Then there is the other side, the one that creeps in from underneath. To a large extent My Friend Dahmer tracks a highly typical high school narrative, one based around friendship, rebellion, sex and drugs, and more than a few gloriously anarchic pranks against school authority figures. Here’s the thing: Meyers and Backderf may be right.īackderf for one should know better than others: he went to high school with Dahmer, and the odd friendship they shared forms the core of the film.
In those moments there is an internal flinch backwards, and a momentary desire to blame Meyers and Backderf for making you care about what some homicidal lunatic felt or experienced. It almost feels like a trick, one that uses well-worn dramatic techniques and familiar scenes to deliberately make us sympathetic to the struggles of an isolated, teased and misunderstood American teenager, right up to the moment when he starts murdering innocent people. There is an almost knee-jerk reaction to that, and it’s one that I occasionally felt when watching Meyers’ film.
#MY FRIEND DAHMER MOVIE ANALYSIS SERIAL#
It is a challenging film in one key respect, but one that I suspect may lead some to find it a particularly difficult watch: it aims to make us feel sorry for a serial killer.
He is now the protagonist of a dramatic feature film, My Friend Dahmer, directed by Marc Meyers and based on the graphic novel by John Backderf. Jeffrey Dahmer was an American serial killer who, between 1978 and his arrest in 1991, raped, murdered and dismembered at least seventeen young men.