![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I can’t go there and hope you can’t, either. Sometimes, as when Dahmer asks a resistant girl to the prom, I thought I was watching a standard teen drama, and remembered my own weird hobbies and nerdy alienation and wondered if I could ever have been that guy. It would be misleading to call My Friend Dahmer “entertaining,” but I got off on its fuzzy sense of dread, its poker-faced ghoulishness. They warn Dahmer to stay away from one lurching, long-haired stoner in particular. But soon even they are dismayed by his reek of marijuana and vodka. They urge him to disrupt classrooms, libraries, and grocery stores. They think his aggression is performance art. His outburst inspires a group of male pranksters (the leader played by Alex Wolff, another kid-show veteran) to venerate Dahmer as a gonzo visionary. He throws himself to the floor, where he bucks and judders. He screams, then totters around knocking books out of students’ hands and leaning into their faces. Gazing on a hallway of classmates to whom his presence means nada, he launches into a routine inspired by his mother’s palsied interior decorator. Ross Lynch’s 9-Step Progression From Disney Star to Playing Jeffrey Dahmer And the fashions! A shot of the Dahmer family sitting around the kitchen table in their huge glasses could be a museum diorama labeled “Hominis Nerdus, late 20th century.” Dahmer’s high school is a scruffy, ungainly mosaic into which he somehow blends. We don’t need to hear Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech to understand that 1978 is a year of toxic spiritual drift. My Friend Dahmer might be the most ineffably ’70s movie since Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. We could blame genetics and/or mental illness (Dahmer would be diagnosed with borderline, schizotypal, and psychotic disorders), but Meyers has added a soupçon of sociology. “I want you to have friends in a way I never could.” That’s very touching but Jeffrey is already closing in on the idea that the only way to get close to other people is to ingest them. “I see things in you I don’t like in myself,” says the dad. He knocks down the backyard shack where young Jeffrey keeps bones and jars of dissolving animals and then buys his son a pair of dumbbells to help him attract girls. His mom (Anne Heche) is wigging out from a mix of bipolar illness and tranquilizers, at one point insisting that her family consume undercooked chicken: “We eat our mistakes.” His dad (Dallas Roberts) - before filing for divorce - nobly tries to guide his son on a path towards normalcy. We watch as Dahmer evolves from alienated loner to semi-popular class clown, all while acidifying the carcasses of roadkill and fantasizing about men - particularly a doctor (Vincent Kartheiser) who jogs by his house most days.Īdding to the mess is Jeffrey’s home life. Marc Meyers’s sick, deadpan comedy (based on an excellent graphic novel by “Derf” Backderf) follows the incipient serial killer (former Disney teen star Ross Lynch) through his senior year. No humans are killed in the movie, however. It’s difficult to pinpoint the source of a person’s drive to kill 17 men, have sex with their bodies (in some cases with their viscera), consume their organs, and reduce the rest to bones - but damned if My Friend Dahmer doesn’t offer a fascinating Portrait of the Artist as a Young Freak. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |