My Friend Dahmer (which is now playing at Webster Place) takes place in 1978, and the movie evokes a certain type of filmmaking that flourished in the U.S. around that time—an improbable mixture of art house sensibilities and exploitation-movie content. Dahmer draws viewers in with a provocative title, which promises to reveal intimate secrets about serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, then refuses to deliver any details about his crimes. Rather, it’s a portrait of the killer as a young man—the movie depicts Dahmer’s senior year of high school and the events leading up to his first murder. Director Marc Meyers, adapting a graphic novel by Derf Backderf, exploits viewers’ curiosity about Dahmer’s gruesome actions to raise open-ended questions about what turns a human being into a monster.
The film doesn’t resolve these questions, as it provides little insight into Dahmer’s interior life; like the shooters in Elephant, he remains a closed book. What does become clear over the course of My Friend Dahmer is just how stifling and awful high school (at least in late-70s suburban Ohio) can be. The movie contains no adult role models who might teach Dahmer empathy; the grown-ups all seem pathetic, whether their lives are coming apart (as in the case of Dahmer’s mother) or held together by meaningless routines. No one seems to be learning anything in the scenes set in class, and the filmmakers make extracurricular activities seem pointless too. Even a class trip to Washington, D.C., (where Dahmer and his clique manage to score a meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale) feels arbitrary and joyless—something high school seniors do because it’s expected of them. The film doesn’t go so far as to argue that Dahmer’s high school experience made him a murderer. But its pessimistic view (made uglier by Meyers’s exploitive tendencies) is that high school couldn’t have helped him either.
