The premise of “My Friend Dahmer” also makes it seem as if it is more like the indie-hipster version of ‘Bates Motel’, – a sensitive prequel to the madness yet to come – as it peeks into a year in the life of Jeffrey Dahmer the gay, cannibalistic, serial killer. Indeed, the dementia presented in the film appears to be rather mild in the Grand Guignol scheme of things. At 17, Jeffrey (Ross Lynch) enjoys taking rotting corpses off the roadside and dissolving them in jars of acid procured from his chemist father and his surly blank stare feeds the teenage outcast syndrome. However, ‘My Friend Dahmer’ is different from the rest of a twisted Afterschool Special as it is adapted from a true-life gory novel and is an attempt by John Backderf who portrays his horrifying high school experiences with Dahmer to attempt more serious and audacious portrayal of the inner workings of a sick puppy who, back then, wasn’t trying as hard to be sick.
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Dahmer, Jeffrey as a child never got a chance. It was painful to watch his origin stories and hear the basis of theme. Instead of telling the audience that Dahmer existed and him being a monster, instead, portraying that he was first made into one and was in fact, a real person. From the sentence, my best assumption of the documentary is that “My Friend Dahmer” is a chilling piece of artistry. There is no doubt the it will do exceedingly well in the right hands. After the “Bates Motel” or even “Hannibal”, people are much more accustomed now and would certainly welcome something that peeps into the adolescent abyss.
Dahmer has casted Disney star Ross Lynch, which seems absurd but makes sense after Ross takes his first step into the character. He steps into the role of Dahmer who is in 1978 and pulls off slacks along with an overcoat, an aviator frame and a shaggy coif. Now that I have seen him, I understand what people mean. People mean that he acts with a spooked gravity, if you look at his face, it becomes clear that he is terrified of something and is ready to do anything is being very careful about smiling. Ross also is like Jeremy Renner, he is massively famous now but, 15 years ago, he went through a world of change when his role in “Dahmer” opened doors for him.
Jeffrey is being bullied in school, and on top of it all, he doesn’t know how to process his feelings for the bearded jogger (Vincent Kartheiser) he sees from the school bus every morning. (He gets beaten up for his homoerotic fantasies that never amount to anything.) From the outside, his home appears conventional, but his mother, brilliantly played by Anne Heche, has been a global pendulum. She accelerates from righteous temper to super frazzled impulse control and invokes the diabolical nature of mental illness, the kind that de-stabilizes everyone who comes close. Jeffrey’s father (Dallas Roberts) is not well equipped to deal with it, neither is Jeffrey. When one of his many retreats is into the chemistry shed located in the rustic backyard of their home in Bath, Ohio, he becomes preoccupied with the insides of animals. In reality, Jeffrey is attempting to find out where his soul is hiding.
It’s as if the whole thing turns into an obsession. In this case, when his father finally takes the shed apart, Jeffrey overcompensates by pretending to be hysterical during a school lesson. This shows he has had enough for the time being. However, a group of nerdy bohemians, or the ‘70s Ohio-ish version of it, led by Derf Alex Wolff come to the conclusion that what Jeffrey is doing –which they consider to be spazzing out– is an outsider art form that is utterly insane.
This is where the motion picture extremely becomes engaging. We can probably all argue that cultures do not “produce” serial killers, but in the last half a century, they have set the background for them to exist. The madness that is Charles Manson was already present before the counterculture, but the deeds of Manson and his hippie “family” were all mixed up with the amoral, what-the-hell rules, do-it-if-it-feels-good attitude of the late 60’s. In Dahmer’s instance, the connection is just as important and less apparent because the late 70s was not as glamorized a period. However, Marc Meyers, the writer-director of My Friend Dahmer, has brought to life that time much more eloquently than Mike Mills in his film ‘20th Century Women’ – by depicting what gave that period its distinctive flavor. Things had turned ‘straight’ again, the counter culture was over, but there still was a sense that fighting against ‘conformity’ was a noble cause.
Urged on by his new friends, who find him a complete absurd gross (but that is what they like about him) Jeffrey starts to spazz out in front of everyone in school which looks like he is in the middle of his electroshock treatment. His body goes through a series of tics while he walks around with his tongue hanging out. It’s the sick kind of performance art that borders on psycho nerd. (This was the period of the Ramones and the ‘Teenage Lobotomy’ song.) The friends also οrganize for Jeffrey to sneak into each year’s group photo for every club in school, a timeless Dada trick that’s left over from the ‘60s. What’s remarkable about Lynch’s performance is that he manages to convey how Jeffrey endorses all this just so that he can fit in. He is too intelligent, however, to lie to himself into believing that he fits in. His chillingly detached “role” as the delusional school outcast is unnerving.
Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” set out to achieve what the movie “My Friend Dahmer” ultimately did: to rubricate the psychopathy of children. Although the movie does pose the question, if Jeffrey was able to express his sexual feelings like everyone else, would he have ended up on a different path? Like with Norman Bates, all the feelings and urges are bottled up inside him – he has the desire to do something but finds himself unable to, as the people around him are not able to tolerate it either – which they correctly sense. Jeffrey is such a good looking person, and the fact that he is a star adds so much to the cinemagraphic of the movie. The Jeffrey Dahmer we all know was a monster with pride as well, and the most horrifying part of his ‘self’ was the fact that he thought he was handsome. But indeed, whatever this may stand for, “My Friend Dahmer” does not go too far. In Dahmer’s case, however, he is portrayed for his true self: a man who was only capable of expressing himself through the worst imaginable. This shows that once someone breaks the borders of sanity, a lot of terrible things can happen – things that are beyond imagination.
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