Fuck me, it actually looks good. Like, really good. The title is still absolutely stupid, but I'm a little excited to see this. My big concern with the movie is the same thing that excites me - and its that it's going to show Bundy as the charmer, the loving boyfriend and father figure. On the one hand, stuff like this can serve a purpose. Elizabeth Kloepfer probably stayed up nights wondering how she let this man into her life, into her daughter's life. People in the circle of monstrous criminals are often saddled with an unfair guilt. I like the idea of showing how even the people Bundy was kind and loving to were victims.
What I don't like is the uncomfortable knowledge that, as I predicted in the first post, this will almost certainly revive the Ted Heads. Ted Bundy fan girls have existed from the moment he was arrested. Everything from women who believed his innocence to women who were seduced by the knowledge he was a killer. The younger Ted Heads bother me on a deeper level though. He's been dead longer than most of the young women who see the movie because Zac Efron is hot and it looks entertaining have been alive. He'll be a character like Joe on Netflix's YOU. While everyone was writing think pieces about whether its okay to have a crush on the character, the main element was often forgotten. Joe is a character. He's not real, his crimes never happened, and his victims didn't exist. Ted Bundy is real. People affected by his crimes are real. The little girl in the movie, that he raised as his own daughter - she's real.
I don't have a profound statement to make on why that should matter to the masses, and it's definitely not a call to pass on the film (I'm going to see it), but I'd like it so much if we started treating true crime a little more carefully.
4 comments:
Bundy is such a difficult one, like Bernardo, because they were charmers who could pass for normal, who seemed like everyone else. That's what makes them so scary and you're right. Stories about them should be handled carefully.
I kind of want to know if Kloepfer and/or her daughter are benefiting from this in any way, but I also don’t want to encourage any behavior that might reveal their new names. It’s a weird one all around.
I just started watching the new-to-me Bundy documentary on Netfilx. So far, so good. Weird thing is that he was awkward in high school, very awkward.
There's been a lot of Bundy-washing lately. There was an article in The Believer called "The End of Evil" that puts his claims of being "tortured with himself" trying to fight his compulsions Red Dragon style, as believable and not the attempts of a murderer to stay his own execution (he also blamed it all on porn to get a priest on his side).
I don't mind keeping him relevant as a warning about how predators work, but romanticizing him is dangerous. "Could you have saved him from himself?" puts the onus on women, and possible victims, to stop the predator.
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