Titles
at the beginning of Dahmer tell filmviewers
that the infamous Milwaukee serial killer was convicted in
1992 of more than a dozen counts of murdering young men. When
the film begins, Jeffrey Dahmer (played by Jeremy Renner)
is on his way home from work at a chocolate factory when he
spots Khamtay, a good-looking Laotian (played by Dion Basco),
at a shoe store and offers to buy him a pair of shoes, provided
that he poses for non-nude Polaroid shots. The ruse gets Khamtay
to his apartment, where he is administered a rum cola drink
spiked with sleeping pills, and then Dahmer drills a hole
in his head so that he will be alive but docile. When Khamtay
wanders away from the apartment while Dahmer is returning
home from work the next day, police are called to the scene
by neighbors, but Dahmer intervenes to assure police that
they are friends but he has just had too much to drink. Let
off with a warning, Dahmer keeps Khamtay as a cuddly toy alongside
a similar Black body in his bedroom, which police somehow
fail to discover. Dahmer then tries to seduce one more victim,
Rodney, an African American youth (played by Artel Kayàru),
but he ultimately walks out on him, presumably angry enough
to report his sadistic behavior to the police so that the
curtain will come down on Dahmer's killing spree. To provide
an explanation for Dahmer's crimes, the film relies primarily
on flashbacks to his family life. Apparently his parents divorced
when he was eighteen, he clashed with his father, and his
grandma was old-fashioned. He drank booze and smoked pot,
but efforts of his father Lionel (played by Bruce Davison)
to get Dahmer to attend AA were in vain. He moved to an apartment
of his own to get away from family pressures. Depicted as
a nerd in the film with few normal friends, he decides one
day when his mother was out of town to pick up Lance, a teenage
jock (played by Matt Newton), who is interested in smoking
pot but not in having sex with him; after bringing Lance to
his mother's house, he kills him, dismembers him, and the
die is cast for the rest of his victims. He later frequents
a gay bar that had back rooms for sex, spiking drinks of his
sex partners before fucking them, until the bartender discovers
that he was doctoring drinks and then 86s him from the bar,
but without calling the police. Yet the main theme of the
film, written and directed by David Jacobson, is perhaps that
Dahmer was homophobic, though he openly talked about sex with
men and performed anal intercourse on them. Titles at the
end inform filmviewers that he was killed by an inmate in
prison two years after he began to serve his multiyear sentence,
and he died at the age of thirty-four. For a version with
perhaps even more psychological insight, see the film The
Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer (1993). MH
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