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4 Jeffrey Dahmer Gay, White Cannibal Why should bodily refuse be a symbol of danger and of power? Why should sorcerers be thought to qualify for initiation by shedding blood or committing incest or anthropophagy? (Douglas 120) Been surviving on McDonalds. Need to start eating at home more. (Jeffrey Dahmer, in a 1990 home video shown on Dateline NBC: quoted in Entertainment Weekly, March 1994: 47) While not mentioned in the criminal complaints (assuming within the law the aura of the great unspoken), Dahmer's cannibalism, described by Geraldo Rivera as his "macabre snacking" (Geraldo, 12 September 1991), was the most sensational aspect of his case, that which separated him from other serial killers. In the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs, Starling tries to map out the norm regarding serial killers by suggesting that "most serial killers keep some sort of trophies from their victims." Lecter, distancing himself from that territory (and picking holes in the FBI's attempts at categorization), counters by noting that he is an exception to Starling's rule. Starling's response, "No, you ate yours," concludes an exchange which corresponds with a New York Times article on Dahmer, similarly demonstrating an apparently irreducible desire to distinguish normality from abnormality, no matter what the subject matter. There are, apparently, your average repeat murderers, and then there is Jeffrey Dahmer: " 'The trophies [souvenirs of victims] are usually identification cards or pieces of clothing. But few, Dr. Dietz said, are driven by their loneliness to keep pieces of their victims' bodies. An ordinary serial killer would have the sense to try to mask the smell,' Dr. Dietz said. 'It's awfully careless not to' " (my italics , 7 August 1991: A8). The regarding of the body as something that can be hoarded, reas65 PART I. POLICING THE SERIAL KILLER sembled, or consumed is a form of abnormality with which currently we seem particularly fascinated. The early nineties witnessed the discovery of cannibalism's marketability. In the same year (1992) that The Silence of the Lambs won five Oscars, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula was released. In the following year Disney's Touchstone Pictures released Alive, the story of how survivors of a plane crash in the Andes managed to eat in the middle of a snowy wilderness . The offering for 1994 in the category of human consumption was the film version of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. In court Dahmer holds up a copy of the Weekly World News bearing a headline stating that he had eaten one of his cellmates. The masthead, however, is replaced by Dahmer with that of The Milwaukee Journal (reported in The New York Times, 15 February 1992: 10). If the switch is an ironic comment on the distinction between"serious" and tabloid journalism, Dahmer has a point. Exaggerating Dahmer's claims of cannibalism (he confessed to eating part of one of his victim's arm muscles), Courtland Milloy tells us via the Washington Post that "by his own admission, Dahmer befriends you, then cuts your heart out, then snacks on it after eating your brains" (1 August 1991: C3). Although Milwaukee Police Chief, Philip Arreola told reporters early in the investigation that "the evidence is not consistent" with Dahmer's contention of cannibalism, cannibalism was perhaps the major focus of most of the Dahmer stories . Dennis Nilsen speculates that Dahmer's claims of cannibalism were probably "wishful thinking" (quoted in Masters 1991, 268), and perhaps it is as much wishful thinking on our part as his. The intensity of speculation may indicate a cultural demand for cannibalism that exceeds the supply. Is there an argument to be made about a contemporary cultural fascination with this particular form of uncivilized behavior , a fascination strong enough to turn the disputed contention of an individual whom we regard as either sick or evil into one of the unquestionable truths of his being? If Clarice is The Silence ofthe Lambs' heroine for tracking down Buffalo Bill, Hannibal can be its hero for his quest to consume all the indignity in the world. Eating people, it would seem, is not necessarily wrong. It depends on who's doing the eating and who's being eaten. It depends on table manners. Would it be improper for me to suggest that we are finding cannibalism rather sexy at the moment? What function might the putative presence of cannibalism in our culture serve? While Joel Norris seems to regard Dahmer's cannibalism as...

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