Continuing his efforts to chronicle every American serial killer in brutal, fetishistic, detail, Joe Berlinger’s new Netflix series “Conversations with a Killer: The John Wayne Gacy Tapes” operates on the same wavelength as his 2019 “Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” — obvious, lurid, and compulsively watchable. Ostensibly about the 60 hours of interviews made by Gacy while on death row, “Conversations” is oddly less interested in using his own words to psychoanalyze the former construction worker turned murderer. Instead, Berlinger’s series is more about contextualizing his killing spree, before diving into in the granular detail of the 33 murders that he committed near Chicago between 1972 and 1978. By using his interviews sparingly, “Conversations with a Killer” is somewhat of a misnomer of a title, as Gacy’s recordings are seemingly treated as an afterthought to what really is a traditional, talking-head style, true-crime doc.
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Organized around the 1978 disappearance of Robert Piest — a catalyst for the investigation of Gacy — ‘Conversations’ adopts the metaphor of a camera roll to jump back and forth through time, moving from Piest to Gacy’s time in Iowa. A series of interviewees — cops, victims, families, lawyers — provide the necessary background into Gacy, as Berlinger cuts between home movies and archival footage. The series narrows in a number of threads that lead to his killing spree, mainly foregrounding Gacy’s early home life and his views of homosexuality. His self-identification as bisexual — and his multiple marriages to women — suggest the relationship between the shame of his sexual orientation and his penchant for murder.
But Berlinger isn’t so much interested in diving into Gacy’s psychology. Instead, “Conversations” adopts a more sociological approach, focusing on Gacy’s community and the treatment of gay youth in Chicago during the ’70s. When the series does hone in on Gacy, it’s mainly after the investigation has reached its climax, and the bodies start cropping up. The final episode is almost entirely centered on recounting the monstrous efficiency of Gacy as he managed to hide 33 bodies — many within his own home. We are shown videos taken by the police, architectural designs, and first-hand accounts of what it was like to dig up so many bodies in a small suburban home.
Berlinger’s choice to centralize Piest, and dive into the aftermath of body identification for nearly a third of its runtime, superficially aligns the series with the victims, but the amount of time spent digging into the specifics of how Gacy disposed of the bodies is also, well, a bit grotesque. After his stunning, anthropological work with the “Paradise Lost” trilogy (and a few odd detours into narrative filmmaking), Berlinger has become the defacto face of true-crime docs — ‘Bundy,’ “Crime Scene: The Vanishing of Cecil Hotel,” and “Confronting a Serial Killer” — each one a bit pulpier than the last. ‘Conversations’ continues this downward trend for a filmmaker who used to be more interested in exploring the motivations, and psychology, behind the crimes rather than dwelling on the gory details.
For a series that claims to unearth the motivations behind the infamous killer, using his own words, no less, Gacy’s voice is oddly sublimated. There has been no shortage of content related to Gacy — just last year Peacock released “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise” featuring many of the same interview subjects. Hearing Gacy’s own voice would, perhaps, justify ‘Conversations’ as a new exploration of the killer, but the series never really seems interested in actually using the titular tapes. ‘Conversations’ is both competently made and very bingeable — two traits that Netflix is surely happy with — but it also is becoming harder to differentiate Berlinger’s work from an episode of “Forensic Files.” [C]