Light Sleeper - Late Night Writings On Cinema
       
Dahmer: Wisconsin Death Trip

By Robert Keser

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Robert Keser teaches film at National-Louis University in Chicago and writes often in Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema.
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Produced by Larry Rattner; written and directed by David Jacobson; cinematography by Chris Manley; production design by Eric Larson; edited by Bipasha Shom; music by Christina Agamanolis, Mariana and Willow Williamson; starring Jeremy Renner, Bruce Davison, Artel Kayaru, Matt Newton, Dion Basco . Color, 104 mins. Distributed by Peninsula Films.
 


"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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