Serial killers are having a moment. Of course, in a sense, they’re always having a moment--American culture has been fascinated with them since they Ted Bundy lured the first woman into his murder van--but they’re extra hot right now, thanks in no small part to Monster, Netflix’s dramatization of the life and deaths of Jeffrey Dahmer, the most famous cannibal in American history.
I haven’t watched Monster (and won’t be, fwiw) but I’ve seen enough clips to know that My Friend Dahmer takes a much different, more distant approach. John “Derf” Backderf went to middle and high school with Dahmer, and witnessed, at only a slight remove, his progression from slightly weird kid to, well, extremely weird kid. The book ends right after Dahmer’s first murder, but Backderf doesn’t recount the murder itself. In fact, aside from a very unfortunate fish, Backderf eschews illustration of any of Dahmer’s violence, focusing instead on Dahmer’s family life, most of which, we learn in the extensive endnotes, he knew of only secondhand, and a handful of notable interaction between Derf and his circle of friends.
The art calls to mind the comix movement of the 60s and 70s, and the influence of Crumb is especially evident; but where Crumb’s art is anarchic and wobbly, Backderf’s is more static, a series of thick-lined snapshots. It’s very effective and genuinely unsettling, especially when depicting something that’s badly “off”.
I learned a lot about Dahmer I didn’t know. His father and mother fought constantly and his mother had seizures and episodes that caused her to shake and produce only incoherent sounds, shakes and sounds Dahmer incorporated into the strange public demonstrations that served as his only real claim to fame in high school. He didn’t really kill animals, by his own account, except for one dog. And his murders and their macabre aftermath were driven by his (sometimes erotic, sometimes seemingly not) desire for “complete control”.
That said, as Chris mentioned when we discussed the book, I’m not sure how much insight there really is into Dahmer himself in this book, possibly even by design. Of more note is the way the interactions between Derf and his friends play out, and what it says about the disturbing and othering ways we tend to treat “freaks”. Derf and his friends spearheaded a group call the Dahmer Fan Club, which mostly consisted of doodling pictures of Dahmer all around the school, trying to sneak him into high school photos where he didn’t belong, and, later, encouraging him to do his spastic character in public so they could laugh at the reactions. The overall impression one gets is that Dahmer was a genuine weirdo, but the group of “friends” treated him as little more than a mascot or sideshow. My Friend Dahmer is, in fact, a very generous title--there’s not much here to suggest that anyone saw Dahmer as a friend. They all saw his drinking, his antisocial behavior, and his offensive odor growing worse but, at least as recorded here, no one so much as asked, “How’s it going, Jeff?” Derf does approach the question a few times, but it seems to me that while he recognizes that no one reached out, he never mentions the ways that he and his friend group exploited Dahmer’s tics for their own amusement.
Does My Friend Dahmer make a cannibal into a sympathetic character? No, it does not, and it’s hard to imagine a story told like this attracting the same sort of the fanfic “I can fix him” crowd that I saw all over Twitter when Monster premiered. Like most narratives about serial killers, this one offers no answers, because really, what could those answers possibly be?
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