The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer (alternatively known as The Secret Life: Jeffrey Dahmer or Jeffrey Dahmer: The Secret Life) was the first attempt by a feature film to tackle the life and crimes of the notorious Milwaukee serial killer, who was responsible for the deaths of seventeen young males prior to his arrest in 1991. Released in 1993, it arrived only two years after the lurid details of the secret life in question had become public knowledge, and also has the unique distinction of being the only film of its kind to surface within Dahmer's own lifetime (before his murder in 1994). The film was directed by David R. Bowen (to date his only directorial credit) from a screenplay by Carl Crew, who also starred in the title role. From what I can gather, it was never picked up for a theatrical release and wound up being released straight to video. Coming so soon after the events in question, it was inevitable that the film would take some heat for outwardly exploiting the murders of seventeen people in order to capitalise on the initial wave of media sensationalism surrounding the case, as well as the then-recent success of Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), a hot bit of zeitgeist at the time of Dahmer's arrest which helped to fuel public interest in the story, and ensure that it immediately became cliche to refer to Dahmer's case as a "real-life Silence of the Lambs" (you'll notice that the tagline of this film does exactly that). Which may account for why the blurb on the back of the VHS takes on such a curiously high-minded tone. Here's what it has to say:
"The FBI estimates that there are at least 50 Serial Killers undetected. If this film saves just one life by raising awareness of the real dangers presented by Serial Killers like Jeffrey Dahmer then our efforts to produce it will have been worthwhile."
My first question would be how, exactly, this film envisioned that it might achieve anything so noble as to potentially save the lives of those who watched it? By letting them know that serial killers do indeed exist outside of slasher movies and are a thing to be wary of? If so, then I'm not convinced that it would be any more effective than your typical piece of media coverage on Dahmer. This reads transparently like the film looking to shield its hide from criticisms that it was looking to capitalise on real-life tragedy, with an element of fear-baiting in the implicit suggestion that your own neighbour just might be one of the undetected fifty. My second question would have to do with why on earth the blurb insists on repeatedly capitalising the term "serial killer"?
Having said all that, I am somewhat disappointed to note that my own VHS copy was not from the original release in 1993 but a later distribution by Marque Pictures in 1999. So I can't be totally certain that this blurb was copied directly from the original. (Also, get a load of that VHS cover art, which is blatantly trying to replicate the promotional imagery for The Firm.)
The film itself opens with this disclaimer:
"What you are about to see is based on the true story of Jeffrey Dahmer's attacks and murders over a period of more than fourteen years. Events and characters in some instances have been fictionalized and combined in order to make a story that can be shown. Many of the deeds of America's most publicized and notorious serial killer are simply too gruesome to show on the screen. In order to protect sensitive issues and the privacy of survivors, events portrayed in this film may conflict in detail with exactly what happened in individual cases.
Only Jeffrey Dahmer knows the truth.
Nothing will ever change the fact that 17 young men encountered Jeffrey Dahmer...
It was their last encounter."
Here, the film likewise covers itself against any potential inaccuracies in its representation of Dahmer's story (and there are a lot of inaccuracies, but we'll get to that later) although again it takes the moral high ground in suggesting that any infidelity to the facts is motivated purely out of respect and sensitivity for the victims/survivors. Actually, I suspect that the budget was also a major factor - despite the revolting nature of Dahmer's crimes, there's little in the way of onscreen gore (we do see a few severed heads and hands, but they look suspiciously like Halloween props). The Secret Life was made on a minuscule budget and has a cheap, TV film aesthetic. Does it make the most of the minimal resources it has, and how does it approach its subject, arriving at a time when the world was still reeling in initial horror at what was uncovered at Apt. 213? Let's take a look.
The first thing to note is that this is far inferior to David Jacobson's 2002 film Dahmer, in which Dahmer was portrayed by future Hawkeye Jeremy Renner. There, Jacobson forgoes the cumbersome task of attempting to cram all seventeen murders into a single narrative, his interests lying less in the killings per se than in creating a portrait of Dahmer as both a manipulative predator and a socially stunted loner, a man whose human vulnerabilities were intertwined with the darkest of impulses. As such, it's pretty light on actual onscreen carnage, focusing primarily on Dahmer's drawn-out ritualistic predation of prospective victim "Rodney", played by Atel Kayaru (commonly perceived to be a stand-in for Tracy Edwards, although his story actually has more in common with that of another Dahmer survivor, Luis Pinet) and interspersing this with flashbacks depicting critical moments from Dahmer's past. The film doesn't always juggle its episodic format flawlessly, but it grows considerably tighter in its second half when it becomes an amalgam of two parallel storylines - the cat and mouse interplay between Dahmer and Rodney in the present and a teenage Jeff's encounter with carefree young hitchhiker "Lance" (Matt Newton), a stand-in for Stephen Hicks, who wound up becoming the first in his long line of victims. It illustrates how, having crossed the line into the abominable, Dahmer found that he could only keep walking, a point impressed in the film's closing shot, which shows the young Jeffrey disappearing into a metaphorical wilderness. The film's arthouse sensibilities may prove a bit trying for some, but all in all it's a well-acted and affecting stab at dramatising the subject that doesn't rely heavily on shocks or sensationalism.
By contrast, Bowen's film is clearly interested in packing in as many killings as possible - I realised this early on when Dahmer takes Hicks (Cassidy Phillips) back to his family home in Bath, Ohio and proceeds to bludgeon him almost instantly, from which point we make an awkward time skip to nine years later when Dahmer hooked up with his second victim, Steven Tuomi (G. Joe Reed). From there on in, the film attempts to provide an extensive chronological account of Dahmer's murderous career, closing off with his arrest on 22nd July 1991. I didn't count exactly how many of the seventeen murders are represented therein, but they definitely covered a fair number, along with a handful incidents where the would-be victims got away or Dahmer declined to make the kill. The problem with focusing so extensively on one killing after another is that the film quickly succumbs to sheer repetitiveness; although some psychological tension is milked from the build-up to the murders themselves (particularly in the case of Eddie Smith, Dahmer's deaf mute victim, even if the scene in question is entirely at odds with how Dahmer operated as a killer - see below), The Secret Life struggles to accommodate the seemingly endless slew of killings into a narrative that feels particularly structured or involving. Inevitably, it moves through the individual victims at such a brisk pace that we gain only the most superficial impressions, at best, of who each of them are (this is in contrast to Jacobson's film, where Lance and Rodney each receive substantial enough focus to establish distinct personalities).
In between the killings, we get a few scenes from Dahmer's personal life, many of which attempt to explore discrepancies between his public persona and the titular "secret life" and just how thin his veneer of normality really was. In particular, the film highlights the irony that Dahmer had multiple brushes with the law where the authorities could potentially have stopped him well in advance of that fateful night in July 1991 (as far back as when he was disposing of Hicks' corpse, in fact), only they weren't attentive enough to pick up on what was going on. This is illustrated particularly pointedly in a scene where Dahmer is arrested at his apartment for sexually assaulting a minor, and the officers apparently fail to notice a preserved human skull lying on his cabinet in plain view. Dahmer's ongoing battle to conceal his secret life from those around him feels as if it should have provided the film with a stronger nexus than it simply amounting to a drawn-out parade of killings, but there's a lot less emphasis on this aspect of the film than there should be, and it's not helped by the fact that Dahmer is literally the only character who receives any substantial amount of screen time. There are a couple of scenes in which we see him interacting with his grandmother (Jeanne Bascom) and a probation officer (Lisa Marks), but there's no real sense of any other distinctive voices or presences emerging in this world - this may well have been a deliberate choice, to emphasise the extent of Dahmer's social and emotional disconnect from other people, but I doubt it.
Surprisingly, for a film which surfaced so soon after Dahmer's conviction and amid the initial wave of media sensationalism, The Secret Life is not entirely unsympathetic to Dahmer and, like Jacobson's film, shows some interest in what made him tick as a person and in contemplating how his personal demons mutated into murderous obsessions. Dahmer's human side is represented in his affection for his grandmother, his troubled parental relations and his insecurity regarding his sexuality, while his gruesome undertakings are swathed in plaintive vulnerabilities that, at the film's strongest, present him as a painfully wretched figure. There's one scene in particular in which Dahmer cradles the severed head of a victim that feels simultaneously tender, disturbing and pathetic - if you can forgive how risible the head prop looks, then it's definitely one of The Secret Life's high points.
On the surface, the film purports to examine Dahmer's one-way journey into homicidal mania from his own perspective, and makes the fairly ambitious gambit of having him provide voice-over narration. Portions of this were extracted from actual statements made by Dahmer during a speech at his trial; nevertheless, as a narrative device it's curiously dry and unconvincing. It's somewhat negated by the film's largely perfunctory take on Dahmer's life prior to his becoming a killer (or indeed, what he was doing in the nine year gap between his first murder and his second), the scant details that are incorporated being done so mainly through expository dialogue. Here, the voice-over narration seems less a sincere attempt to get up close and personal with Dahmer's twisted psyche than an easy route for imparting vague biographical details that provide no real feel of how he got from Point A to Point Z. Really, though, the film's foremost problem is that Crew, even if this was his passion project, is blatantly miscast as Dahmer - physically, he's too brawny and imposing to swallow as the shy but stealthy societal outsider, and while he does attempt something of Dahmer's infamously flat, monotone voice, his vocals are much too deep (as it is, he sounds eerily reminiscent of David Beard's character from The Last Broadcast (1998), which if you're familiar with that film, might be enough in itself to make the hairs on your neck stand on end). There's also the issue that, ultimately, the film cannot resist turning Dahmer into a more stereotypical, knife-wielding madman whenever he goes in for the kill, and it's here that the film often comes dangerously close to pushing the story toward the territory of B-movie schlock. As noted, the film opens by surrendering any pretensions of creating a painstakingly accurate representation of Dahmer's life and crimes - as such, it seems futile to get overly picky with The Secret Life for what it gets right and what it doesn't. Nonetheless, a few of the liberties it takes are so glaring that it seems unreasonable to gloss over them altogether. Here are the inaccuracies that especially stick out:
- Although Dahmer's home life growing up was indeed very turbulent, the film's repeated insinuation that he was molested by his father, Lionel Dahmer, is totally unsubstantiated. For his part, Dahmer always adamantly denied that he was ever sexually assaulted as a child.
- There are multiple instances in which Dahmer is seen taunting his victims as he kills them, most of whom are still conscious enough to grapple back to some capacity (in one particularly egregious example, Dahmer drops a live, screaming victim into his infamous blue barrel of acid while banging on the side and ordering him to shut up). The real Dahmer always stated that he gained no gratification from the killing itself; it was merely a means to an end. In the majority of cases, he drugged his victims and then strangled them while they were fully unconscious. Crew's Dahmer, on the other hand, very clearly enjoys the thrill of the kill.
- Jeffrey's mother, Joyce Dahmer, was not present in the family home at the time of Stephen Hicks' murder.
- In my review of Chris James Thompson's 2012 documentary The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, I noted that some critics had picketed at the comments by Dahmer's neighbour, Pamela Bass, that Dahmer may have fed her sandwiches containing human flesh. For Dahmer, cannibalism represented yet another avenue of intimacy with his victims, and there is no evidence to suggest that he ever sought to share his unusual appetites with anyone else. Bowen's film contains a scene in which Dahmer is implied to do just that, serving a prospective victim a suspicious-looking meatloaf and assuring him that the primary ingredient is "venison".
- In the film's version of events, Dahmer purposely reveals to Tracy Edwards (Aaron Braxton) that he is a serial killer by showing him Polaroids of the numerous corpses he's mutilated. Edwards then escapes and heroically leads the police back to Dahmer's apartment. In reality, Edwards was unaware that Dahmer was such an accomplished killer and went back with the police solely to retrieve keys to the handcuffs that Dahmer had fastened on him. Edwards was not actually seeking to press charges against Dahmer at the time - possibly because he had jumped bail for a sexual assault charge and it was not in his interests to get involved with the police.
- A minor quibble, but Dahmer's more innocent pastime - ie: his passion for fishkeeping - is not represented in any shape or form. Instead, his apartment is adorned with animal taxidermy, presumably to give him more of a Norman Bates vibe.
I assume that having Joyce Dahmer (Donna Stewart Bowen) just around the corner during the Hicks incident is intended to drive home the point that this was all taking place under everyone's noses (plus, the juxtaposition of the killing with shots of her sewing machine provides the sequence with a few tasteful cutaways). It strikes me as perhaps a tad too convenient that she happens to switch on the radio just as Dahmer launches into his attack, however. The alterations to Edwards' portion of the story were no doubt implemented in the interests of simplification, and in providing a more traditional ending where the forces of heroism win out in the end. Making Dahmer into a more overtly sadistic killer, as opposed to a disturbingly detached one, likewise seems to have been motivated by a desire to make him into more of a traditional movie maniac (one who laughs maniacally while decapitating a victim with a buzz-saw); this does create more of a stark contrast when Dahmer is later seen addressing his victims' chopped up remains with a disquieting tenderness, but it's where the film dips most markedly into full-on sensationalism. That and the daddy thing.
If you're after a good Dahmer drama, then David Jacobson's Dahmer is the flick to go for. The Secret Life of Jeffrey Dahmer is not an altogether meritless attempt at what is a pretty challenging case history to dramatise, but I would mainly recommend it if you're a Dahmer completist, in which case what it predominantly has going for it is its historical interest. Of course, being a Dahmer completist also obligates you to watch Ford Austin's Dahmer vs Gacy, and...well, maybe I'll go into that one at a later date.
In the meantime, here's the trailer to Marc Meyer's upcoming film My Friend Dahmer:
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