us avoid killings is a poor justification.
This leads us to the question of why such shows are made. If they are made for entertainment, then we’ve really been desensitized to suffering, and there’s no way any way can defend this as being anything other than bad.
This doesn’t mean that True Crime Media shouldn’t exist. We all have an uncanny curiosity to understand the dark nature of human beings. I myself remember being 16 and watching interviews of serial killers just to understand why humans would ever want to kill another human being. This just means that true crime media should be produced ethically, with a focus on victims, whose families and friends were affected by the heinous crimes of the Serial Killers, who are still reminded of the trauma they had to endure when they see yet another show featuring the people who have the blood their beloved on their hands portrayed as a sort of hero.
