My Friend Dahmer, based on the book by Derf Backderf

My Friend Dahmer, based on the book by Derf Backderf

Sometimes, films about Monsters can have an incredible success…consider the movie…Monster

That one has won the Academy Award, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Award and many others for Charlize Theron as the Monster

                My Friend Dahmer is interesting, although not Oscar material.

Ross Lynch is not as appalling, fearsome, and horrendous as to create such powerful feelings in the audience as to make the viewing an unforgettable experience, with critics hurrying to write about a noteworthy performance.

This actor though may actually portray the infamous Dahmer with brilliance, given the fact that, to begin with, the monster was a rather bland personage, given to some eccentricities, but not exposing such a flawed character as to make one expect the series of gruesome murders which have been all over the news, so there is no need of a spoiler alert.

Indeed, one appealing aspect, more than that, a very attractive strength is that a viewer is watching with absolute concentration, waiting for the signs of peculiarity to give way to the spectacle of horror.

                Well, what can one say? Keep waiting!

Young Jeffrey Dahmer surely sends alarm signals off, but ignorant in such matters as one can be, there is nothing on the scale of the man who entered a Florida school recently to kill seventeen people.

His father, Lionel Dahmer is a biologist and the source of the material for some of the outré, perhaps vicious experiments that indicated a morbid inclination, the immersion of dead animals into acid and then watching their decomposition, challenged at one point by colleagues, who angered the young man and made him take out one jar with remains, smash it and revolt the doubters who were also overwhelmed by the nauseating smell.

Dahmer collects road kill for this procedure and he also places dead cats in acid, which come to think of it is ghastly and makes one think that it is in fact the expectation of much more horror in connection with serial killer that made Jeffrey and his acts seem bland, but only compared with the knowledge of his later horrid executions, dismemberments, cannibalism and necrophilia.

Remember- this Dahmer as a…friend, in his young age, when he is disgusting and every moment could bring the weirdness to another level, a murderous one, as he lifts a bat, the public awaits for the smashing of a skull and the other known fearsome crimes.

There are quite a number of scenes where the panic rests in the waiting and the aforementioned knowledge of the seventeen murders committed by the lunatic that young Dahmer was or maybe he would just become later.

It is the brilliance of the use of the waiting for the jogger to be ambushed and dismembered, the expectation that the dog he takes in the woods will be killed using the Swiss knife he keeps taking out, that his “friend” Derf, the one who has written the book on which the film is based, would be hit with a baseball bat that makes the viewer shrink in expectation.

Colleagues at the school are ambivalent about this strange colleague, who keeps making weird noises and pretends to be a comedian, until somehow, some boys are delighted by these peculiar performances and even create a fan club, although it is often an attitude of deplorement that prevails.

The other students are not so much having fun with the clownish, loutish Dahmer, who is not spiritual, smart, incisive in his pretended humor, but uses instead some stupid sounds and stupid gestures to get some conceited laughs.

There is tension in the family, the parents are fighting with each other and this is surely part of the explanation of the heinous behavior of the adult Jeff Dahmer, but not justifying it in any way or form.

In the parking lot of the motel where the father now resides, Mrs. Dahmer is shouting and hits the man, who responds with his own loud, vicious words that condemn the other in a game known from the quintessential Games People Play by the definitive expert, writer, psychologist Eric Berne.

Vincent Kartheiser, famous from his major role in Mad Men, plays with perfect skill the doctor Matthews, who is jogging near an observant Dahmer and we expect this run to end at any time, with the killer trapping the unknowing runner and applying the methods he had refined with cats and badgers on him.

In fact, Jeff Dahmer pays an official visit to the doctor, who tries to assess the health of the young man, asking him questions that prompt answers that expose some of the confusion in his head, like when the reply to the question “did you have sexual relations?” is “what kind?” which may point to the antihero entertaining already various sexual partners and some of the sick acts he would commit, like necrophilia.

In one of the later scenes, Dahmer is on a bed, lying on top of what looks like the corpse of the doctor and the immediate thought is that he had done it, killed the man and he is now enjoying his accomplishment.

It is only a dream though, maybe a nightmare, even if one cannot comprehend the workings of such an Ugly Mind- we can put this in antithesis with The Beautiful Mind, where a genius suffers from schizophrenia, but instead of murdering humans, he helps others immensely with his Nash Equilibrium Theory.