À PROPOS DE CET ÉPISODE
A teenager with red hair swooping over one eye takes a selfie at an eyeglass store and posts it on Tumblr. “I saw these Jeffrey Dahmer like glasses,” he writes in the caption. “I feel like [they] look cute on me. Is that bad?” He tags the photo #serialkiller.
The list of serial killers who wore glasses is long and bloody, from Dahmer to BTK to Harold Shipman and his professorial frames; even the Zodiac Killer, never caught, wears a thick-rimmed pair in a police sketch. The aesthetic of “serial killer glasses” is so pervasive that it pops up everywhere from Urban Dictionary (“Eyeglasses with heavy or severe frames that live somewhere between fashionable and creepy”) to TV Tropes (where “a guy who is cold, emotionless… or even a soulless monster” is given glasses “to quickly tip off the audience to his personality”), and countless Tumblr posts in between.
Search for “serial killer glasses” on Amazon and you’ll be directed to the “So In Luxe Aviator Retro Fashion Glasses” — perfect for the manic pixie dream serial killer. Naturally, Spirit Halloween sells a pair, too. It’s a look that signifies “creep” and “outsider” so well that it’s become the punchline to a joke: Amy Schumer and Conan O’Brien have both done skits about how men who favor a certain style of glasses tend to be serial killers, molesters, cult leaders, or all of the above.
Of course, the fact that many serial killers wear glasses is simple math: Over 60 percent of Americans use some sort of vision correction, and serial killers are just like the rest of us, at least when it comes to their eyesight. But because these killers are often exhaustively scrutinized and even fetishized in the media, their glasses have become part of the serial killer iconography. A pair of shiny lenses, perched on the bridge of a serial killer’s nose, becomes a subtle metaphor for his walled-off nature, for her sociopath’s aloofness. Glasses become a mask that’s acceptable for the killer to wear in public. They become a threat, too: After all, the serial killer who wears glasses is apparently someone who can see us better than we can see them. Someone who’s always watching.
While serial killers can be found leering behind everything from cat-eye glasses to horn-rimmed spectacles, the glasses of Jeffrey Dahmer have certainly come to define the look. After the whole world saw a pair of bug-eyed, wire-rimmed, double-bridged, clear-lensed aviators adorning the face of Dahmer — cannibal, necrophiliac, killer of 17 men and boys — the style became notorious. These days, Dahmer’s accessory has been embraced by the mainstream; it’s an ironic statement now, a “lewk” that you can find not just on Tumblr but also on Pinterest (“Jeffrey Dahmer made me love these glasses”), Reddit (“How would I seek out the “Dahmer” style glasses?”), and even on the faces of Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, and Beyoncé, though they admittedly might be going for more of a “sexy nerd” look.
As an object, the glasses themselves have become unnerving, even without the real Dahmer behind them. When John “Derf” Backderf, one of Dahmer’s high school classmates, stopped by the set of My Friend Dahmer to see how filming was going (Backderf wrote the graphic novel that the film was based on), he found it impossible to talk to Ross Lynch, the actor playing Dahmer, because of his glasses. “He was in his full Dahmer get-up, and it freaked me out,” Backderf remembered. “I said, ‘Dude, you HAVE to take off those glasses or I can’t talk to you.’”
Dahmer wasn’t the only killer lurking behind clear-lensed aviators, though. Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, wore an almost identical pair as Dahmer, and a woman who fitted him for glasses at the Spectacle Shoppe in Wichita, Kansas, vividly remembers his cold eyes as he stared at her, “sizing her up.” Ed Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer, wore a pair, as did Dennis Nilsen, the Kindly Killer; Wayne Williams, the suspected Atlanta Child Murderer; and even the lesser-known Canadian Robert Hansen, the Butcher Baker, whose glasses were for sale on eBay in 2008. All these murderers operated during the ’70s and ’80s, decades when serial killers were sprouting like weeds across the globe, and the same decades that clear aviator glasses happened to be extremely popular. It’s no wonder, then, that so many of the decades’ worst offenders ended up in mug shots, glaring out at a horrified public through spookily similar frames.
Still, it’s not just ubiquity that doomed the clear aviator. 2020 Magazine, the “optical industry’s leading publication,” argues that there is something inherently creepy about the glasses’ physical design. It’s all in the curving, lachrymose angles: the bar across the top of the glasses turns suddenly downward at the corners of the eyes, and that, along with the tear-shaped curve of the inward frame edge, “pull[s] the face and the eyes down with them, giving the illusion that most aviator wearers are sad, frowny-faced, or otherwise dealing with some sort of internal p...
