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"I’m a pervert. I’m an exhibitionist. I’m
a masturbator, and a killer." So says Jeffrey Dahmer,
arguably America’s most infamous serial killer, in a
moment of truth when urged to own up to his real self near
the end of David Jacobson’s debut feature film. He speaks
the simple truth calmly because he knows, of course, that
the victim will not believe him, and he’s right.
It was little more than a decade ago, the same year that
Silence of the Lambs was winning Oscars and
box-office dollars, that daily revelations of atrocities from
the hidden life of the Milwaukee gay killer occupied the headlines.
Dahmer’s trial -- which resulted in a near thousand-year
jail sentence -- contains the raw material for a provocative
screenplay, but writer-director Jacobson positions his script
as neither prosecution nor defense, but rather challenges
the viewer with an unexpected imaginative understanding of
its protagonist. Not necessarily accurate in terms of complete
details this film, nonetheless, takes seriously subject matter
that has been debased for Grand Guignol thrills (as in Hannibal
) or punitive religiosity (as in Se7en),
whose killer’s moral agenda results in crimes described
as "sermons ... he’s preaching!"). If Hannibal
Lecter, as a figure of evil genius, embodies society’s
distrust of the intellectual, then Dahmer personifies society’s
disquiet at discovering the secret murderer in the boy-next-door.
Viewers who expect a peephole look at grisly gore will find
no cheap shocks as Jacobson leaves the unwatchable and unspeakable
details unwatched and unspoken (the actual violence amounts
to barely half a minute). Instead, stylized framing and composition
mask the bloodshed, achieving an austere abstraction from
the details of Dahmer’s crimes. Indeed, if this film
were not connected to such a notorious killer, if its title
were simply some commonplace surname --"Jackson"
or "Johnson" -- a greater public might appreciate
its sharp dialogue, assured technique, and thoughtful approach
to dealing with the reality of the murderer in society.
Working without the safety net of a thriller (or even a mystery)
framework, Jacobson leads the viewer in a more disturbing
direction than a mere restaging of crimes that were adequately
exploited and sensationalized by the media in 1992. (These
were also gruesomely recorded in the one-man exploitation
film, The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer,
produced in 1993, while Dahmer was still alive). In any film
from the police viewpoint, such as Se7en,
the elaborately sordid details serve to distance the killer
from the audience, leaving spectators nervous because the
heroes are in danger. In Dahmer, we are the
ones in danger, just from the fact that we live in the same
society. While those who have to apprehend the killer and
clean up after him are valid subjects, it is equally valid
to understand the killer himself. One unsettling question
that Jacobson’s film asks is: how could this one-man
axis of evil (even Ted Bundy and Son of Sam didn’t consume
their victims) pass unnoticed in day-to-day life?
As portrayed here, Dahmer is not a people pleaser like Norman
Bates, although this film shares Psycho’s
audacity in making its psychopath a personable, appealing
personality, in effect daring the viewer to recognize the
ruinous instability driving this slow-drawling but nimble-witted
young man. When he remarks that "when you think about
it, the cross was a torture device, it’s like praying
to an electric chair or a guillotine", his skewed outsider’s
viewpoint would not be out of place with the circle of cultural
misfits in Ghost World. With no inside knowledge,
could we detect the secret wells of violence in this Dahmer?
Can we see into the hidden propensities of anyone around us?
Looking like Tobey Maguire’s blond older brother, with
an artless haircut and glassy eyes peering out from his aviator
spectacles, Jeremy Renner commits himself to a brave and unshowy
performance, convincing both as a teenager chafing at parental
restrictions and as the adult focused on his mission. Unlike
young males portrayed today, this Dahmer does not define himself
by his choices of rock music, and cars and sports do not interest
him. With his K-Mart wardrobe marking his underclass origins,
he nevertheless seems impervious to pop culture (although
the film fails to mention that police found his videos of
Blade Runner and Star Wars,
the latter apparently serving to psych him up for an evening’s
hunt for a partner). Renner’s Dahmer always listens
alertly, weighing what he hears, whether loping around his
rundown part of town (exteriors filmed in Dahmer’s old
neighborhood in Milwaukee) or spiking knockout drinks for
his guests in his one-bedroom sinkhole of an apartment (decorated
with the temporary personality of a college dorm room, complete
with lava lamp and murky fishtank). But what was he thinking?
Not a loner by choice, he seeks intimacy, yet is unable to
risk the final move without immobilizing his partner. As the
film’s subtitle -- "A Mind Is a Place of Its Own"
-- suggests, Jacobson tries to open a way into Dahmer’s
interior emotional life by imagining certain private moments
that place the viewer in unsettling complicity with the killer.
Thus, we see him press his face to the chest of an unconscious
victim, just listening to his heartbeat. Aided by the visual
control of Chris Manley’s loose (though not imprecise)
framing and emotionally charged lighting (which saves red
light to signal the danger zone of Dahmer’s bedroom),
the film’s clean style effects an unusual widescreen
intimacy that repositions the audience as participants. Keeping
a middle distance, never aggressively pushing into close-ups,
the camera establishes Dahmer as someone recognizable in everyday
reality, yet capable of playing in fascination with his victims,
strangling and then reviving them, unable to find a better
way of relating to them.
In the most remarkable scene, played in a dreamlike hush,
the camera puts the viewer in bed alongside Dahmer, lying
close to another immobile victim. The shock value squandered
by hundreds of slasher movies is recovered when, with an absent
musing concentration in his eyes, he inserts his hand into
the man’s chest, and it’s suddenly clear that
he has already penetrated and opened this man’s body.
With all bloodshed masked off by careful framing, this clean
and stylized shot underlines this as the ultimate intimacy,
successfully suggesting how this gesture could be sexual.
(Dahmer later told psychiatrists that he only killed the ones
he liked), putting the audience in direct communication with
the horror. When Hitchcock’s Rear Window
makes us all voyeurs, spying alongside James Stewart’s
character on his neighbors’ private lives, there is
still safety in the physical distance and the telephoto lens
to hide behind. Dahmer removes this distance,
as if Hitchcock had placed us motionless and helpless in the
killer’s living room to calmly watch him strangle his
wife.
In order to isolate the human reality behind the tabloid
headlines, Jacobson controls access to the full details of
Dahmer’s private world, for example, never inquiring
into the contents of his refrigerator (which in reality held
body parts). Nor does the film address the economic circumstances,
although it is clear that the American Dream has little meaning
for Dahmer, a man with no ambition beyond his routine duties
at his chocolate factory. This is not a case of a little person
wanting to be big by asserting control; in fact, the world,
the greater community, doesn’t interest him. In a way,
he is the perfect assembly-line worker, master of his machinery
and too focused on his own obsessions to question procedures
at his workplace.
Nor does the film ask the obvious psychosexual question of
whether or not coming out could have saved Dahmer and his
victims, although it follows his cruising forays, watching
his awkwardly direct seduction ploys. Dipping into the ethnically
diverse melting pot, Dahmer has no trouble picking up partners,
fictionalized here accurately as two African-Americans, one
Asian, and one white (though the youth and vulnerability of
the real-life victims are downplayed). A sequence of gay bar
encounters shows Dahmer as sexual predator, the engine in
a rush of stuttering strobe-lit (and strobe-edited) druggings
and backroom sodomies. Finally, after even the blind eye of
the jaded bartender can no longer ignore that this customer
is basically a rapist, Dahmer gets beaten up and thrown out.
When one character finally tells him, "You’re pissed
because you’re gay", Dahmer never denies it, but
his problem seems not so much a repressed gay nature amenable
to some rainbow solution as a misdirected, stifled identity.
The absent father explanation, a familiar though discredited
cliché to account for gay orientation, does not apply
here. As played by Bruce Davison, Dahmer’s no-nonsense
dad is all too present, perceived by his son as an intrusive
authority figure (although the father is never the cold monster
of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom who
drives his son to kill as revenge). When the elder Dahmer
discovers in a closet a department store mannequin -- headless,
bare-chested, and clad in tight jeans (credibly the ideal
torso his son was always seeking) -- the ensuing argument
turns into a battle of wits in which this shrewd father is
not quite a match for the evasive strategies of his son, who
knows all the right buttons to push. Nor does the mother,
barely seen here, fixate the son’s thinking, as she
does in Psycho, While the City Sleeps,
and The Strangler.
The troubled breakup of this family appears in indirect strokes
as his parents separate, yet the enduring mystery of Dahmer
is that his pedestrian background holds so little mystery.
The relatively privileged middle-class environment that spawned
Dahmer presented him with unremarkable family problems, the
same ones that also produced millions of non murderers. While
some may question the film’s priorities, arguing that
the tragedy of the victims has been neglected in favor of
empathy for the predator, the film itself suggests that only
by understanding the monster growing up next door can we hope
to stop him from acting out his demons.
The only murder depicted is the first one, crucial in that
it establishes the pattern of seeking intimacy, followed by
rejection and murder. When his parents leave for a trip, the
teenaged Dahmer holds a Risky Business type
party but sits alone, hungry to belong yet isolated among
the heterosexual couplings at his own celebration. The next
day, he picks up a hitchhiker on a leafy suburban street,
luring him back to his parents’ house for a night of
giggly pot-smoking that ends when this peer rejects Dahmer’s
overtures, stating that he is straight. His host argues, "Don’t
you see that you’re programmed?" Warning that a
conventional family life will lead to growing fat and bored,
he predicts that "then you won’t want to have sex
with anybody." When the young man still insists on leaving,
he becomes Victim Zero: Dahmer cannot accept the loss and
impulsively bludgeons him. Sitting on the blood-mottled floor,
he weeps as he slowly realizes that with this act he has crossed
the line to become a murderer and has sealed his own future.
A lengthy and smartly played night of cat-and-mouse confrontations
forms the film’s dramatic centerpiece, matching Dahmer
with the slender and unpredictable live-wire Rodney, played
by Artel Kayaru as a sharp survivor who is not above lifting
money out of Dahmer’s wallet but still remains fundamentally
honest about himself. Rodney lays himself open nakedly by
declaring, "I think you’re beautiful. You’re
strong, you’re tall, you’re gentle. I always dreamed
about somebody like that." At this point, it is too late:
Dahmer has slid too far downward to accept any forthright
expression of emotion. His eyes have gone dead because he
knows he has reached the end of the line. (Jacobson could
have heightened the impact of this final sequence by emphasizing
Dahmer’s desperate position: in reality he had lost
his job and could no longer pay the rent). Nevertheless, Rodney
becomes the only one to escape, and the one who will open
Dahmer’s secrets to the world.
In the end, the movie cannot be accused of either exploiting
or romanticizing Dahmer. It does not turn him into a martyr,
yet carefully sidesteps comforting labels, nor does it demonize
his father (understandably since the film was suggested by
Lionel Dahmer’s book 'A Father’s Story').
A lesser film, one with a TV-movie sensibility, might reduce
the problem to a "solution" like counseling or psychoanalysis,
but this film bravely bucks the social currents to show that
Dahmer himself saw through the hollow promise of therapy as
a means to pacify those around him, not heal himself. Dahmer
does not seek help, and we are left to wonder who could have
helped him and how.
Although this film lacks the ultimate clarity of purpose
that marks a major work, and stumbles with some obvious symbolism,
it seems unfair to ask it for answers that society itself
has yet to figure out. Was he a spoiled and selfish brat,
or were his crimes pre-programmed in his DNA? Offering no
explicit schematic as explanation, the film paints him as
a slow-burning but strong personality with a weakness that
eats his life. When a cat captures a mouse and bites off its
head, the cat is merely fulfilling its essence as a cat, but
can we regard people this way?
At the conclusion, when so many films wilt into compromise,
Dahmer strengthens by ending just before his apprehension
(we know the police are coming, but he doesn’t), denying
us release with the obvious drama of a police capture. (Jacobson
reportedly shot the scene of Dahmer’s murder -- beaten
to death in the prison shower by a black inmate -- but did
not use it). The ending used does not tell the audience what
it wants to hear -- that we are protected from the homegrown
murderer among us -- denying this illusory safety. Instead,
Jacobson’s final shot follows Dahmer, suspended in time
as he withdraws into a forest, an image as memorably assured
and resonant as any in Donnie Darko or Boys
Don’t Cry. The object in this film’s
mirror is disturbingly closer than it appears
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© Copyright Robert Keser 2004. No part of this article
may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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