My Friend Dahmer is an upcoming film based on a graphic novel that dramatizes the formative years of American serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. The author of the graphic novel, John Backderf, who took inspiration for the tragic chronicle from his time spent as a school mate of Dahmer’s in the ‘70s, attempts to both humanize the murderer and craft a cautionary tale regarding our failure to comprehend and properly address mental illness. The controversial subject at its center notwithstanding, this is a film that has the potential to do a lot of people a lot of good. My Friend Dahmer examines the potentially adverse effects of failing to acknowledge free will as the delusion it really is.
When a movie adapts events that in at least some small part utilizes real life victims, we must tread the fine line between “humanizing” and “romanticizing.” By the look of it, My Friend Dahmer accomplishes this by shedding light on the helplessness of Dahmer’s mental state.
Instead of empathizing with a figure like Dahmer, a man born with a mind captivated by murder and dismemberment, society is quick to condemn imagined external forces, like violent movies and videogames, that might have led him astray.
That isn’t to say we’re immune to “influence,” but our brain is more perceptible to fundamental biology. I will not pass the buck of any of my psychological hangups on movies and video games. I assure you, I would be a version of the neurotic masochist I am today even if I weren’t raised on a steady diet of genre schlock and Middle English literature.
My Friend Dahmer’s efforts to comprehend and properly address psychosis counters the ongoing postulation that video games and violent movies are responsible for rearing the minds of mass murderers of the future.
The hard and perhaps uncomfortable fact of the matter, as neuroscientist and philopher Sam Harris teaches, is you are no more an author of any of the things that make you “you” than Grand Theft Auto 4 is the author of a disturbed individual that shoots up a mini mall. Blaming movies for birthing the disturbed is indicative of a more perilous failure to understand how powerless we are to our own brain chemistry.
Whatever vulgarity there is in releasing a film that portrays real life serial killer and sociopath Jeffrey Dahmer as some sort of tragic hero is almost certainly overshadowed by its potential to bring empathy to the tribulations of the misunderstood, to the complicated nature of the human mind.
I look forward to discussing the My Friend Dahmer in greater detail once it hits theaters on Nov. 3.
