My Friend Dahmer is about a wacky high school misfit.

Who went on to kill 17 people.

Ant
Ant
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read

My Friend Dahmer is based on a comic of the same name, written and drawn by an artist called John Backdwef (aka Derf, aka Derf Backderf) who actually went to high school with the infamous killer. It’s such an unusual tale that I had to check after watching the movie to see how much was true — it seems like a lot of it.

The movie, directed by Marc Meyers follows Jeffery Dahmer (Ross Lynch) in his teenage high school years. He has an unhealthy obsession with roadkill and other dead animals, taking them back to a shack in the woods near the Dahmer family home and dissolving them in acid. His mother is mentally unstable and speaks maniacally, almost ignoring Dahmer entirely. His father is worried about him, and keeps trying to reach out. First by being stern, then by being a mate. But he’s also distant.

At high school Jeffery exists somewhere between being ignored and being teased. He’s a weirdo and a loner. But then he finds that he can use his weirdness to his advantage. He begins to fake seizures, which turns him into a class clown of sorts. It also attracts the attention of a group of inbetweeners, led by Derf (Alex Wolff). They befriend Dahmer, and start pranking everyone. And things start to seem normal in his life for a while. But all the while Jeffery knows that he’s basically Homer in that episode of The Simpsons, “Homer vs Dignity”, where Mr Burns pays Homer money to embarrass himself.

This, combined with his parents getting divorced and his already unhinged state, sets Dahmer back on a downward spiral of drinking, and eventual violence.

He also watches Pete Campbell from Mad Men jog. No, really.

A quick aside: even on the scale of serial killers, Jeffery Dahmer is abhorrent. He didn’t just kill, but performed experiments on some of his victims. In 1991 he lured a man back to his apartment, drugged him, then drilled a hole in his head and injected acid into his brain. The idea being to turn his victim into a compliant living sex toy. You know how movie serial killers always have elaborate psychological motives and methods, but the real life ones usually just jump vulnerable people and strangle them? Nah. Jeffery Dahmer is a real life movie monster.

So when it comes to humanising the man, My Friend Dahmer has an uphill battle on its hands. And while it doesn’t exactly humanise him, it makes him a lot more… understandable? No, that’s not quite the word either. “Relatable”, that’s probably it.

My Friend Dahmer is half thriller, half high school indie comedy-drama. Take the serial killer out and you could be watching and episode of Boy Meets World. There’s proms and biology classes and bullies and field trips and girl troubles and pranks. There are long stretches that are just fun, like when the class goes on a field trip and Jeffery charms his way through to meeting the Vice President. That’s a fun teen comedy I’d love to see more of!

But it’s all seen through the lens of a psychopath. Of a troubled young man who can’t process the bullies and the girl troubles, and definitely not his broken family life. Dahmer is played by a fella named Ross Lynch, who I learned afterwards is a Disney Channel kid and has a Hanson-esque pop band with his siblings called R5. Well, this guy can act. I would not have picked him as a teen heartthrob at all.

(Note: I went in thinking that Dahmer was played by Jesse Eisenberg. Look at that header image.)

He plays Dahmer incredibly authentic, someone who is doing his level best to fit in and be normal, but all the while wrestling with darkness underneath. When real-life Dahmer was caught, he said that he “created this horror and it only makes sense I do everything to put an end to it.” He knew that what the was doing was terrible, but he couldn’t help himself — and there was no one around to help him, either. And that comes through in Lynch’s performance.

My Friend Dahmer never excuses the man of his crimes. But it does show how people who commit terrible crimes are made. They’re the vulnerable, broken, disturbed members of society, and with a bit of help from us there’s a possibility that they could go down a different path.

Ant

Written by

Ant

Every Day Is Movies

I watch a movie every day in 2017, then write about each one. It seems like a good idea here in 2016.

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