• Written and directed by David Jacobson
• Starring
  • Jeremy Renner
  • Bruce Davison
  • Artel Kayaru
  • Matt Newton
  • Dion Basco

I missed the entire Jeffrey Dahmer brouhaha the first time around.

No, seriously. I was in Japan as a missionary from August of 1990 to August of 1992. Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested in July of 1991, and convicted in February 15, 1992. By the time I got home, Dahmer had faded from the headlines entirely, into the background of the pop culture lexicon.

Just goes to show: Never trust a man in a hairnet.

I think that, in a way, that may make me the ideal audience for this movie. Both the back of the DVD and the screen cards make a point of saying that this movie was “inspired by” real events; I think that if I knew the Dahmer case more intimately, I’d have concentrated more on historical veracity and missed the meat of the movie entirely. Everything you

Everything you need to know about the Dahmer case for the movie to make sense is right there on the back of the box anyway (in case you’re even more ignorant of the facts than I am): convicted of the murder/mutilation/partial cannibalization of 17 young men in Milwaukee. In the minds of many, Jeffrey Dahmer represents the ultimate inhuman human, the ultimate monster among us.

Oh, come on — what teenager DOESN’T have a headless mannequin in his closet?

But this is not a movie about an inhuman monster; it’s about a very human one. And frankly, that’s what scared me a bit as I put in the disc; there are some people that I don’t want to understand too well.

The story is told in non-linear fashion, though the fact that it has no plot to speak of shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s unstructured; writer/director David Jacobsen uses non-sequential storytelling to as great effect as Tarantino does (though with no other similarities in style). The first thing we see, after Dahmer’s lifeless job in a chocolate factory, is how easily he picks up a man in the shoe department and entices him back to his place for some pictures. It only takes one drugged drink before the victim is in a position to have a hole casually drilled in his skull.

Um… That usually works better with an ax, you know.

With this opening to let us know Dahmer’s operating style (and it’s kind of a rough transition, since that’s basically the first twenty minutes of the film before we switch gears), we get many a flashback (themselves out of chronological order) which don’t really spell out “what made him the man he is today” so much as give us snapshots of his evolution. We see his strained relationship his with his divorced parents, especially his father (Bruce Davison), where it seems that Dahmer’s closeted homosexuality has been guessed and is an unspoken source of tension. Alas, Dad doesn’t know that, even before growing up entirely and moving away from his folks, Dahmer’s already gone beyond garden-variety “perversions” like gay porn, and is keeping body parts from the people he’s killed.

Most of the second half of the movie is intercut between two events: the teenaged Dahmer meeting and buddying around with his first victim (Matt Newton) while his mom is out of town, and the “now” Dahmer, picking up skinny black queen Rodney (Artel Kayaru, who steals his scenes) at a knife store and spending the evening in on-again, off-again flirtation. It’s here that the acting really stands out, particularly on the part of Jeremy Denner as Dahmer, who is completely believable both as a teenager and a man in his early thirties (kudos as well to the costumer, hairstylist, and make-up artist who aid the transformation). Denner looks like a baby-faced Robert Englund, too perfectly doe-eyed and shy to be as harmless as he looks.

Yeah, like THAT’s not ominous.

A viewer could easily come to conclusions about why exactly Dahmer became what he became — self-loathing over his homosexuality, rebellion against his unloved parents, embraced guilt over the hotheaded-killing of his first victim — but you have to realize that this is film-Dahmer, not necessarily reality-Dahmer. But choosing a known serial killer as the inspiration for the pseudo-fictionalized story was a good move, and it works differently than, say, using Henry Lee Lucas as the inspiration for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Why? Because Dahmer has incredible name recognition — or as the crassly commercial might put it, “market penetration.” Everybody knows who Dahmer is; he’s joined the ranks of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson for notoriety (leaving their godfather Ed Gein in the dust), only a half-step lower than Hitler himself. It’s not so much that name recognition helps with the videostore appeal of the movie (though being able to use a single word and no tagline on the cover has its value), but it lends another layer to audience comprehension: Everyone knows what the man named Jeffrey Dahmer was capable of. Even I, who was on the other side of the world at the time, can understand instinctively how far Dahmer was below anything we like to imagine that humans can do to one another.

It’s not a completely successful movie; after the initial encounter and first few flashbacks, the settled-in pattern of switching back and forth from first victim to Rodney loses momentum and almost gets tedious. And frankly, I failed to be as horrified as I expected/feared. Yes, this movie goes to great pains to get inside the head of at least a recognizable version of Jeffrey Dahmer, but one would expect that the soul of the most demonized man of the latter twentieth century would be even more repulsive.

Despite the producers’ best efforts, they just couldn’t secure a product placement for this scene.

And yet, maybe that’s where the real horror lies. There’s a moment, when the introductory victim wanders out of Dahmer’s apartment and into the night, drilled and drugged beyond the capacity to speak, and Dahmer goes out after him before the police discover him. It’s possibly the most jarring moment in the movie, when you realize the source of the suspense: Dahmer is the protagonist. He’s the one in jeopardy. Without realizing it, you’ve been rooting for Jeffrey Dahmer. I guess that means that the goal of showing the human side of Dahmer — to prove that, behind the “inhuman monster” hyperbole, there was an identifiable, even sympathetic side to the most vilified American in recent memory — was accomplished.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Bruce Davison (Lionel Dahmer, Jeffrey’s dad) played “Jareth” on the Voyager episode “Remember,” and “Menos” on the Enterprise episode “The Seventh”