MY FRIEND DAHMER. (2017) DIRECTED BY MARC MEYERS. SCREENPLAY BY MARC MEYERS.
BASED ON THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, MY FRIEND DAHMER, BY JOHN ‘DERF’ BACKDERF.
STARRING ROSS LYNCH, ANNE HECHE, DALLAS ROBERTS AND ALEX WOLFF.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This film is on Netflix at the moment and I loved watching it. It’s loosely the story of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s high school years, which one of his actual schoolmates, John Backderf, nicknamed ‘Derf,’ used as the basis of a graphic novel he made after hearing about the murders Dahmer committed in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. He based his comic book on his ‘friendship’ with Dahmer in high school and on drawings he had made of Dahmer during this time.
The film doesn’t deal directly with the murders, just on Jeffrey’s mid-to-late teenage years, though his first murder, that of hitch-hiker Steven Hicks, is heavily implied in the last scene, then some text appears on-screen to tell us of that young man’s fate.
Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1960, murdered seventeen young men. He dismembered, kept and sometimes even ate and sexually violated their remains, but the film, as I mentioned, doesn’t include these activities, as they happened after Dahmer and Derf had gone their separate ways.
Poor Jeffrey! He had a shitty childhood. I don’t for one minute condone what he did, but if ever a boy was bred for this type of thing, ie, killing, it was poor Jeffrey Dahmer.
His mother Joyce was a high maintenance drama queen who was always fighting and arguing with Jeffrey’s dad, an analytical chemist. Dad Lionel was usually too busy shouting back at his wife to pay much attention to Jeffrey.
Jeffrey, meanwhile, was a desperately lonely teenager. He was rather unnaturally interested in roadkill, or, more specifically, the bones and things that made up their insides.
His chemist father unwittingly taught him how to safely bleach and preserve the animal bones he was keeping in the shed. He had no idea, however, of the dreadful use to which his son would later put this gruesome knowledge…
Meanwhile, Jeffrey, who was also secretly gay and, by now, very sexually frustrated as well, was not getting on particularly well in school either.
He was virtually friendless and drinking hard alcohol to help him cope with his mother’s deteriorating mental health and the negative effect this was having on his parents’ marriage.
Enter John ‘Derf’ Backderf, a talented artist and schoolmate of Jeffrey’s. He had noticed that Jeffrey had a distinct gift for clowning around, acting the fool in class and on the street to get attention and alleviate his boredom.
Derf formed an unofficial ‘Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club’ with a handful of his mates. This mainly involved encouraging Jeffrey to ‘spazz out’ or ‘do a Dahmer’ for the amusement of Derf and his chums.
This doesn’t seem like the basis of a genuine friendship to me, which is why I apostrophized the word in the first paragraph. Derf and his pals are only using Jeffrey, although you could make the argument that, were it not for these lads who egged him on, the unfortunate teenager might not have ever known the joy of belonging somewhere, the joy of belonging in a gang or group of his peers. So, ‘tis as long as it’s broad, as we Irish might say.
Derf did pretty well out of Jeffrey Dahmer overall, in that he got a book and a movie out of him and he’ll always be known as Dahmer’s only friend.
Things didn’t work out quite so well for Wisconsin’s second-best-known serial killer (don’t forget Ed Gein…!), however. He was beaten to death in prison in 1994 while serving his sentence for the murders he’d committed.
Some of the blame for Jeffrey’s story has got to go to his parents, who neglected him terribly, whether intentionally or otherwise. He committed his first murder just a few weeks after graduating from school, during a period when both his parents had moved out of the family home and Jeffrey was living alone because each parent assumed he was staying with the other. He had nothing to do for weeks but drink alcohol and brood on his sexual frustration. No wonder his mind went funny.
Anyway, MY FRIEND DAHMER is well acted and scripted and is well worth an hour or two of your time, especially if you’re a fan of serial killer movies.
Ross Lynch is excellent as the titular Dahmer, and newcomers to the Jeffrey Dahmer story will find themselves expertly segue-wayed (is that how you spell that word???) into wanting to know about the killer’s post-high school career… in killing. In which case, I would refer them to the superb Netflix series, MONSTER: THE JEFFREY DAHMER STORY (2022).
All the best now and happy reading!
sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris 