Be the Monster

One Friday night, in March 1895, Michael Cleary of Ballyvadlea, Ireland, set fire to his wife for refusing to eat a piece of toast.

Bridget Cleary had always been a bad fit for Michael. She was an exceptionally beautiful woman, and—thanks to her parents’ purchase of a Singer sewing machine—an exceptionally powerful one, too. Bridget taught herself to work as a milliner and dressmaker, which, along with keeping poultry, allowed her to live off her own income. That level of independence was rare in a married woman, and Bridget didn’t do much to downplay it: She had not moved in with her husband for some time after their wedding. She wore ostentatiously stylish clothes of her own design, in part as a walking advertisement for her business, but also for all the reasons beautiful women wear stylish clothing. She had a reputation for arrogance; “people speak of [Bridget] as being ‘a bit queer’ in her ways,” one local newspaper wrote, “and this they attribute to a certain superiority over the people with whom she came into contact.” There were rumors that she’d been having an affair.

“She was not my wife. She was too fine to be my wife,” Michael said of Bridget after her death. It might sound like bitterness, a man venting his insecurity at a woman who made him feel small. But Michael was being literal. He also claimed the woman he’d killed was “two inches taller than my wife.” By the time he was on trial for murder, Michael was not framing the problem in terms of some flaw in Bridget. He claimed that the woman he’d killed was not Bridget at all.

The thing that looked like Bridget, Michael said, was a changeling—a fairy that assumed someone’s appearance in order to disguise the kidnapping of the original person. Though they preferred to take children, fairies also stole adult women from time to time, especially pretty ones or nursing mothers. Like the vampires of New England, the changelings of Ballyvadlea were surprisingly noncontroversial. When Michael asked Bridget’s family to drive the changeling away, they were glad to help.

In the days leading up to her death, Michael’s neighbors recalled hearing screaming coming from his house—“take it, you [bitch], you old faggot, or we will burn you” was one widely reported comment—and seeing Bridget tied to the bed, where she was doused and force-fed potions to repel fairy magic. Sometimes that meant herbs boiled in milk. Sometimes it meant urine. Fairies hated iron, so she was threatened and prodded with a hot poker; fairies hated Christianity, so a priest was called. Bridget was made to recite her name and her male relatives’ names; she had to describe herself as “Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God” over and over, as if the spell could be broken by reaffirming the proper marital relation. When she was slow to answer, they held her over the kitchen fire. Johanna Burke, Bridget’s cousin, affirmed in her testimony that Bridget “seemed to be wild and deranged, especially while they were so treating her.”

Here’s the thing: it worked. After hours of counter-magic, everyone agreed that the real Bridget had been returned to them. But then, while the participants were recuperating by the fire, Bridget made the mistake that would end her life. She insulted Michael’s mother.

“Your mother used to go with the fairies,” is what she said, according to Johanna. “That is why you think I am going with them.”

The toast was on the breakfast table. Bridget had eaten two pieces. When she refused a third piece, Michael knocked Bridget to the ground and began forcing the bread down her throat. He began demanding that she call herself “the wife of Michael Cleary” again.

“I said, ‘Mike, let her alone, don’t you see it is Bridget that is in it,’” Johanna said, “meaning that it was Bridget his wife, and not the fairy, for he suspected that it was a fairy and not his wife that was there. Michael then stripped his wife’s clothes off, except her chemise, and got a lighting stick out of the fire. She was lying on the floor, and he held it near her mouth.”

Fairies hated fire. So Michael held fire to his wife’s mouth, telling her to take back what she’d said. Some of the witnesses remembered her crying out for Johanna—“oh, Han, Han”—and Johanna remembered Bridget saying, “give me a chance,” but then her head hit the floor, hard, and she stopped talking. So it may have been the blow to the head that killed her. We can’t know. Somehow, in the struggle, a spark got loose, and Bridget’s chemise caught fire. Over the screaming of her assembled family, Michael reached for a lamp and poured the burning oil over Bridget’s body, stoking the flames.

James Kennedy, her aunt’s brother-in-law, recalled trying to stop him: “For the love of God, don’t burn your wife,” he shouted.

“She’s not my wife,” Michael said. “She’s an old deceiver sent in place of my wife. She’s after deceiving me for the last seven or eight days, and deceived the priest today too, but she won’t deceive anyone any more. . . . You’ll soon see her go up the chimney!”

They assembled family, believers all, may well have looked for the miracle. But the body of Bridget Cleary stayed where it was.

It’s difficult to tell what motivated Michael in those final moments. It wasn’t just his belief in fairies; the other participants believed in them, too, but by the time Michael killed Bridget, everyone else knew that she was a real person. It may have been that Michael believed in fairies a little more than the others. It may have been mental illness; one popular theory places the blame on Capgras syndromes, in which sufferers are afflicted with the delusion that a loved one (“usually a spouse,” as per one Irish doctor) has been replaced by an identical duplicate. Or, given what we know about the other men, the obvious pride Bridget took in herself, and the financial power she wielded—say it plainly: the fact that Bridget was not under her husband’s control—it may have been a lie, and a way to justify killing her. Men kill women every day to assert their authority. Bridget wouldn’t have been the first.

But if Michael was lying, it was a lie with deep roots. Ireland and the other Celtic countries have a long folkloric tradition of fairy wives. Like Bridget, they were women who were hard to keep in one place—women who asked for more than was normal.

In the typical story, as per W. Y. Evans-Wentz, “a man catches a fairy woman and marries her. She proves to be an excellent housewife, but usually she has had put into the marriage-contract certain conditions which, if broken, inevitably release her from the union, and when so released she hurries away instantly, never to return, unless it be now and then to visit her children.”

Among the conditions, ironically, is the right to leave an abusive husband; in one story, collected by Evans-Wentz, the man learns “that he must not strike the wife without a cause three times, the striking being interpreted to include any slight tapping, say, on the shoulder.” Other fairies are disquietingly independent; a selkie, for instance, will come into her new husband’s home with a trunk, which he is not to open under any circumstances. If he disobeys her—suspecting treasure, or just not wanting her to have any secrets—he will find that the trunk contains only a sealskin, which the selkie will use to transform herself back into a seal before disappearing into the sea. In the Welsh Mabinogion, we have the story of Rhiannon, a fairy woman pursued by the human Prince Pwyll, who was struck by her beauty as she rode through his kingdom. Pwyll chased Rhiannon for days, unsuccessfully, until he became so tired and hungry that he begged her to stop. Only then did Rhiannon turn around: “I will stay gladly,” she told him, “and it were better for thy horse hadst thou asked it long since.” Rhiannon had been in love with Pwyll from afar, and had come to propose marriage, but she wasn’t going to let him grab her off the road and call it conquest. To be with a fairy woman, even one who loved him, a man had to get her consent first.

The ur-myth here is probably the French story of Melusine. When she married Count Raymond of Poitou, her only demand was that he leave her alone in her own room on Saturdays. Raymond agreed, and for many years, they were almost happy. Yet each of their children was born strange and frightening—with claws or tusks, or too many eyes, or too few. Though the maladies varied, “all were in some way disfigured and monstrous.” The problem defied explanation, and in time, Raymond grew suspicious of his wife. One Saturday, he peeked through a crack in the door and saw Melusine, taking a bath, with the lower half of her body transformed into a long, snaky tail.

Melusine loved Raymond, and initially forgave him for spying on her. It was only when Raymond publicly called her a “serpent” and blamed her for “contaminating” his noble line that she dropped the act, transformed into a sea dragon, and flew away. The legend says that she came back in the dead of night to nurse and hold her children, proud Mama Snake cuddling her little monsters to her clammy breast. Melusine could forgive her husband for curiosity, or even for being afraid, but not for turning on their children; she may have been a hideous, recently divorced hell-snake, but she was not a bad mother.

“Fairy wives” behaved less like inexplicable creatures of the spirit world and more like women who’d figured out how to have long-term heterosexual relationships without ceding their dignity or autonomy. So if Michael Cleary had a wife who was more beautiful than ordinary women, who wielded more control than ordinary women, who acted “too fine” for him or anyone, who had a habit of disappearing—well, he knew what to call her. If tradition had taught him anything, it was that a woman who insisted too much on being treated like a person was probably not a person at all.

From Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrocity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power by Sady Doyle

Sady Doyle on the Man Who Insisted His Wife Was a Malevolent Fairy. LitHub , August 26, 2019.

Sady Doyle wants you to know it’s okay to be a monster. In Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, her follow-up to 2017’s Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why, Doyle unpacks the many tropes that box women in from adolescence to adulthood. The taboo of menstruation and the sanctity of virginity; the lawlessness and danger of unbridled female sexuality; and the castrating and all-powerful mother. Doyle argues that throughout history, patriarchal social norms have dictated an acceptable set of standards—mental, physical, relational, sexual—that non-cisgender men must conform to. Diverging from these subservient, effacing, purity-obsessed standards causes women to be perceived and portrayed as a temptress, villain, or monster.

But, as Doyle argues in the book, even women who choose to live within these narrow confines fall victim to the very same accusations. Patriarchy creates a system of traps and Catch-22s: We have to be pure, but not so pure as to displease men. We have to give ourselves to our children, but not so much that we smother them. We have to be sexual, but not so sexual that it threatens men—and certainly not sexual in a way that excludes them. We have to be aware at all times that our bodies are not our own, but not so vigilant that we seem dramatic or paranoid. We cannot have both power and agency because the things patriarchy tells us we need in order to gain power strip us of our agency.

Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers draws a macabre, validating, and empowering roadmap of the origins and manifestations of female monstrosity, from gothic literature and exorcisms to the mothers of serial killers and the catharsis of watching horror movies. I talked to Doyle about who gets to be a monster, the challenge of changing our approach to discussing gendered violence, and the power of leaning into the darkness of it all.

CR : In the book, you write about the dichotomy between the “lethally beautiful and unbearably ugly.” Women aren’t given room for nuance, which is something that a lot of women struggle with. We only get to be a “career woman” or a “sexy temptress” or a “mom.”

SD : That’s a dynamic you see a lot in patriarchy: Every woman is ugly unless she’s beautiful, but if she’s beautiful, she’s untrustworthy because of that. There’s so much mythology [around] that. There’s the fairy-bride mythology about dangerous women from another world who might steal your soul or trap you underground. There are [also] mermaids and sirens singing you onto the rocks.

And that’s what [we] think of when we think [about] women who have sexual agency. The assumption is that we need to keep women under control and restrained from their own sexuality because otherwise they’ll use it to hurt men. It’s a projection. It’s something that men think will happen because historically, men have used sexuality as a weapon against women. Mothers are feared for a different reason: As [women] get older and start to accumulate more power within the world, [they’re viewed as] ugly, formidable, and castrating.

Most men and women have been under the authority of a woman at [some] point. We all fear our mothers’ anger, and adults can be really terrifying to children. But even when they’re not, that sense of growing up under the control of or the authority of a woman who’s much bigger than you, can make decisions [for you], and is more competent than you, gets transmuted into an overall sense of, “What’s going to happen to me if a woman has economic power? What’s going to happen if a woman [becomes] president? What’s going to happen to me if, once again, there’s a woman who’s so much bigger than I am, and I can’t do anything about it?”

CR : It’s the same with the topic of periods. It took me until I was I diagnosed with endometriosis in my mid-20s to realize there’s power in making people uncomfortable. A school administrator was giving me a hard time about missing classes after I’d had surgery, so I scanned full-color pictures of my surgery and sent them to her. I was like, “Here you go. You wanted more information. Here it is.” There’s power in that attitude.

SD : When you go back to really old texts, it’s literally elderly cis men who are perplexed, puzzled, and terrified by the fact that not all bodies are cis men bodies. I want to be really careful because a lot of women’s bodies bleed, but it doesn’t mean that men’s bodies don’t bleed. Some women have never menstruated in their lives. The idea [was] “women’s bodies” were innately monstrous, [and] that they were, [as] Aristotle said, “mutilated men.” These are bodies that have failed to be male, that are not quite human, [and] that just don’t work right. It’s not a figurative thing. It’s not like I’m having fun metaphor time with the idea that women are monsters. Lots of men have literally believed that we were.

CR : I want to talk about the section in your book that focuses on the power of being able to get pregnant. I’ve had a lot of conversations about my ability to have kids, so that looming weight really resonates with me. We use fertility, socially and institutionally, as a means of defining women. And it’s not just cis women; these conversations are used to otherize trans women too.

SD : It was really interesting to discover how much [of] our medical system is set up around penalizing and controlling these bodies, and it’s not only pregnant and childbearing bodies. [Some of the] witches [who were] burned were midwives who knew how to administer birth control. It wasn’t until about 100 years ago [that] you [went] to the doctor to have a baby. [Back then], you went to a midwife. And in America, a midwife would usually be a Black woman. When white males took over, maternal mortality rates went up.

The part where cis men get to pick who has the baby, keep that person in a house, keep them in a monogamous relationship, and keep them under control is [an artificial system]. The part where cis men are in charge of reproduction, in charge as doctors in the operating room, [in charge] as fathers giving their names to the family line, [and in charge] as the lawmakers, judges, and authorities determining whether or not they think rape is a big enough deal [is] an artificial system.

It’s dangerous to [assume] a super-optimistic “sex is power” or “reproduction is power” attitude. I don’t want to define myself purely that way. But there’s a really profound subversive power in women’s reproductive agency, and we have lived in a society that’s built around controlling, shaming, demeaning, hurting, raping, and killing [women] for so long that we’ve lost sight of the fact that there are powerful things about being able to make a person.

CR : And these patriarchal confines apply not only to reproduction but to sexuality, and they set women up for punishment. There’s this idea that women are temptresses, and then they become victims of violence. It circles back completely to the idea that “she was asking for it.”

SD : It continually loops around on itself. Sex is supposed to be something that’s put out there so you can get into a heterosexual relationship and get married. But if you put it out there and somebody decides to shit on it, then that’s your fault. Why were you at that party? Why were you dressed up? Why did you look that way if you didn’t want his attention?

CR : Every time there’s some major scandal about a politician or a celebrity having an affair, there’s always this shaming of the other woman. That never sits right with me.

SD : [There is this idea that] this is how cishetero reproduction has always worked. The idea is that men are supposed to be free to sleep with women because that’s how you continue your family line. Women must not be free to sleep with men. Women must be kept in one specific relationship that we know they’re in. Because otherwise, outside of raising a newborn baby and saying, “Maybe I see a little bit of red in his hair,” you don’t really know who the father is. Patrilineal arrangements are awkward, weird, and socially constructed in [such] a tenuous way that you really have to be in control of another person’s sexuality and body in order to be absolutely sure that things are working as intended.

CR : This also ties into the way that mothers are forbidden from being sexual beings. Once you’ve had a baby, you’ve graduated from the phase of sexy temptress, and now you’re the castrating mother. It made me think about how a mother is her daughter’s eyes into the world; that relationship influences the next generation living in this weird paradigm.

SD : [That’s] when all that stuff starts to meld together. The book is split into daughters, wives, and mothers, and [I’m] really specific [about how I] split all of those things up. The child who’s supposed to be under our protection and the child who’s afforded a degree of humanity before she grows up and becomes a woman has to be kept separate from the sexual woman—the seductress—or the wife—the woman who’s there for us to look at through that [sexualized] lens. [The wife] has to be split off from the mother who’s simultaneously really sentimentalized and really devalued and feared. When you start to Frankenstein all those bits together, you get someone who has sexual agency, sexual pleasure, reproductive agency, [and] who, despite what children she has and when, has control over that process. When you start to forge all those things together, you [have] an image of a self-determined person whose life is not guided by patriarchy, who cannot be held down, who will not be split off in fragments of herself, and [who will not be] turned into a subject or a second-class person by these very limiting goals.

When you manage to undo your own fragmentation, you [develop] an image of your own humanity [and] your own agency—what decisions you might make if you weren’t making the decisions you’re “supposed” to make as a woman.

CR : You write about the ways in which women engage with true crime and horror as an escape of sorts. But it’s also a somewhat safe manifestation of the things that we have always been taught to fear.

SD : It’s purifying for some reason. There’s a lot of evidence [that shows] women watch horror way more than men. Women read and watch true crime way more than men. It’s not that women are murdered more than men; men will get in bar fights and kill each other pretty often. But women are living in a culture that constantly subjects them to violence for the [sake] of violence. There’s also an idea that you don’t talk about it because you will be blamed. You will be told that you are being oversensitive or paranoid, or you will just have it written off in this way that’s really invalidating and destabilizing. [The] first worst thing is to have the crime happen. The second worst thing is to say it has and no one cares.

The opposite of what we used to think [about] the demographics is true: Women are the ones who see these movies about serial killers. It has always been the case that women go to these really dark places, from gothic literature [to] true crime.

CR : It’s a weird dichotomy: We shield girls and young women from so much because the world is so predatory. Yet true crime can be empowering because it validates all of those little twinges in the back of your head. There’s a dark comfort in realizing we’re not loopy.

SD : I’m glad you [used the word] “validating” because women have to ignore and downplay the extent of the violence in [our] lives and the extent of the violence around [us] for so much of [our] lives. When you go to horror, it’s not even always an escalation. It’s a place where you don’t have to pretend that your life isn’t scary.

CR : That brings me to infamous serial killers, including Ed Gein and Edmund Kemper, whose  mothers are given this looming, consequential role in their violence and their brutality. You make the point that these men can be radicalized elsewhere; they have abusive fathers who they learn from or a fascination with Nazis. It’s akin to what we see in online communities like Reddit. That was such an important way to counter this narrative of the “bad mom” causing men to turn to crime.

SD : We love to blame mothers; it’s easy to blame a mother. But the patriarchy that’s all around you is constantly sending [the] message that violence is good, purifying, [and] righteous. [Patriarchy] is constantly telling [men] that women need to be controlled, kept in line, and taken down to size through violence. Cruelty and violence are what power is, and women in particular need to be subdued and put in line through sexual and other forms of gendered violence.

When a guy murders and rapes a bunch of coeds, lures women into his car to rape and kill them, or decapitates them like Edmund Kemper, why would you [pinpoint] one person to be mad at when you’ve got a whole society telling him that he’s not that far out of line? It only takes this one guy [who’s] willing to take the joke a little too far, and you’ve got an Ed Gein. He wasn’t distinct from his father’s violence. He saw his father constantly beating up his mother, [so] when he got a little older and got to a place where he felt powerless, he knew [exactly] what to do. When we blame mothers, we’re ultimately victim blaming.

CR : These patriarchal confines set us up to fail. The rules aren’t written down anywhere, so if you don’t follow them it might be really tough. But if you do follow them, you’re screwed anyway, so why bother?

SD : That’s the thing. You can’t [live in] a way that allows you to evade punishment, and you [still won’t be] safe. Look at Laci Peterson. This was a woman who fulfilled every bourgeois domestic ideal, and everyone loved her. She did everything right, and her husband [still] got up one day and decided to throw her in the river. You can warp your life into being what other people need you to be—and it still is not going to protect you. If you’re going to be targeted no matter what they do; they’re not going to like what you say no matter how you say it because you’re talking; they’re coming at you; [and] this is a war, then why not charge? Why not be what they’re afraid of? Why not be the monster?

Be the Monster :  Sady Doyle Draws a Macabre Road Map of Female Monstrosity. By Caroline Reilly. Bitch Media, August 13, 2019.

When we think of horror stories, both fictional and true crime, the assumption is that the draw is violence and a fascination with it. While that's no doubt true, author Sady Doyle argues, in her new book "Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power," that the terror is also about gender. Stories about monsters transmit and reinforce fears about women's bodies, women's resistance, and, worst of all, women having power.

But horror isn't wholly sexist. Monster stories are also where women have long gone to explore their own desires to rebel against the patriarchy or to discuss forbidden topics, such as the ubiquity of male violence. Doyle spoke with Salon about the power of monster stories, both to oppress and empower women.

AM : 

So this book is about monster stories, which range from classic fairytales and myths to modern-day horror stories and even true crime stories. These stories, you argue, are often and possibly primarily about deeply gendered concerns, almost always touching on anxieties about a woman's place in the patriarchal society. Why do you think that is?

SD : It goes down to the concept of "otherness." One of the fundamental patriarchal myths is not that women are a different kind of human to a cisgender man, but women are something fundamentally less than or different than human men.

And of course, there's all sorts of other othernesses that you can have. Cis people other trans people. White people other people of color all the time. But in some of these really ancient texts, like Aristotle, he was fundamentally concerned and horrified at the fact that not all humans are perfect reproductions of their father's bodies. The presence of any difference whatsoever freaks him out.

I think it was Aquinas, who opens the book, who says that, "Were it not for some power that wanted the feminine sex to exist, the birth of a woman would be an accident of nature, like that of other monsters." The idea of women as misbegotten and defective is there.

Horror is a genre that's all about bodies. It really is just about bodies in the sense of corpses, bodies in the sense of sexuality. Horror is a place where we go with really intense, obsessive concerns about what a body should look like and how it should behave and what makes a body human or inhuman.

So, when we tell monster stories, more often than not, we are returning to those same fundamental concerns about what makes sex safe and appropriate or deviant and scary. What makes a body beautiful or ugly, human or inhuman? So it's absolutely not surprising that we would end up with a bunch of horror movies that somehow seem to mimic these ancient texts about the terror of period blood and how it would give dogs rabies and kill men who touched it.

AM : You have the book broken into categories of daughters, wives, and mothers. In the first section, daughters, you start off with stories about poltergeists and demonic possessions, most notably "The Exorcist." What is the kind of common thread between poltergeist stories and demonic stories?

SD : They both center on a terror of what I'm going to go ahead and call, for our purposes, female puberty. Poltergeists are, in case any of your readers don't know this, they are the ghosts that can throw things around. And in ghost hunting communities, these are thought to be not dead people, but pieces of rage that have somehow gotten so powerful, they have detached from someone's body. It's just that your anger is so big, it's gotten outside of your body and is now wrecking your house.

In ghost hunting lore, in paranormal lore, over and over again, they stress that you are never more likely to have a poltergeist than when you're around a very young girl who's having her first period. There are even some of these books that I've read that are like, "Sometimes there's a poltergeist in an adult person's house, but that's also a woman on the rag." That's what poltergeists are: they're period spirits. And they attend on young and teenage girls in the lore pretty exclusively.

Demon possession has not always been so gendered. The case that "The Exorcist" was based on is called the Roland Doe exorcism, and it was a little boy who stabbed a priest with one of his bedsprings in the middle of the exorcism. And I think William Peter Blatty heard that and thought, "Ooh, that's good."

But when he sat down to make it spooky, he immediately made that a story about a 12-year-old girl. The movie so intensely focuses on her body and all of the things that her body can do, all of the terrible changes her body is undergoing.

They show her masturbating. They show a 12-year-old girl's bloody vagina in that movie, and it's strongly implied that either that crucifix is sharp or that she's just on her period. I still can't believe this is in the movie. Every time I look at it, I'm like, "I don't know how they got that in the movie." One of the biggest shock shots in the movie is a young girl who bleeds.

Those exorcism cases are often about our idea of young women as being suddenly filled up with a new power. The second they step forward into adult womanhood, they stop being children who are under our protection, children who are sweet, who are good, who are safe, and they become these foul-mouthed, cursing, masturbating women, who might potentially get angry and throw a lamp across the room with their minds. We are so scared of girls growing up, of girls obtaining adult power that we've made endless horror stories of it.

AM : Not all stories that make the girl a dehumanized object of terror and disgust. "Carrie" is a very different kind of version of "The Exorcist" story. Carrie is a sympathetic character, I would argue, even if she gets killed in the end.

SD : Well,  she's almost victimized by the amount of power she has, you know? And "Carrie" is  a dance between her and her mother for who's going to be the victim of the movie and the villain of the movie. Carrie is young, she's just gotten her first period. She's backwards. She's viciously, viciously abused by her mother, who is this female misogynist who believes that women's bodies and sexuality are inherently evil.

For most of this, Mom is the bad guy, right? Mom is the woman who has power in a way that is threatening to us because she's an adult, and she's older, and she has authority. The strange thing, for this woman who's a misogynist, is that she doesn't actually interact with any men at all throughout the movie. She doesn't have a husband. She doesn't ever want to have sex with men. For as religious as she's portrayed as being, she doesn't go to church. She doesn't have a pastor or a priest or a male authority figure. She seems to have written her own Bible. She's like, "Let us pray," and then it's just a whole bunch of stuff that is not in any religious texts. She seems to have formed her own religion of which she is the pope, and its only ceremony is locking your daughter in like a prayer closet with a creepy Jesus that's clearly handmade.

Margaret is a vision of female power that's very threatening, and Carrie is a vision of a young girl who's starting to step into adulthood and into power and who experiences that, for most of the movie, as something overwhelming and horrifying and frightening. She gets her period, and she thinks she's dying. She learns she can move things with her mind, and it's not a fun realization for her for most of the movie.

But then eventually, there's this symbolic menarche of her being drenched in pig's blood. She realizes that, if she has powers, she can do what power does, which is make life real hard for everybody who's made life hard for her.

Stephen King has even compared her to a school shooter, like a Columbine guy. For all that it's his book, I don't know that I would agree with that reading. But I think eventually we're meant to see that Carrie's power takes over, and then it voids her of humanity, much the same way that the demon voids Regan of humanity in "The Exorcist" until she's cured.

AM : I was tickled to read that you like "My Favorite Murder." I'm also a fan. True crime mostly has female fans, and we're all expected to feel ashamed for how much interest we have in these gruesome, true-life stories about serial killers and other kinds of murderers. You're a little more sympathetic to women's desire for these stories, so tell me, why do women love stories about true crime so much?

SD : It's such a heavily-feminized genre, and the reaction is so often that it's just like, "Oh, you're some wine mom watching Lifetime movies. You don't have any real problems, and you're just trying to vicariously suck up someone else's pain to get you through the boring day."

I would argue is no, women are really drawn to stories about violence, not just true crime. Women are the primary audience for slashers and torture porn movies, evidently. Women are drawn to this, because our lives are very violent, because we really do live with an epidemic of sexualized and gendered violence that we are trained to fear every moment of our lives.

You walk with your keys between your fingers at night. You make sure that you're not outside of the house at a certain hour. You make sure that, if you go to a party, you have a buddy who's going to keep their eye on your drink. You make sure of all these little things, and at the end of the day, you can still find out that Matt Lauer has a magic button in his office that he can use to lock you in his office to sexually assault you. At the end of the day, still there's going to be a nice, handsome blond guy who wants you to help him with a car problem, and whoops, it's Ted Bundy, and now you're dead.

The ubiquity of that violence and the fact that we have very few socially approved ways of talking about it, ways of thinking about it, is really stifling for a lot of women.

We have more now. We have online feminist communities, and we have social media, and that's made more truth-telling possible. But, for a long time, one of the only ways you could  process the amount of fear that you were living with every day was to go to these really spectacular stories of sexual violence and sexual terror.

If your husband is starting to scare you, if that relationship is going dark, it might actually make a lot of sense for you to be obsessively concerned with what happened to Laci Peterson, whose husband killed her.

You might be not sucking up someone else's pain like a vampire. You might be trying to work through what's the worst-case outcome of my situation. Women do that. We get really concerned with the amount of violence in the world, and if we had no external validation, we would feel crazy and alone all the time.

AM : The Laci Peterson/Scott Peterson case held this huge fascination over people in the early 2000s, and less than a decade later, "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn came out.  Flynn denies that it was inspired by the Peterson case....

SD : Well ...

AM : You draw some extremely interesting parallels where it's a retelling of the story, except that the wife lives, and she's actually setting the husband up to be framed for her murder. Women love this book. Why did they go nuts for it?

SD : It's a turning of the tables, isn't it? Amy's rage is so unsanitized in that book. She said some stuff, even, that you might characterize as misogynist, but that kind of adds to it. She is, we're supposed to believe, a sociopath, but she is also a highly educated woman who has worked her whole life to make something of her life, and she married this frat boy who dragged her out to the middle of nowhere and started cheating on her.

The level of just pure raw rage in this woman, that despite everything she's done to build a life, she still winds up stuck in this confined female role of being some guy's bitchy, dragged-down wife in the middle of the Midwest, it's very real. And she's really real about how much she wants to kill him for trapping her in this role.

Just as these movies and stories can provide a venue for us to talk about how we feel victimized, they can also provide a way for us to walk backward into our own scary parts.

For me, it's not "Gone Girl." It's a movie called "Audition," where it's this woman who's a ballerina, and she's been viciously abused by her ballet teacher.  This sexist dude sets up a fake audition so he can harass a well-meaning actress into being his girlfriend. He picks the wrong woman to be his girlfriend because the second he starts stepping out on her, she's lopping his limbs off.  But I absolutely love that movie because I think that Asami tries to tell him five times, "I've had a rough life," and he's like, "Whatever, let's eat chicken." He doesn't listen.

These movies can provide us with safe places to play out our rage. You're not thinking about framing your husband for murder and sending him to death row. You're just sitting on the beach, reading a book, but maybe he should've been a little bit nicer to you that day. You're kind of creating a safe place for your anger to play out where it doesn't have to wreak havoc on your life.

AM : I appreciated the part in the book where you write about the female audiences for slasher flicks, and how the underestimated part of the appeal of slasher flicks is the way that the final girl at the end kills the monster who's been killing women.

SD : That's what stories do. They allow you to find multiple identification points, right? Because we all want to be the final girl. Women read true crime, especially if there's one woman who figures out a way to survive, because they want to know how to be that woman.

Women are specifically drawn to stories about serial killers because it's a codified way of talking about sexual violence and sexual assault generally. If we accept that, then we also have to accept that most of the girls in that movie aren't the final girl. The rates are pretty high of women being either sexually assaulted. There are epidemic forms of violence everywhere. The more marginalized your identity is, the more likely you're going to fall into them.

We are way more likely to be Rose McGowan getting her head crushed in a garage door than we are to be like Neve Campbell who triumphs over her abusive boyfriend in the end. We are all more likely to be the girl who doesn't make it. And telling her story matters just as much as telling the story of the girl who got away.

There's the girl you want to be and the girl you are. We use stories to process our emotions. It's important to tell both those girls' stories so that you can really feel every inch of fear or grief or horror that you may feel.

AM : Speaking of serial killers, both real and fictional, you have a really interesting piece in this book about the mothers of serial killers. Ed Gein's mother has been blamed for him becoming this body-mutilating serial killer. "Psycho," "Friday the 13th," there's all these fictional versions of Ed Gein's mother. People want to blame the mother when a man does violence like serial killing. Is there any actual reason to believe that mothers cause serial killers?

SD : There's so much that causes a serial killer that's not that person's mother, and the stories that we come up with to say why somebody is a product of their mother, they can be so silly. There are some cases where, yes, someone was viciously abused as a kid.

There's this reality show called "Murderers and their Mothers," and I think I watched a whole season. And one of them was just like, "Daniel Bartlam killed his mother reenacting a scene from a soap opera. How could she have caused this? Could it be that she let him watch horror movies?"

What? What teenage boy has not seen a horror movie? They're not all stabbing their mothers to death.

But we want to believe that it's the moms. We want to believe that there's some simple  pattern that you can follow that's going to result in a perfect child, and the reason we want to do that is because moms are easy people to blame. Moms are victims, and we love blaming victims.

What is often the case is that these men are just representing a more of an elevated version of the violence against women that they grew up with. There's a whole society that glorifies violence towards women. There's a whole society that tells men that women are there to be conquered and taken and penetrated and consumed and tossed aside.

I talk about Ed Gein because he's so often blamed on his mother, the idea that he had an abnormally close relationship with his mother, and therefore he killed. But he was a schizophrenic guy who viewed his mother as his only safe person. He only started killing people after she was dead. He decompensated radically because he was very isolated out there on that farm. He had no other family members. But when he decompensated, he became violent.

And what was never, ever mentioned in this telling, never mentioned, never dwelled on, is that his father beat his mother routinely in front of him. His father beat him routinely.

We have created this whole mythology around Ed Gein where it's just like, "Oh, well, maybe he wanted to be a woman or maybe he just loved his mother too much, and he hated all other women because they weren't his mother."

The idea that he just grew up in a really misogynist environment and, when he felt powerless, went out and did some more misogynist things to get his power back, that's not as seductive to us because that puts the blame on us. That suggests that we are creating our monsters, that our society, that our patriarchy is creating violence, and we don't want that. We want violence to be an exception rather than the rule.

AM : I want to talk about witches. People are talking about witches again. Hillary Clinton was accused of being into witchcraft by the Pizzagaters. Covens of witches are hexing Donald Trump publicly, and every time they do this, the religious right loses their goddamn mind. What is the appeal of witches?

SD : A little while ago, they were mad at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They thought she was one of the witches hexing Brett Kavanaugh, which if so, more power to her. It's a very common thing that, when you see a woman with power in the public or political sphere, people will be like, "Oh my god, she's going to blight my crops!"

I love witches. I put them in the back of the book as the key transformative figures because witches have a power that is above and beyond. Witches are people who knowingly go to the outskirts of their society. They knowingly take a look at the narratives and the culture and the values of patriarchy, of the world they live in, and they take a look at all of that, and they say, "Well, no thank you."

So often, in a witchcraft story, the way a woman will become a witch is she has to recite the Lord's Prayer backwards, or she has to sign her name in a book. There's a lot about words, and there's a lot about what book are you in, what story are you in. The idea of taking the most sacred words of your culture and reciting them backwards so that you are casting yourself out of that story into a new one, I love that.

Witches are linked to midwives. A lot of midwives and women who were able to prescribe birth control were killed for being witches. Witches are linked to the exercise of political power, not only because feminists, for some reason, have always loved to dress up as witches or claim to be witches, but because the idea of a woman exercising power over you inevitably calls up the idea of the witch, of the woman who is able to enrich herself or utilize her dark influence. The woman who is wise, the woman who knows things that nobody else knows and can do things nobody else can do.

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We are so unused to women having any public or legitimate power whatsoever that the very exercise of power in a woman seems illegitimate. It seems supernatural. It's like, "I can't understand how she's winning this election. It can't be that more people are voting for her. Is it this?"

I love witches because they are not just monsters. A monster is born a monster. A woman decides to be a witch, and she does that by wandering out beyond her world into forbidden places, into places you're not supposed to look at. She goes out there, and she finds out things you're not supposed to know, and that means she can come back with the power to heal her world. And that's why I love them.

"We all want to be the final girl": Sady Doyle on true crime, slasher films and surviving patriarchy. By Amanda Marcotte. Salon, August 27, 2019. 

Another interview :

Alone in the Dark: Sady Doyle on Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. By Matt Zoller Seitz.  Roger Ebert.com. August 27, 2019.

reviews

The Book: Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers . Dangerous Characterss , August 2019.

Book Review: Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. London Horror Society , August 19, 2019

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.