South Park: Hell on Earth 2006 (aka That Darned Dahmer)

With the US release of My Friend Dahmer just days away and with Halloween just around the corner, now seems like the perfect time to take a look at the Milwaukee cannibal's "guest" appearance in the  South Park episode "Hell on Earth 2006", which first aired on 25th October 2006 as part of the series' tenth season.

"Hell on Earth 2006" is what I would describe as a "busy" episode, in that it has at least four different story strands going on at once, none of which are especially well-developed. Ultimately it plays more like a series of vignettes, loosely connected around the overarching theme that Satan is planning to throw a big Halloween bash up on Earth and grows increasingly petulant when things don't go his way. This is a parody of the MTV reality series My Super Sweet 16, with Satan ultimately concluding that he's above the depravity of the spoiled divas featured on that show. There's also some stuff about the Catholic Church attempting to crash Satan's party and Butters using a mirror to summon the ghost of Biggie Smalls, but none of that's particularly important.

In the strand we're focusing on, Jeffrey Dahmer is released from Hell, along with fellow deceased serial killers Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, to pick up a Ferrari cake for Satan's party. Naturally, they fail to accomplish this ostensibly simple task when their urge to kill gets in the way, and the whole thing swiftly transforms into a dark pastiche of The Three Stooges, with Bundy assuming the role of Moe, Dahmer of Larry and Gacy of Curly. The three killers do what they can to salvage the increasingly grisly situation, but darn it, those danged murderous urges just won't stay in check. If the whole set-up sounds incredibly distasteful, remember that we're in South Park country, baby. Actually, this episode is probably best-known for the controversy it provoked on its initial airing, due to its flippant depiction of the death of Australian TV star Steve Irwin less than two months after he died (he shows up as a guest at Satan's party, complete with a string ray sticking out of his heart), which many viewers condemned as "too soon" (the Irwin moment does explicitly comment on the issue of mocking something too soon after the event, although you can very well argue that Trey and Matt were looking to have their cake and eat it). There's a line in the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors proposing that "Comedy is tragedy plus time" (which was presumably reworked from the Karl Marx quote, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce"), and I guess that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were able to bear that out with this considerably less controversial story arc casting three historic serial killers in a Three Stooges style caper. The whole thing is a drawn-out exercise in pushing the boundaries of bad taste, but there is something weirdly beguiling about the sheer insanity of it all.

The big question, or at least the one I'm the most preoccupied with, is how accurate this episode's depiction of Jeffrey Dahmer is to the facts about the man himself, and that's what I'm going to examine in the space below. I could talk about Bundy and Gacy too, but I'm not nearly as well-versed on those guys.

First off, a disclaimer, just to make it totally clear that I'm well aware that South Park wasn't striving for accuracy and that everything that happens in this episode does so purely in the interests of humour. The fact that it involves three dead serial killers going to collect a giant cake shaped like an automobile is a pretty big tip-off. But does anyone really mind if I nitpick it anyway?

Here, Dahmer is voiced by Matt Stone and - surprise! - he sounds nothing like the actual Jeffrey Dahmer. Mind you, I think that Stone was looking less to emulate Dahmer's real voice than he was Larry from The Three Stooges. To be fair to Stone, his efforts are still infinitely less weird than what Trey Parker calls a Jeffrey Dahmer impression.

The three killers first enter the scene about eight minutes into the episode, when Satan decides that he wants a Ferrari cake at his party and his assistant Azazel calls forth "Hell's most evil souls" to go up to the Bakery Napoleon on Earth to retrieve it and deliver it to the party. As each killer steps forward, a newspaper headline flashes onscreen, giving the viewer some vague insight into his own particular misdeeds.

When Dahmer appears, his newspaper headline reads "17 bodies found in...". Straight off the bat, we have our first inaccuracy, for Dahmer's list of victims did indeed number at seventeen, but not all of their bodies were found (particularly as Dahmer didn't immediately take to his practice of hoarding preserved body parts). Notably, the remains of Steven Tuomi, Dahmer's second victim, have never been found to this day, and Dahmer was not charged with his death due to the lack of concrete evidence - even Dahmer's own confession on the matter was considered shaky. (Incidentally, if you think that seventeen is a shocking figure, Dahmer actually had the lowest kill count out of this particular trio of killers.)

So, Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy head up to Earth to retrieve that Ferrari cake, and I've got to say, I'm not sure exactly how this supposed to work, even in context. Are they returning to Earth as ghosts or have they been given brand new corporeal bodies? I'm assuming the latter, given that their ability to interact with the material world doesn't seem at all impaired or out of the ordinary. They go to the Bakery Napoleon, but things immediately take a nasty turn when Gacy and Dahmer impulsively stab the staff at the bakery, leaving the three killers with no one to help them load the Ferrari cake onto their pick-up vehicle, and some Three Stooges-esque scuffling ensues.

The massive inaccuracy the entire "Three Murderers" story arc hinges on is the whole idea that they can't accomplish simple tasks because they're compelled to gruesomely butcher every person they encounter on sight. In reality, all three men operated according to strict MOs and did not kill this indiscriminately - if Dahmer, Bundy and Gacy had gone around stabbing people willy-nilly, as is depicted here, they would have each been caught very quickly. All three killers were methodical enough to conceal their murderous activities within the context of their ostensibly ordinary lives - indeed, a crucial part of what defines a serial killer is that "cool off" period that occurs between each murder, in which the killer goes back to their "normal" life before the urge to kill resurfaces. Certainly, stabbing random strangers on the spot was not Dahmer's style. He was very selective in the victims he targeted (young males with a physique that appealed to him), and his preferred method was to lure them back to Apartment 213, drug them and then strangle them in their sleep. Dahmer also did not kill because he enjoyed the act of killing, but because he wanted complete control over his victims and to do what he willed with their bodies. Something that's also not represented here is how entwined Dahmer's activities were with his alcoholism.

Later, when the three killers are attempting to load the cake onto the vehicle themselves, a random stranger offers them his assistance and gets gorily stabbed by Gacy for his trouble. When Bundy berates Gacy for this, he states that he did it for Dahmer, because "he likes havin' sex with dead bodies". Bundy then turns around and notices Dahmer getting duly intimate with the dead man's digestive system.

Bundy: Dahmer! Stop having sex with them intestines!

Dahmer: What good are intestines if you can't have sex with them?

Okay, that part is 100% true. Dahmer did have a morbid fascination with the viscera in particular, and he got up to some really gruesome things with his victims' guts. Although I doubt that the man in question would have been Dahmer's type.

Bundy points out that they now have a dead body to dispose of, lest they attract unwanted attention. As they tend to the body, Dahmer gets hold of a severed hand and begins to nibble at it compulsively, much to Bundy's annoyance - this is a reference to Dahmer's true-life cannibalism, although again this was a bit more methodical than Dahmer simply being compelled to nibble away at any loose bit of human flesh he got hold of (Dahmer ate the body parts of some of his victims as a means of furthering his sense of intimacy with them - he also cooked it in advance). Unfortunately for the three killers, they're so engrossed in the task at hand (or rather, in physically pounding one another when it doesn't go so well) they forget that they never finished loading the Ferrari cake onto the truck and it winds up getting splattered over Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy in a glorious mess. Bundy berates Gacy when he cheerfully samples the ruined cake, as Dahmer laments what deep trouble they're now in.

 

In their final skit, Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are in the bakery kitchen, having resolved to create a new Ferrari cake entirely from scratch within the twenty minutes they have remaining. Dahmer quips that he knows he's up to the task because he once enrolled in an Italian cookery class, but ultimately quit because, "There weren't enough Italians to eat!" Something tells me that the real Dahmer would have been way too introverted to have participated in an Italian cookery class, even if he'd had the opportunity (there's also the implication here that his cannibalism was driven by a simple taste for human flesh rather than his ritualistic behaviours), but then he's clearly joking and some sources indicate that Dahmer did have a very weird sense of humour (though he wasn't exactly what you'd call a jolly soul), so I'll give "Hell on Earth 2006" this one. (Actually, the real reason why Dahmer might have been handy in the production of confectionery is because he worked in a chocolate factory.)

The gruesome finale sees the three killers ultimately turning their murderous compulsions on one another. When Gacy refuses to get 10,000 eggs for the Ferrari cake, Bundy finally tires of his clowning and rips his eyeballs from their sockets. This angers Dahmer, who stabs Bundy in the gut with a kitchen blade and blows a raspberry at him. Bundy retaliates by cutting off Dahmer's exposed tongue, but Dahmer manages to take Bundy out by stabbing him upwards through the jaw. Meanwhile Gacy, who can't see what's going on, starts swinging a rolling pin blindly and ends up brutally bludgeoning Dahmer. This is no doubt an intentional reference to how Dahmer died in real life; he was bludgeoned by another prison inmate and succumbed to his injuries before he could receive medical attention. Here, I'm not sure quite what the deal is, because all three men are technically already dead, but it's the last we see of them in this episode. In the end Satan decides that he doesn't need anything as ridiculously decadent as a Ferrari cake to have an enjoyable Halloween party, and the other story strands do converge in the final scene, but the "Three Murderers" arc ends with Dahmer and Bundy in crumpled, bloodied heaps with Gacy still waving that rolling pin blindly. Too bad they couldn't make the party.