Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes Shows the Banality of Evil: Review

Clint Worthington
·6 min read
5

The post Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes Shows the Banality of Evil: Review appeared first on Consequence.

The Pitch: Years on, the American public is still obsessed with serial killers — who they are, what makes them tick, the lurid details of their murderous escapades. No one knows this more than the folks at Netflix, who toss out a new true-crime documentary every other week, and whose biggest hits include shows like Mindhunter.

One of the platform’s biggest hits was 2019’s Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which assembled a four-part chronicle of his crimes, his history, and the trial that ignited the public’s imagination. Now director Joe Berlinger is back with a follow-up, The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, drawing from nearly 60 hours of recorded interviews with another infamous mass murderer to tell another tale of lost innocence, the nature of madness, and the various ways we’ve constructed our society to help folks like Gacy get away with it.

Just Call Me John or JW: Like the previous docuseries, the bread and butter of The John Wayne Gacy tapes are the recordings themselves, conducted from 1979 to 1980 by investigators while he was on death row. Fuzzy and ephemeral like an audio log in a video game, listening to these clips carries a morbid fascination, even if Berlinger’s presentation of them teeters perilously close to a kind of hero worship.

It’s hard not to resist that temptation, after all; serial killers have lingered in the public’s imagination as societal deviants, the closest thing we have to pure, unambiguous demons. And Gacy’s story is particularly theatrical, Berlinger hopping back and forth through various points of his life to show a man scarred by an abusive childhood, working his way into the public’s trust through his work as a respected businessman, philanthropist and, yes, party clown.

(“I think they were nice clowns,” Gacy chuckles about the many pictures of Pogo the Clown he had in his house, the same one where he stashed 26 bodies of the 33 young boys he murdered. “But that’s just me.”)

The conversations themselves (well, less conversations than they are monologues from Gacy himself, the interviewers left to the occasional prodding question) offer plenty of prurient detail about Gacy’s take on his childhood, as well as his sexuality.

Early on, Berlinger establishes Gacy’s gleeful obsession with putting people in positions of intense psychological pressure just to see what happens, a fundamental component of his predilection toward serial killings. He professes both fascination and disgust with homosexuals depending on the moment, with his greatest ire reserved for the bisexual: unlike gays and straights, who have romantic feelings toward a particular gender, “A bisexual has sex just for having sex. To me, it’s like a form of masturbation.”

In the third episode, detailing the long but inevitable trial process that would eventually see him executed in 1995, Gacy flits between confession to his crimes and feigning ignorance — one last piece of manipulation to keep his subjects on their toes. And it’s that mercurial nature that keeps John Wayne Gacy Tapes from offering us any new revelations into Gacy’s true nature, remaining as elusive as ever.

The Last Piest of the Puzzle: In many ways, the tapes themselves feel like an afterthought to The John Wayne Gacy Tapes, Gacy’s voice merely lending supporting evidence to the host of police officers, attorneys, victims, and survivors who narrate the thrust of the series.

It’s here we get a refreshing remove from Gacy’s MO to examine the effect he had on those around him: The city officials who appreciated his work with the Cook County Democratic Office at the time, his defense attorney who did his best to defend an obvious monster, the man who narrowly escaped being murdered by Gacy when he was sexually threatened by him at 16.

These not only offer personal glimpses into the specific impact Gacy had on the Chicago community, but more wide-ranging indictments of the environment in which he thrived. In the ’70s, the public and police were especially hostile to young gay men, leaving them easy marks for Gacy to prey upon.

For most of these boys, even their families had abandoned them because of their sexuality; the one real break in the Gacy case comes when the parents of young Rob Piest, a good-looking white honor student, actually took the time to hound police to look for their child, a rarity among these kids. Gacy even admits that one of the reasons he kept going was because no one was going to be looking for such marginalized outcasts.

One thing that survivors and friends of victims emphasize throughout the doc is the need to keep the victims in mind first and foremost. The public’s fascination with serial killers (evidenced, honestly, by the very existence of this doc) often turns into a sick obsession with the narrative thrills of the case.

Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes (Netflix)
Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes (Netflix)

Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes (Netflix)

We’re repulsed and drawn to Gacy in equal measure, both by the gruesome nature of his crimes and the unconventionally compelling, soft-spoken manner with which he carries himself. Berlinger, to his credit, attempts to complicate the elevation of its subject by reminding us of his victims whenever possible, ending the miniseries with a long, unapologetic montage of every victim’s face — all of them young, cherubic, smiling, full of life snuffed out far too soon.

That said, all of the earnest acknowledgment of the victims doesn’t take away from the innate mystique docs like The John Wayne Gacy Tapes lend their subjects. Berlinger makes gestures toward putting the victims first, but at the end of the day this is still the kind of doc that lingers on every hushed syllable its murderous protagonist utters.

Its drama comes from tales of drunken fathers and childhood cross-dressing, shots lingering over images and descriptions of putrid, decomposing bodies being pulled from Gacy’s crawlspace, all while ominous music plays. As well-intentioned as it might be, it’s impossible for Berlinger’s work to escape the sick thrills true-crime audiences crave with docs like these.

The Verdict: Broadly, you won’t get much from The John Wayne Gacy Tapes that a passing familiarity with the man and his murders won’t reveal. No grand new insights come from the tapes or the interviews with the subjects involved. But as an example of the well-worn genre of true-crime docs, it’s decently well-structured, moves fast at a mere three hours(!), and accurately pins down the societal ills that Gacy’s predation highlighted.

It’s easy to point at a manipulative, emotionally hollow figure like Gacy and mark him as ‘evil’; it’s harder still to acknowledge the failings of law enforcement, corrupt politics, and public prejudice that gave evil so much runway to work with. It’s in these moments that we glean something new, a recognition that bigotry kills (even if indirectly) and that the culture of policing is insufficient to protect the vulnerable in their time of need.

Where’s It Playing? Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes drops on Netflix April 20th (just in time for you to drop an eddy and lose yourself in crime confessions).

Conversations With a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes Shows the Banality of Evil: Review
Clint Worthington

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