BEFORE: I'm back from DocFest, which was taking place at four theaters around Manhattan, only one of which I work at. But yesterday was a full day for me, from 9 am to 10:30 pm, with 8 documentaries playing on two screens. That's unusual for a theater that usually only shows one film per day, sometimes two - and I was exhausted after, which is strange because I used to work at a 7-screen theater that usually had five shows per day per screen, so that usually meant 35 screenings total in a day, you'd think that eight wouldn't seem like much by comparison. I guess maybe I'm out of shape now, not doing as much physical activity in the theater now that I'm a part-time manager. There were documentaries about Julia Child, Roberto Rossellini, Dean Martin, slain actress Adrienne Shelley, birth control, boycotts, a gospel choir and a school shooting, and Ricki Lake was there for a Q&A, she produced one of those docs. I didn't get to watch any of the documentaries, but I nabbed the program guide so I can start planning for a documentary chain of my own in 2022, or maybe I'll just have to work those films in one by one. I want to (eventually) see that "Roadrunner" documentary about Anthony Bourdain, and there was one about Kurt Vonnegut in the festival, too. There were also new docs about Jacques Cousteau and Arthur Ashe, but eh, I don't know, oceanography and tennis aren't my bag. I'd probably give the docs on Dionne Warwick, Kenny G or the Velvet Underground a spin before either of those.
Anne Heche carries over from "Birth", and since this is the middle film of three in a row with her in them, I COULD drop this film - there are several films between here and Christmas that I could drop, but then I'd have to replace each one with something, and right now my numbers are spot on, my 2nd Christmas film will be Movie #300 for the year and #4,000 overall, why would I want to mess with that? I suppose I could maybe try to work in that "Shang-Chi" film, there's one place where it could replace a film in the line-up, but if there's a choice between two films, I'd maybe like to get a rough plan for January before deciding between them, to see if one film fits in the January chain and the other doesn't, that would make the decision a whole lot easier.
But I'm keeping this film in the line-up, because I've got another serial killer film coming up at the end of this week, and I'd like to bookend the weekend with two films on a similar topic. Makes sense?
THE PLOT: A young Jeffrey Dahmer struggles to belong in high school.
AFTER: Now for a film that's not a documentary, because that might be TOO disturbing, and more of a "Based on a true story" type of film, it's "My Friend Dahmer". I know there's also a film out there called "My Friend Rockefeller", about a con artist and murderer, now I want to know if there's any connection, or how many films there are in this series. "My Friend Hitler"? "My Friend Saddam Hussein"? "My Friend Pol Pot"? This could be a series that goes on and on, until eventually the fans of whatever this is start to complain that they're eating a dead horse. Sorry, BEATING. The expression is "beating a dead horse".
This film only works, of course, if you know the history of Jeffrey Dahmer, which is in our past but in the future of the high-school kids depicted here. The film is based on a book by "Derf" Backderf, which is an unfortunate name to have in high-school, kids would probably never stop making fun of it, because that's what kids do. The author's name is John Backderf, but it looks like at some point he just decided to lean into the nickname that people were calling him anyway. Trust me, if you've got a weird last name, you might as well get used to it, and learn to laugh at the mispronunciations, misspellings, and horrible nicknames that people are going to come up with. I saw a book ONE TIME in a bookstore, it was called "What NOT to Name Your Baby" and it just listed all the things that kids in junior high are going to call your son or daughter, based on what first name you assign them at birth. I thought that would be VERY helpful in choosing (or not choosing) certain first names for your kids, but since I haven't seen the book in years, I'm not sure how helpful or handy that book was in the first place.
It's rather daring to go make a movie about Dahmer's teen years, but then again, it also feels very exploitative, too, considering how he ended up. I've dabbled in dramatizations of the lives of killers like Ted Bundy, but I haven't been able to bring myself to watch the one about John Lennon's killer - though I may have to go there eventually. They've made a few films about Ronald Reagan getting shot, but I don't think they've made one that focused on his intended assassin, John Hinckley - but somewhere, somebody's probably working on one. For any and all of these films, just making them, or planning them, seems to involve walking on a very thin line, like if you go too far over in any direction, people are bound to complain. You can't really glorify an assassin or a serial killer without getting into some kind of trouble, and you can't really explain away or justify their behavior either, for similar reasons.
Anything you show here in the teen life of Dahmer COULD be construed as an explanation as to how he came to be what he was, which was a serial killer who targeted men and boys, preserved their body parts, and engaged in some form of necrophilia and/or cannibalism. But as a teen he was collecting roadkill and preserving the bodies of animals because he enjoyed watching them decompose. There's obviously some through-line there, one hobby could be said to lead to another, fascination with the dead and decomposing escalating somehow to actual murders. But is there more to that equation? What roles, if any, did being a social outcast, drinking, being attracted to men, have to do with his 13-year killing spree that followed high school? What about his parents divorce, what effect did that have on him? His father was a chemist and his mother was a part-time insane person, according to this film.
And so we have a film that can't really make a direct connection between THIS incident or inclination in his teen years and THAT vile, disgusting action years later, without getting itself into trouble. I can just hear the PC crowd saying, "So all gay men are serial killers, is that it? Or is just alcoholic, socially awkward gay men?" It's a slippery slope, as they say, so they had to really punch up the fact that Dahmer was bullied - but plenty of people are bullied in school and grow up to be fine, decent members of their communities who DON'T kill people and have sex with their corpses. So how, then do you explain why Dahmer became who he became and did what he did? Unfortunately, it's all still something of a mystery this way, except to imagine that this guy just wasn't wired right. We all become the sum total of our experiences, though, and these impulses didn't just come from nowhere, though.
This film takes us just up to Dahmer's first murder, because, well, it has to stop there. If you read the details of his killings, which I actually do NOT recommend doing, you'll see that the encounters he had with his victims are basically unfilmable. But, at one point they said that about the book "American Psycho", too, and yet somebody found a way to film it. If, however, you're not familiar with Dahmer's future history and his desires to have men over for dinner, then you might be very confused with this film, it would probably then resemble your average, everyday Gus Van Sant film, set amidst the social dynamics of any high school. And perhaps that's the point, somewhere there's somebody who befriended/bullied a future serial killer as a teen, and lived to tell the tale. Somewhere there's somebody who went to PROM with Jeffrey Dahmer, just as somebody was once Hitler's art teacher, and somebody once taught Ivan the Terrible his A-B-C's. OK, so it was a Cyrillic "C", but you know what I mean.
I read a quote a few weeks ago, it was used as the solution in a puzzle magazine, about how we each breathe in and out so many molecules of air and so much water passes through our bodies over our lifetimes, that stastically, because there are only so many molecules of matter surrounding Spaceship Earth, and all of them have been recycled again and again, with every breath, every drink of water, we're ingesting molecules that were breathed out or passed through historical figures like Leonardo Da Vinci, or Julius Caesar, or yeah, even Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer. We're all connected, therefore, on a molecular level, to everyone in human history, which all feels just a bit odd.
Of course, you might increase your odds of sharing molecules with Julius Caesar if you go breathe some air in Rome, or drink the water in Florence if you want to consume some water that passed through Leonardo - it's simultaneously gross and scientifically fascinating, right? In sort of the same vein, they filmed part of this movie in Dahmer's childhood home in Bath, Ohio. They filmed the mall scene in Euclid, Ohio, which is weird to me because I've probably BEEN there, my ex-wife grew up in Euclid and I used to visit a few times a year - but now that mall is an Amazon fulfillment center, it seems.
My only other thought tonight is that the actor who plays Jeffrey Dahmer's father, Dallas Roberts, really needs to be cast in some version of "The Paul Lynde Story", but I'm sure he hears that all the time. Alternately, if you put a helmet-head 70's wig on him, I bet he could get cast in a John Ritter biopic - if somebody ever makes one, and he has an interest in doing so, that is. I'm apparently not the first person to make the John Ritter suggestion, and it seems like Billy Eichner's going to be starring in a possible Paul Lynde bio-pic instead of him.
Also starring Ross Lynch (last seen in "Muppets Most Wanted"), Alex Wolff (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Vincent Kartheiser (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Dallas Roberts (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Tommy Nelson (last seen in "Barry"), Harrison Holzer (last seen in "Sex Tape"), Cameron McKendry, Miles Robbins, Liam Koeth, Lily Kozub, Dave Sorboro, Adam Kroloff (last seen in "Smart People"), Brady M.K. Dunn, Michael Ryan Boehm, Jake Ingrassia, Ben Zgorecki, Kris Smith, Jack DeVillers, Gabriela Novogratz, Joey Vee, Tom Lepera (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Christopher Mele (last seen in "Marshall"), Maryanne Nagel, Katie Stottlemire, Dontez James (last seen in "Last Flag Flying"), Tom Luce, Sydney Jane Meyer, Nancy Telzerow, C.J. Rush.
RATING: 4 out of 10 yearbook photos
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