Editorials
‘My Friend Dahmer’ and the Horror of Adolescence
“He was the loneliest kid I ever met…”
Reading about the horrific crimes Jeffrey Dahmer committed between 1978 and 1991 – the murder, dismemberment, necrophilia, and cannibalism of 17 men – it’s hard to imagine he was ever a kid, let alone human. It’s much easier to explain away his actions by envisioning him having always been some kind of full-grown monster – since forever – full of hate and anger and bloodlust, from day one.
But that wasn’t the case. In fact, by most accounts, Jeff had a fairly normal upbringing. Still, something clearly went wrong. My Friend Dahmer sets itself apart from the numerous other Dahmer docudramas by exploring the subject matter through the eyes of the people who may have known Dahmer more intimately than his own family – his classmates. The film is based on the synonymous graphic novel by Derf Backderf, and it’s a subject he knows all too well: in 1978, Backderf was a classmate – and brief friend – of Jeffrey Dahmer.
From the opening moments of the film, we know something is amiss with Jeff (as everyone calls him). During the morning bus ride to school, while the other kids chat and socialize, the lonely Dahmer (Ross Lynch) fixes his attention on a young jogger who plods along the roadside. As the bus passes the runner, Jeff – in a trance-like state – quickly stands and heads to the back of the bus to watch the runner disappear in the distance. It’s only after the bus driver shouts for Jeff to sit down – for the third time – that he’s snapped from his daze and returns to his seat. It’s the first time Jeff seems to realize something about himself – something strange – as if he could audibly hear the click happen inside.
Dahmer’s daily school life seems to continue in a similarly languid haze, one where he just sort of moves from hallway to classroom, dead-eyed and stoop-shouldered. What we learn through his daily interactions is that Dahmer is an anomaly. He’s introverted and unhip, but not a geek; he’s clearly intelligent, but not a brain. He gets picked on by the bullies, even though he himself avoids the nerdy kids. He’s entirely unclassifiable. He just seems to sort of exist. And the pain from this listlessness is evident in the sneer he wears on his face.
He’s only eventually noticed by Backderf (Alex Wolff) and crew when he inexplicably starts faking a seizure in the hallway of school; Backderf and his cronies refer to his spastic episode as “doing a Dahmer”, and they wonder aloud, “Is Dahmer funny?” They decide to sort of adopt him into their little group, making him a pet project of sorts – going so far as to start the “Jeff Dahmer Fan Club”. At one point, as a classmate of Backderf’s asks, “Is Dahmer your muse?”, to which Backderf responds with an uncertain “No”.
Despite his new social circle, Dahmer remains on the outskirts of fitting in. His constant battles with the inner demons which continually plague him – something he tries to subdue with copious amounts of alcohol – keep him from fully being accepted. Dahmer cannot excuse his continuing strangeness forever. The Jeff Dahmer Fan Club, realizing that maybe they’d taken on more than they’d bargained for with Jeff, awkwardly cut ties with him, paying him a few bucks to “do a Dahmer” at the nearby mall in one final pitiful performance. It’s here that Jeff demands to be called “Jeffrey”, signaling the death of the old Dahmer, and the emergence (and acceptance) of this alien being he was always destined to be. By the time he concludes his strange act at the mall – the thing that once earned him the only friends he ever had in high school, and was now his farewell to that same group – no one is proud of themselves.
The end of the film signals the end of their high school careers. After one last failed attempt at normalcy (Dahmer asks a girl to prom – and then promptly abandons her shortly after they arrive), everyone goes their separate ways. Backderf is set to move to New York for college, but Jeffrey has no plans. He spends his first week of freedom in the abandoned house his family vacated after his parents divorced. And it’s this first week that Dahmer commits his first murder.
And that’s My Friend Dahmer – a straight-forward, no-frills look at what one of America’s most notorious serial killers was like in high school. There’s a particularly depressing scene early on, an incredibly brief and subtle thing that really spells out just how hopeless Dahmer’s case is: Jeffrey, pressured by a teacher for an answer he doesn’t know, responds frustratedly in his affected bwaa voice, causing the classroom to erupt with laughter. For a brief moment, there is a restrained joy on Jeff’s face; for probably the first time ever, he was paid attention to by his schoolmates. Not just attention, but positive attention. His smirk quickly fades, however, as his eyes start to dart back and forth; he’s having an internal realization, accepting the impossibility of ever maintaining this type of warmth and popularity among his peers.
It’s a brutal watch for those of us who remember high school. Those of us who were picked on, those of us who did the picking, and those of us who just stood by and watched. High school is a whirlwind of highs and lows, surging hormones and brain chemicals, and existential uncertainty. It’s not a kind place. It’s a jungle. And though he was briefly taken in by a few schoolmates, Jeffrey Dahmer realized quickly he was a novelty to them, and that he would never truly be accepted. Now imagine dealing with all of that while trying to smother your burgeoning homicidal feelings. The film doesn’t necessarily humanize Dahmer, but it doesn’t dehumanize him, either. By the end, you’ll ask yourself an impossible and scary question: did we fail Dahmer?
Backderf says in his novel My Friend Dahmer, “He was the loneliest kid I ever met.” Perhaps the most tragic part of Dahmer’s tale is not the fact that we’ll never know why he did what he did, but that we’ll never know if it could’ve been prevented.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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