Apparently Serial Killers are Having a Moment

A few months ago, Facebook started serving me ads for a subscription box called “Hunt a Killer.” There was a photo of a bunch of a papers and an old-timey pocket watch and a cackling line of copy: “Do you have what it takes to catch a killer?”

On the site I learned that “if I qualified,” I could see what it would be like to “have a serial killer deliver a package to [my] doorstep each month” for the low, low price of $30, or I could upgrade and get wine included and make it a #datenight or a party where we all worked together to decipher letters and “creepy” clues. “A fun and unique game for my husband and I!” said one user review.

Last weekend, I turned on Netflix to watch Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and was confronted with a massive homepage ad for The Ted Bundy Tapes. A few days later, while flipping channels, I caught ABC News’ teaser for its interview with the daughter of the “BTK” killer.

Apparently serial killers are having a moment. Or maybe the moment they were having last year just never ended. Maybe the moment has been on a slow simmer since 1977. Or 1888.

But despite all the hype, I’ve never been less interested. Which might seem strange considering I’ve been following a serial killer of my own for the past decade.

I’ve been to his home. I’ve written him letters. I’ve chatted with his high school friends and surveyed hundreds of pages of data about his psychological makeup and the pattern of violence he’s inflicted upon women. I’ve watched him from across a courtroom too many times to count, and at the end of it all, I’ve come away with only one clear conclusion: he’s a waste of my time.

When my childhood best friend was found murdered in her home in 2001, I had no idea that seven years later, an alleged serial killer would be the one to be charged with it. I have to say “alleged” because he still hasn’t been convicted, although he’s been in jail awaiting trial since 2008. DNA evidence connects him to three of his four victims, however, and if he goes to trial next month as he’s currently scheduled to, chances are, by the end of year we should be able to drop the “alleged.”

I’ve watched this man get thinner and more angular over the past ten years. More fidgety and more cocky. I’ve seen him dismiss attorney after attorney, and stare stone-faced at the wall while the mother of one of his victims tearfully read her statement to the judge. I’ve seen person after person — reporters, prosecutors, obsessives — regard him with fascination, vitriol, and a compulsion to get closer to him, as if he somehow held all the answers. And I understand the compulsion, because I once shared it.

But after ten years of researching my friend’s murder, and almost 20 since her death, I can definitively say that her killer is the least compelling thing about her story. Her killer is simply a man. A boring, attention-hungry, deeply misogynistic cipher.

When we talk about serial killers, as we have been so frequently lately, we’re really talking about power and gender and fear. We’re talking about revolting, inhuman, outrageous, thunderous violence. We’re talking about the things men can do to women and the way they do them. (Obviously, serial killers also target men, but it seems most of the media attention goes to the ones who kill white women.) We’re talking about that sinking feeling that we can never truly know another person, and that tragedy can strike anyone at any time. We’re talking about loss, and the ripple effects it can create throughout life.

The problem is, most crime storytelling and media is formulaic and male-driven and gets at none of these ideas. When crime shows aren’t eclipsing the stories of female victims, they’re objectifying them. When they’re not staging corny reenactments, they’re dishing out graphic visuals and calling it entertainment. The male killer and his complicated, devious brain is always the focus, at the expense of everyone else. Inside the Mind of a Whatever, To Catch a Blah, Blah — it’s all the same. And we, the viewers, seem to fall for it every time. We’re titillated by gore and extreme violence. We’re blushing over our attraction to a criminal. We’re elevating the monster.

There’s an opportunity cost to this. When we exalt the killer, we’re diverting our focus from people and ideas more worthy of our attention. We could be considering the victims and the people they left behind. Or examining how it is that women’s bodies are selected as an outlet for violence, both extreme and quotidian, again and again.

But something does feel a little different about this particular serial killer moment. Maybe it’s because we’re different now. Maybe it’s because some of what’s going on in the world — school shootings, hate crimes, climate apocalypse — feels scarier and more urgent than the ravenous murderer next door whom the media is trying to gin up our fear of.

Just last week, Netflix issued a much-pilloried tweet cheekily chastising viewers for crushing on Bundy.

I've seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service — almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers

— Netflix US (@netflix) January 28, 2019

Then the platform turned around and purchased another Bundy film, this one starring Zac Efron, which feels a bit like they baked the cake, served it to you, shamed you for eating it, and then put another one right in front of you. And so the cycle continues: the cooks know we aren’t ready to make better food choices, even when they — and we — can see they’re making us sick.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Serial Killers. By   Carolyn Murnick. The Cut , February  5, 2019.

On 12 December 2017, Lauren Berlant posted an article on her blog, Supervalent Thought, titled ‘The Predator and the Jokester’. In the opening paragraph, she wrote:

                          Al Franken has said he’ll resign. If so, he will be gone from the Senate not because he was a vicious    predator but because there was a bad chemical reaction between his sexual immaturity, his just ‘having fun’ with women’s bodies, and this moment of improvisatory boundary-drawing that likens the jokester to the predator. What’s going on?

Berlant argues that US Senator Franken thought his ‘good guy credentials separated him from the predators’. The delineation between good guy and predator is also the focus of David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) and Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019). Both shows explore the phenomenon of the 1970s serial killer. What the decade birthed, however, was not simply a new criminal taxonomy, but a new kind of masculinity that had to engineer a new mode of catharsis for itself in order to respond to the increasing socio-economic liberation of women. Bundy’s earliest documented homicides were committed in 1974 and targeted sorority girls on college campuses around Washington State. During the first half of 1974, female college students disappeared at the rate of about one per month.

The Ted Bundy Tapes – along with the almost-nostalgic, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019) and Lars Von Trier’s serial-killer feature, The House That Jack Built (2018) – is illuminating not because it uncovers the reason Bundy murdered women, but because it reveals that Bundy could only perform male normality if he was killing women. Just as acting normal is what it took to get away with murder, normality, a restorative valve, becomes the affective mode that deploys male transgression. Much to the frustration of Stephen Michaud, the journalist who recorded roughly 100 hours of interviews with Bundy in 1980 at the Florida State Prison, where he awaited execution, Bundy refused to blow his cover. (He finally confessed in 1989, only a few days before his electrocution.) It is the ‘good guy credentials’, as Berlant puts it, that enabled the transgression. Male violence, therefore, is not an aberration or a surplus; normalcy is. ‘I don’t feel guilty for any of it,’ Bundy said about his crimes. ‘I feel less guilty now than I’ve felt at any time in my whole life. About anything. I mean really. I am in the enviable position of not having to feel any guilt. Guilt is this mechanism we use to control people. It’s an illusion. It’s this kind of social-control mechanism and it’s very unhealthy.’ Bundy regrets not the murders, but the years he wasted trying to suppress and manage the urge to commit them. He views it as lost time; wasted potential. Self-control becomes synonymous with blockage and emasculation.

Bundy’s two prison escapes (the first lasted six days; the second 46) marked a turning point in both his killing and his thinking. Once Bundy was apprehended and convicted, he was freed from upholding the good-guy act that interfered with unencumbered violence: it was getting caught that provoked him to go on increasingly reckless killing sprees as a fugitive. Judging from the bootleg audio of disgraced comedian Louis C.K.’s set in December 2018 – performed at the Governor’s Comedy Club in Long Island, less than a year after he was accused of sexual harassment by numerous women – C.K. forgoes the ‘self-awareness’ of his late comedy in order to go on irrepressible rants about women, the survivors of the Parkland high school shooting and transgender teens. ‘I’m committing career suicide here,’ C.K. tells the crowd. ‘Let’s just go all the way […] My life is over. I don’t give a shit.’ For C.K., who, like Franken, is both predator and jokester, the idea of ‘going all the way’, in spite of getting caught, is, in a sense, a verbal equivalent of the murders Bundy committed during his two escapes from prison.

When Michaud questioned Bundy about his dating history, Bundy told him: ‘It wasn’t that I disliked women or was afraid of them. It was just that I didn’t seem to have an inkling as to what to do about them.’ The preposition ‘about’ is all-revealing here. It reduces one’s relation to women to just two options: extermination or acceptance. The construction of straight, white, post-war masculinity, Bundy tells us inadvertently, literally becomes: what do men do about women? Something had to be done about the newly liberated, feminist women of the 1970s, the question was: what? The decision Bundy made is the real story of The Ted Bundy Tapes. What the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have brought into sharp focus is the extent to which men have succeeded in seamlessly interchanging compliance and abuse, normality and abnormality, good guy and predator, in various ways – not, as we previously told ourselves, being either one or the other. Bundy, despite his famously brutal and numerous crimes, managed to get married and father a child while on death row.

On 20 July 1979, Ted Bundy spoke in court against his own counsel: ‘Maybe we’re dealing with the problem of professional psychology,’ he told the judge during his trial for the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy at Florida State University’s Chi Omega sorority house. When found guilty of both convictions, Bundy told Michaud: ‘They [the jury] refuse to perceive me as being anything that approaches being normal […] I’m just a normal individual.’ This logic is echoed in the Lifetime series You (2018), another serial-killer drama recently picked up by Netflix. You repurposes the romantic comedy genre as a tool for examining male seduction and manipulation, exploring the way social media amplifies the male gaze and is inherently a system of stalking and control. Joe, the show’s psychotic Romeo, refers to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to ‘justify’ his actions. The monster, he says – alluding to himself – is not really a monster; an old argument.

The Ted Bundy Tapes ends where Mindhunter begins: with the FBI’s methods of criminal profiling and pattern study in the late 1970s. By having serial killers supply the raw data of their murders, the FBI ‘built a composite of the mass killer and his victims’, as newscaster Tom Brokaw reported on the evening news in 1984. The establishment of a national centre of analysis of violent crime – which Mindhunter creator, Joe Penhall, refers to as a ‘death museum’ – allowed male FBI agents to figure out ‘who kills and why’ and, in Brokaw’s words, to ‘look for patterns in the methods of murders’ using interviews with notorious serial killers, including Charles Manson. (While the FBI employed female agents, the majority were overwhelmingly male.) Mindhunter is also built around the testimonies of real life-serial killers. In season one, Ed Kemper and Jerry Brudos recall the various humiliations they suffered at the hands of their so-called overbearing mothers (fathers are not mentioned). It would seem that women, along with feminism, drive men to kill women. The increase in the number of serial killers during the 1960s and ’70s, therefore, can be attributed – at least in part – to a feminist backlash enacted by men who felt emasculated by post-war America. In her book, Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer (1994), attorney Polly Nelson writes: ‘It was the absolute misogyny of his crimes that stunned me,’ she wrote. ‘His manifest rage against women. He had no compassion at all [...] he was totally engrossed in the details. His murders were his life’s accomplishments.’

Mindhunter looks for reasons to corroborate motive while retroactively questioning that reasoning. It builds an epistemology around the psychology of serial murder in order to avoid addressing the lethal system of misogyny that produces it. The duality and duplicity that creates sociopathic masculinity puts it on the spectrum of artifice and psychosis, as Mindhunter illustrates through its young and increasingly morally culpable FBI profiler, Holden Ford. To its credit, the series does not separate normal masculinity from abnormal masculinity, federal agent from serial killer, the profile of the behaviour from the behaviour itself. Rather, it bonds and conflates them through a shared performance of masculinity. Both the profiler and the killer engage in the act of normality, or what David Sims – in a 13 November 2017 article about C.K. in The Atlantic – describes as ‘performing self-awareness’. In the case of sociopathic masculinity, normality is often the public act of self-awareness that subsidizes the private psychosis of misogyny.

Where male-centred dramas like Mindhunter and The Ted Bundy Tapes fail, and a feminist series like BBC’s crime series Happy Valley succeeds, is in the antiquated pursuit of motive and the study of ‘abnormal’ masculinity using psychological profiles designed by men. Happy Valley, which stars a female lead, and is written and produced by women, understands that patriarchy is a total system which houses all masculinity, and that misogyny itself is a principal psychology which is both aberrant and prescriptive. The forensics of motive, therefore, become redundant. Even Bundy himself dismissed it – claiming it didn’t ultimately matter. Men don’t need a reason to kill women, Happy Valley tells us: they need a reason not to. Moreover, men can kill women off – both literally and symbolically – in lieu of what actually restricts and displaces their authority. In Bundy’s case, the executioner was reportedly a woman.

In David Fincher’s Gen X Fight Club (1999), the narrator’s emboldened alter ego, Tyler Durden (also murderous), bitterly seethes about post-war feminization: ‘We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.’ In the age of Me Too and Time’s Up, the serial killer revival, in movies and on TV, hints at a troubling resurgence of the psychosexual male panic that led to the rise of the serial killer in the 1960s and ’70s. Perhaps, as with any distress, especially the kind sutured into our everyday lives, we need to keep replaying the banal horrors of masculinity in order to figure out how to finally wake up from its nightmare.

Return of the Serial Killer: How Psychosexual Male Panic is Infecting Pop Culture. By  Masha Tupitsyn. Frieze , February 11, 2019.

In the wildly popular Netflix show “You,” former “Gossip Girl” star Penn Badgley plays Joe, a handsome-yet-unassuming bookstore clerk who, when he’s not caring for the ancient novels in his shop’s basement, is obsessively stalking his girlfriend. Her name is Beck, and in an effort to secure her affections, he resorts to manipulating and eventually murdering several people she knows and loves.

Earlier this month, Badgley ― aka everyone’s TV crush circa 2007-2012 ― responded to the hordes of online fans who admitted to finding his “You” character attractive, to actively rooting for Joe in spite of his blatantly violent and controlling tendencies.

“Penn Badgley is breaking my heart once again as Joe,” one Twitter user wrote. “What is it about him?”

“A: He is a murderer,” Badgley matter-of-factly replied.

In the yet-to-be-released movie “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile,” another former all-American heartthrob ― Zac Efron ― plays another murderer with a complicated female following: Ted Bundy. In the film’s trailer, Efron-as-serial-killer grins, winks and charms to the tempo of a catchy rock tune. If you didn’t know better, you’d think you were watching a preview for a fun and fast caper about a relatively harmless criminal in the style of “Catch Me If You Can,” rather than a biopic about a monster.

The teaser, which dropped in late January, left a bad taste in the mouths of some people online, who blasted it for romanticizing a misogynistic rapist and necrophile who confessed to killing about 30 people in the 1970s ― and yes, was also attractive. The trailer plays up this quality ― perhaps, as others have pointed out, to make a point: The common narrative around Bundy is that he was able to get away with his unimaginably cruel acts for so long because he was exceedingly charming, clever and disarmingly handsome.

The common narrative, however, is wrong.

In many ways, true crime culture’s ongoing fascination with evil men like Bundy and the problematic reception of Joe on “You” seem to go hand in hand. We’ve been fed a line that serial killers are fascinating, evil geniuses whose misdeeds warrant a near-obsessive degree of analysis. And so documentarians and filmmakers and showrunners eagerly dive into the minds of these predators ― most of whom are white ― hoping to shed light on the inner demons that make our sociopaths tick.

But often, the mystery is less deep. Onscreen and off, whiteness is a shield that protects typical, everyday men from scrutiny. Being white is often associated with attractiveness, and attractiveness is often associated with decency, and together these associations help to provide cover. Neither Ted Bundy nor Joe needed to be exceptional criminals or atypically conniving people ― or even inordinately attractive men ― to get away with the horrors they enacted.

As Badgley, whose character on “Gossip Girl” turned out to be yet another man prone to stalking the people he hoped to control, put it: “Would anyone else be considered unassuming on the side of the street standing there too long? It’s pretty evident that no one but a young, handsome white man could do that.”

Refinery29 writer Ashley Alese Edwards recently declared as much. “The Ted Bundy of America’s consciousness is a myth,” she wrote. “Bundy was not special, he was not smarter than the average person; he did not have a personality so alluring that his female victims could not help but simply go off with him. ... What Bundy did have was the power of being a white man in a society that reveres them.”

Contemporary shows like “You,” movies like “Extremely Wicked” and docuseries like Netflix’s “Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes” are intended to illuminate the truths so many true-crime and serial killer-centric programs before them failed to do. They are ostensibly about broken systems that privilege some over others ― the intangible things that help murderers to get away with what they get away with. But no matter how hard they try, these projects inevitably fall into the precarious trap of perpetuating narratives about “fascinating” serial killers even as they attempt to dismantle them. 

Instead, they rehash a story that’s been told several times before, they flatten some narratives and inflate others, and most importantly, they leave the viewer more preoccupied with the murderous men than the victims. Even on “You,” the audience gets so wrapped up in Joe’s journey to “win” Beck at all costs, that we forget that Beck is, in fact, a victim. In the case of Bundy, it’s easy to forget that his victims had stories of their own, too, when each woman’s body is primarily used to reveal another facet of her killer’s biography.

The question really boils down to: What is the value in rehashing these stories if they’re going to be packaged in the same way?

Early reviews of “Extremely Wicked” suggest that, unlike its trailer, the film takes a more nuanced approach to Bundy and his murders; it’s told from the perspective of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer. But even if the movie resists romanticizing Bundy’s deeds in favor of condemning them (according to my colleague Matthew Jacobs, who saw the film at Sundance, there are two shots of Efron’s sculpted butt that, among other things, complicate the film’s intentions), the very existence of yet another Ted Bundy movie is a kind of romanticization, one with unwieldy results.

The “Conversations With a Killer” docuseries, for example, has garnered far worse critiques: The show was described as “cruel” and boring” in a review on Jezebel by Stassa Edwards, who also argued that it preserved “the tired narrative of the smart, good-looking serial killer.” On Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz criticizes the four-part docuseries for focusing on Bundy rather than exploring the lives of his victims. Somehow the point continues to evade storytellers: Beyond the killings, beyond the killers’ minds, are actual human beings.

It seems that for stories like these to truly elevate the discourse around serial killers, there must be some value beyond simply getting into the mind of the man who kills. “You,” for instance, has sparked vital discussions about internalized misogyny that amounts to distrust of victims and the kind of toxic masculinity that masquerades as the opposite, by placing us in the killer’s mind and revealing that it isn’t all that interesting ― just delusional. Joe’s inner monologue isn’t a register of brilliant criminal strategizing; rather, it’s an average man’s earnest stream of consciousness that’s littered with entitlement and dispensation at every turn.

“You” has its flaws, but it seems far more self-aware of its place in the conversation than past serial-killer lore and “Conversations With a Killer.” Rather than just lead us blindly down the killer’s path of destruction, it challenges us to interrogate why we’re following at all.

  

Sexualizing Serial Killers Like Ted Bundy Has Its Consequences. By  Zeba Blay. The Huffington Post,  February 4, 2019.