Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer Equates Queerness with Monstrosity
When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in 1991, I was sixteen years old and struggling with my sexuality. I grew up in a small town in southwestern Virginia and attended an all-boys prep school in central Virginia, both places isolated and unsafe to be out. Unlike now, positive examples of gay men like Pete Buttigeig, Dan Levy, or RuPaul weren’t in the media, and certainly gay historical figures weren’t taught in the classrooms. Instead, I had Dahmer, whose criminality the media clumsily and maliciously mingled with his sexuality, implying that there was a relationship between the two.
When I heard that Ryan Murphy, the writer, director, and producer best known for the TV shows Glee and American Horror Story, was making Dahmer, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story for Netflix with his long-standing collaborator Ian Brennan, my stomach churned, and my curiosity was piqued. Indeed, it was a double and, perhaps, paradoxical reaction: a physical revulsion at the idea of dredging up Dahmer’s horrors for profit and a true interest in how the series would handle the material artistically. My question: Would Murphy and Brennan counter the media’s initial treatment of the story and offer a truer, more balanced representation of the nightmare?
Femmes Fatales, Queer Rage, and Me
THE “FEMME FATALE” gained a popular foothold in the detective fiction of the 1930s and then, even more visibly, in the great films noir of the 1940s and ’50s. In these narratives, the femme fatale often seizes command of the straight male gaze and harnesses it to her own purposes, her own pursuit of power. Given the dominant patriarchal attitudes of the era, in these storylines she is almost always revealed to be deceitful, cold, and self-serving. This being the era of the Hays Production Code, she is predestined to be punished, often to the point of death. Because she represents a woman trying to establish agency for herself, she is bound to be shut down. The narrative is making the implicit point that powerful women pose a threat to straight male dominance. It’s not surprising, then, that her popularity as a villain was never higher than when service men were returning from World War II seeking employment only to find that many of their jobs were filled by capable women.
Sympathy for the De Vil: Reading Beyond Likability
With the tagline, “I’m Cruella, born brilliant, born bad, and a little bit mad,” the marketing for the villain-revision vehicle Cruella, which landed in theaters this summer, invites a compelling challenge to the viewer: “Watch this film,” Disney dares us, “and fall in love with one of our most vicious villainesses!” Dodie Smith’s dog-killing, dog-skinning heiress sets a high bar on unlikability. For me, a fan of the unlikable, a lover of the hard to love in fiction, the prospect was thrilling.
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CrimeReads—”The Femme Fatale: Subverting and Complicating a Noir Trope”
The femme fatale is a long-standing character type in crime fiction, a prominent and popular fixture of the mid-twentieth-century hard-boiled detective novel. Her overt sexuality is her chief weapon, greed is her underlying desire, and her fate is bleak, without redemption. It’s also a misogynist archetype, a product of the male crime writer’s anxiety about his diminished standing in Depression Era America and later his fraught reintegration into civilian life after World War II.
Electric Lit: "10 LGBTQ Crime Fiction Must-Reads"
The act of coming out is an unveiling. Since queer people live in a straight, cis-gendered dominant culture, we have the burden of proclaiming our sexual orientation or our gender identity. As a narrative, the coming-out story is one we’re familiar with, and one we’ve embraced. Crime stories have a similar structure, which perhaps is why they resonate with queer readers and writers: the tension of withheld secrets, the satisfying snap of the puzzle pieces fitting together, the wonder of the reveal. We’re drawn to a narrative where the unknown becomes known. Where motives are made clear. Where identity is made evident.
CrimeReads: "Closure: Crime Fiction's Most Satisfying and Elusive Gift"
Several years ago, I decided to redecorate my office. The idea was to make it more aesthetically conducive to writing: fresh paint in pleasing earth tones, new furniture made from recycled pallet wood, everywhere clean, modern surfaces—a blank canvas from which to create. In truth, it was an elaborate (and expensive) excuse to procrastinate revising the ending of my novel, Dodging and Burning. One Saturday, passionately avoiding my laptop, I grabbed my husband, and we moved the furniture out and ripped up the frayed wall-to-wall Berber carpeting. Underneath, we discovered a loose board in the pine flooring. Our curiosity piqued, we removed it. Between the support beams, peeking through the dust, we found a treasure trove: three Chesterfield cigarette packets, two Hershey bar wrappers, an ad for women’s cosmetics, a hand-drawing (perhaps a tracing) of the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, and the remains of a letter penned by a woman named Catherine, all dating back to the 1920’s or early 1930’s.
Southern Writers—Suite T: "Crafting Revelation in Fiction One Detail at a Time"
Revelation in fiction comes in many forms: In a murder mystery, the curtain is pulled back on the identity of the culprit. In other narratives, the curtain is pulled back on the true nature of a character. For a revelation to work in fiction, it must feel surprising and inevitable to the reader. These qualities seem contradictory but in the hands of a skilled writer, the tension between the inevitable and the surprising is always present; it is the only way a revelation is fairly earned.