Netflix just released a new series that has heads turning and jaws dropping. It’s captivating. It’s thrilling. It’ll shock you to your core. It’s “The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”
Wait.
Don’t we already have one of those? Do we really need another show about Jeffrey Dahmer? Or any serial killer for that matter? We saw it first with the Ted Bundy movie,“Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” and now we’re seeing it with this new Dahmer show. Why are we humanizing some of the most evil people who ever existed? Not only is it incredibly tone deaf, but it’s flat-out disrespectful to the victims and their families. This new show features violent reenactments of Jeffrey Dahmer’s horrific murders. Murders that happened to real people. Real people whose families are still alive. Families who, now, not only have to relive the trauma of losing a loved one in such a sickening way, but also have to sit back and watch as the entire world takes pleasure in watching this depraved series.
There seems to be a disconnect in this generation between what we perceive as fiction and what we know to be real. The rise of true crime as a mainstream genre has desensitized us murder and death in general. People are watching this show, and deep down they know it’s a true story, but I don’t think they consciously realize it. They get drawn in because it’s crazy and fascinating, and seems too disturbing to be true. But it is true. And Netflix is profiting off of it.
It’s not just Netflix, either. The making of videos that detail gruesome murders has given hundreds of people large social media followings and platforms. There’s a difference between wanting to inform the public of the dangers they might be encountering and just profiting off someone else’s trauma. Something about a random person on the internet filming a podcast about someone else’s tragedy, getting millions of views, and making hundreds to thousands of dollars because of it, just doesn’t sit right with me.
I understand the fascination with true crime. But we need to sit back and ask ourselves if it’s really ethical, or if it’s just exploiting real-life victims.
