Dahmer

I think it would have been easy to look at Dahmer prior to watching it with expectations of something quite exploitative. However, I think director Jacobson decided he was more interested in seeing the serial killer during points besides the grisly details that had become a morbid media fixation. I had recently watched an interview special where Stone Philips interviewed Dahmer beside his father in a room at correctional prison just before he would be killed by an inmate. Dahmer was unable to reason with his interview as to why he felt the need to mutilate, to destroy, and spoke candidly (and eerily, matter-of-factly) about his own responsibility and impulses that drove him to commit the heinous acts that led to his notoriety and infamy. What made this especially surreal was how Dahmer could be so candid as his father sat right next to him. And being asked by Stone regarding how he felt about pops’ writing a book about the whole ordeal (even his own dreams of killing!) is also quite bizarre.

While “taking creative license” in how Dahmer’s life unfolds to us in a “back and forth” time frame between his selection process, eyeballing possible victims, working at a chocolate bar factory, his awkward relationships with father, mother, and grandmother, concealments of his sexual desires and orientation, drugging males he meets in gay bars (along with sodomizing them in “back sex rooms”), and eventual entrapment of men in his home (drugging them as he did males in the gay bar hangout) before butchering them in sickening fashion, director Jacobson is careful not to explicitly exploit the ugly details, instead telling us this disturbed individual’s story in a way that isn’t glamorously exposing him as much as following him during a path of darkness. Jeremy Renner seems perfect casting in inhabiting this man as a cold, detached, introverted lost soul, briefly outbursting volatility in certain moments when his secrets were potentially unraveled. By police, father, and urban ladies as examples, Dahmer is shown avoiding exposure, even though we all know his downfall was certain. I’m not sure there is a way to truthfully gain perspective on the inner demons and understand what made him tick. Instead, what we have is the results of his actions.

There was a lot seething underneath the surface. We see his father leaving the home as his parents’ marriage was coming apart, and not long afterward, Jeffrey’s using a baseball bat to take anger-fueled swings at trees in the backyard. Later, during a struggle with some random neighborhood young man in a wrestling jersey, he attempts to use a chokehold on him. There’s this excuse Jeffrey uses of “I’m only playing.” It’s a ploy when attempts to hurt people aren’t quite as successful. When the young man he offers grass to in exchange for his company has turned the tables on Jeffrey during that mentioned chokehold (he is a wrestling high school champion), he is walking away unaware of a muscle weight would to be used across the back of his head. Jeffrey, as seen in this film, is trying to find someone to have sexual relations with. He’s interested, and this random guy walking down a street is attractive to him. He’ll try to persuade him to a potential tryst but because the other guy is one of those hetero jocks, this will not succeed. Smoking pot, getting high, eating peanut butter, and guzzling milk is where it all goes. Even a wrestling match on the living room carpet doesn’t go as Jeffrey expects. But by the end of the evening, a dead body will need to be disposed of, and a close call with a local police officer while taking the chopped up remains in garbage bags away from the place of the murder will be Jeffrey’s first near brush with capture.

The film bounces back and forth between times when Jeffrey was a teenager-turning-adult, more or less a loner with few friends, and his night with a gay, young African-American man he first met as he was substitute-managing (for a cousin) at a pawn shop in Milwaukee.  Jeffrey is rather rude, elusive, antagonistic, purposely selective in what he has to say (with most retorts with bite) to this young man during this night. Attempts to harm him are often ended before Jeffrey is about to kill him. This is one potential victim who tempts fate and survives because Jeffrey didn’t have the urging to execute him.

There’s an issue of privacy that Jeffrey wishes to maintain. He nearly comes unglued when pops (played perfectly by Bruce Davison who looks nothing like Dahmer’s real father) demands Jeffrey open an old chemistry box (this box, we learn in an interview with Dahmer, held a severed head). Not to mention, pops expecting Jeffrey to return a stolen mannequin that appeared to be a sexual fantasy object for him to enjoy alone. In the interview with Stone Philips, the real Dahmer sees a box as he starts to leave for his cell after it’s over and comments on how it resembles the one he held the severed head in. I personally don’t think that urge to kill and the homosexual perversion that lived within him (not the sex but the use of a body as it was dead or near death, a total plaything with no consideration in what would take place) ever left once he was put in prison. In fact, if he had been released, there’s no doubt to me he would have continued to free his psychopathy on others. One such unlucky victim unable to escape Jeffrey had fled the apartment, met some urban locals, and nearly was aided by them, but the dark irony of his demise was in fact thanks to the local authorities who buy Dahmer’s story of his being merely drunk (unaware of the drill that was used to bore a tiny hole in the Asian victim’s head!), and allowing the psychopath to take him back to his residence!

I think it was wise for the director and his crew to try and avoid the scrutiny of the "Anachronism Police." You can check the imdb and realize that Jacobson and company couldn't do that, but it was worth a shot. It is just exhausting for any filmmaker and crew to totally avoid some time mistake that the A-Police will uncover and criticize. This is still an attempt to gaze into instances in the life of a man plagued by impulses thankfully many of us are blessed not to suffer. He couldn't rid himself of the urges that summoned from within. As the film is about to conclude, Dahmer reaches into the opened stomach of the victim "that nearly got away" and a sense of pleasure starts to arise on his face. Afterward, there's an earlier time in his life when his father felt he needed help "for his alcoholism", taking him to a doc that might could offer guidance to do so. Pops didn't truly know what he really needed help for. Dahmer walks into the nearby woods located by the hospital and over a hill. He would claim about fourteen more victims after this walk.

I guess Jacobson, if he was so inclined, could have used a narrative device from within Dahmer's mind as to explain his actions, but I think Renner has a performance, aching, and pain in his face that does as much to evoke the agony from behind the veil. Dahmer admitted that psychiatrists attempted to get answers for his monstrous body count and warped treatment of bodies after death, but even he couldn’t explain why he did what he did…how is a filmmaker and screenwriter supposed to?