Supposedly we’re to believe this because he befriended the loner during their senior year of high school and thus cultivated a kinship able to shroud the objective truth in inherent nostalgia-based subjectivity. Supposedly Dahmer wasn’t his first guess.
She called him up and said that someone he graduated with was a serial killer and jokingly asked who he thought it was. The story goes that Derf found out about Dahmer’s arrest from his wife, a journalist. He’s desperately trying to assuage his guilt. What’s even worse, however, is that this film makes it seem as though author (and “friend”) Derf Backderf isn’t looking for answers. It minimizes the tragedy of those who died by his hands and makes a mockery of psychopathy by eschewing its nuance for blatant earmarks of trouble. This is a dangerous thought because it humanizes what relinquished his right to be human. It supposes that something could have been done to stop him and everyone blind to the signs is culpable. The concept alone is misguided on paper because it declares that events led Jeffrey Dahmer to do what he did. I can’t speak to the graphic novel, but Marc Meyers’ cinematic adaptation of My Friend Dahmer does the latter. Rather than search for answers, we merely end up glorifying the infamous with prestige. The line separating a constructive use of time/resources and the salacious commoditization of the macabre will inevitably blur. But at some point these deep dives into crimes move beyond the idea that someone may be falsely accused or a cold case could be solved years later. As darkness and carnage earns ad clicks, the venues plying them multiply in order to reap the benefits. So many of us do it, though - especially today in a post-“Serial” world.
While it’s one thing to live vicariously through the nonsensical ravings and actions of a D-list wannabe celebrity who stumbled drunkenly into a reality TV show, it’s another to get into the mind of a homicidal maniac. The need to therefore discover what in his life drove him to that point trumps everything. There’s this unavoidable sense of morbid fascination because we can’t fathom doing what he’s done. We wonder about how someone could become such a monster right under our nose without ever suspecting it.
And yet we try to find motivation nonetheless. I’m not certain there could be room for anything but disgust whether you’re a stranger, a family member, or an old friend reading the news. When someone kills seventeen people over a thirteen-year span with words like necrophilia and cannibalism circling each murder, sympathy for the predator - not his prey - is neither the first nor hundredth emotion that should come to anyone’s mind.