Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes is a Netflix docuseries that uses the hook of Stephen Michaud’s 1980 interviews with Ted Bundy as an excuse to revisit his story. It consists of four episodes and has a running time of 3 hours and fifty-five minutes. I normally put Netflix productions in my queue, and unlike the universe, wait until I feel like watching it instead of watching it immediately, but in this case, my interest matched the world so mom and I watched it immediately.
In the interest of full disclosure, I specifically dislike Netflix crime documentaries even though I have only seen one, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, but I generally like true crime dramas, Unsolved Mysteries, etc. If Rashomon has taught us anything, each person has his or her own perspective. This perspective must never be conflated or confused with the objective truth, which may be virtually impossible for one human being to discern. The good news is that we can learn from others’ perspectives and gain new insight into a situation that was heretofore impossible to perceive in that way. Movies and television shows are empathy machines that literally put us in someone else’s bodies and help us see through others’ eyes.
Netflix has a proclivity to project extraneous tropes from a whodunit, mystery or thriller narrative from the perspective of a detective, in this case the journalist, on to a story that is already riveting without the bells and whistles of forcing it into an ill-fitting framework. It is as if the content creators who appeal to Netflix do not completely grasp what originally made a story interesting to its potential audience, but instead are looking to force true stories into different fictional dramas to jazz up old stories. It is not a different perspective on the same story. It is twisting of a story to market it to an audience that it already had. You didn’t need to do anything except tell the story.
If you decide to watch Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, I would recommend also watching 20/20 ABC’s Bundy special, which aired on February 15, 2019, is Season 41 (for real?) Episode 24, is 80 minutes long and should be available on Hulu and ABC’s website. It replays many of the clips from the Netflix production, but does an overall better job of filling in some of the holes left by the docuseries. ABC may lean towards disgusting, prurient tabloid exploitation of tragic real life events in its Truth and Lies series, which is a subset of 20/20, but it gets why we’re here and offers a comprehensive recap. I classify the ABC docuseries as nostalgic true crime though it also includes pivotal political events like Watergate or Clinton’s impeachment. You may want to take a shower afterwards, but it satiates.
The audience for these types of shows falls into one of two categories. I fall into the first category. I remember the event and want to relive/reexamine it with the benefit of hindsight and more knowledge than I had when I was originally in the midst of it as it was unfolding. Instead of reminiscing about the good old days through rose-colored glasses, I’m reflecting on our past by looking at our worst selves. The other type of viewer is someone who was around, but not paying close attention to the event or someone who was not even alive and want a basic recap of what all the fuss was about so the viewer can join in. Shows like 20/20 and Truth and Lies nail those goals, but Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes tries to add suspense and then waltzes right past interesting tidbits that could actually add texture to the story.
For example, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes casually alludes to a time when Bundy attacked a guard for making an innocuous comment. What was the comment? Who knows! Did they interview the guard? Nope. To be fair, maybe the guard declined an offer to be interviewed, but it is aggravating to get allusions to little known events about Bundy then not elaborate on them. Instead the Netflix docuseries acts as if viewers are coming to the table born yesterday instead of with a lot of knowledge about Bundy even if it is just anecdotal. It sticks to the broad strokes instead of highlighting the areas that we may have missed the first time around. Almost four hours may be too much, especially since it is not terribly insightful. I watched it in two sittings then realized that it failed as an effective recap because when it revisited specific victims, I realized that I barely remembered the person even though I know the overall story fairly well whereas the 20/20 special privileged the victims over Bundy and made them more memorable. The best part of this docuseries is the interview with one of the few women who survived and was able to face off against Bundy in court. This feature is prominently played in 20/20, but 20/20 also interviews other survivors.
Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes spends a lot of time toggling between the jailhouse interviews, the perspective and frustrations of the journalists and jumping back and forth in time to give a roughly chronological account of Bundy’s life and crimes. I understand that the creators felt the need to start the docuseries explaining how they got the tapes, but with all due respect, I don’t care, and I’m not here for the journalists. Is it Bundy’s voice? Great. Keep it pushing and intersperse it throughout instead of jumping around the timeline. Just tell the story in a chronological fashion. There is no narrator, but there are a lot of talking heads elaborating and describing the events. Can you imagine that a serial killer may not want to be forthcoming or honest about his flaws and crimes? I’m as shocked as you are.
I think that one aspect that I prefer about ABC productions is that they clearly take an overt position on the subject so even if I disagree, I can see what they’re trying to do. Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes tries to be objective then wildly veers on one side or the other. For example, eagle-eyed viewers such as myself may notice that a photograph of Bundy gradually changes his eye color from blue to black to illustrate an interviewee’s perspective of how his appearance changed from normal to malevolent. Is it a cool subtle effect that will influence the viewer? Yes, I appreciate it from a cinematic standpoint, but I don’t cosign special effects on a story that actually happened to people because then it introduces a fictional element that creates a small fissure of doubt to the rest of the story. We live in a very dangerous time when people don’t accept facts as facts if it doesn’t fit their opinion and using techniques like that undermine the ability to find common ground in public discourse.
Then Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes tries to pull a Making A Murderer, which I still haven’t seen, by questioning whether the evidence and legal system gave him a fair shake in the eleventh hour. Um, pardon my French, but the fuck! Not the time or place. Yes, the legal system should be above reproach and be objective, but my instinctual, reductive, over-generalized response is why do Netflix productions only pull this crap for guilty white men? There isn’t a genuine question of fact or possibility of framing in this particular story. We know the end of the story. He literally knew where the bodies were buried.
To be fair, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes also paints law enforcement like the Keystone cops, but every piece that retrospectively examines Bundy misses a huge fascinating element of his crimes and why evil was allowed to prosper. Everyone starts from the perspective that he is normal, good looking and intelligent. Even with the benefit of hindsight, the majority of people still see Bundy this way, which I find astonishing, and is the real interesting missed opportunity that needs to be examined when revisiting Bundy’s crimes and capture. When I was a kid watching Mark Harmon play him in the television miniseries, The Deliberate Stranger, I was inclined to agree because Mark Harmon, but as an adult and lawyer looking at the actual Bundy, no the fuck he wasn’t. I have seen really hot, intelligent defendants, but he is not one of them. He wasn’t clever. They were blind, and we can learn a lot about our society if we further explore this blindness with a critical eye.
Bundy always looks sick and skinny to me even his early days. He was not attractive unless smirking cadavers are your thing. I know that I should not be the arbiter of hotness because while I understand why Brad Pitt is considered attractive, his eyes give him a simian appearance that I find a little repulsive. Because Bundy wore clean clothes and had some blazers, I guess that makes Bundy attractive, but that seems like a low bar. Also he had all the clear signals of a psycho that are only obvious when collected in one place and listed. The equivalent today would be to discover that a prolific serial killer worked for Presidon’t’s local political campaign, recently joined an incredibly conservative religion known for its marginalization, denigration or abuse of women and had a history of hurting animals and people as a kid. That shit may be common, but it isn’t normal, and in the aggregate, you should expect bodies in the basement with a profile like his! Who builds tiger traps as a child to impale other kids?!? Elizabeth Barthory and Vlad Tepes maybe and possibly not even. What does it take for a white man to seem abnormal and start ringing alarm bells in people’s heads? If I was a normal average white guy, I would be offended to constantly be placed in the same category as a guy that fits this description. Not all white men!
The legal system, including the presiding judge, humored him too much and flattered his ego by constantly complimenting him and reinforcing his self-image that he could be a great lawyer. No, he couldn’t. When you actually hear him talk about his case, he is the worst kind of pro se litigant: the one who thinks that he or she knows a lot, but actually everything that he or she knows is wrong and will actually hurt his or her case. He was a damn fool, and even if he was not a serial killer, he would have never finished law school because he lacked the intellectual rigor to stop looking into a mirror and feeling impressed with having a few words from Black’s law dictionary at his disposal to actually know how to properly use them. They tolerated his courtroom antics far more than they would have from other pro se litigants using those same techniques because he did go to law school. They took his story at face value that he didn’t get to finish as opposed to the objective reality that he was a professional dropout that wanted the benefits of being seen as a lawyer without doing the work to become one.
To me, what makes him crazy isn’t his view of women as objects that exist to fulfill his desires. That was a deliberate choice that he made with the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. His views about women were in line with an inherently misogynistic society though that society largely disagrees with his resulting extreme violent actions. He is crazy because his compulsive delusions of grandeur are not rooted in any objective facts even when he harms himself or others. He always wants to be on top. When a lawyer gets him a good deal, Bundy just has to show him who is boss then gets the death penalty while he still congratulates himself on putting his lawyer in his place.
Also if Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes is going to impose a genre on this story and prefers to focus on the investigators, it missed a golden opportunity to use a psychological expert throughout to engage in some irresponsible, unrealistic profiling and armchair diagnosis. If you’re going to be wrong, go big or go home. I’m surprised that no one really noticed that Bundy behaved like an addict in withdrawal and compulsively kept trying to escape and increase his murders exponentially so much that he didn’t even have a type of victim. It was as if he was just making up for lost time during his dry periods and willing to kill anybody just to try and reach his old high. No one really notices and remarks on this pattern. Come on! It can’t just be me who sees it, right?
Even though I found Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes disappointing, I would actually watch it again to see if I judged it too harshly. I find Bundy fascinating because he was the first serial killer that I learned about as a kid. I think what did make him smart is that he saw the holes in law enforcement (communication and jurisdiction issues, deference when he metaphorically dressed in drag as a lawyer) and exploited them, but most predators are good at observing weaknesses and exploiting them. When will get a documentary that looks at him with a more analytic, critical eye and does not just dismiss him as a monster? Probably around the same time that law enforcement and the justice system learns from the mistakes that they made in this case in order to stop real crime in the future. Think about it. For being found guilty of trying to kidnap a woman, if it wasn’t for escape attempts, the minimum sentence was a year. The maximum was fifteen. If he was capable of patience and not addicted to brutalizing human beings, think of Ted Bundy being free after a couple of years with his debt to society paid, free to go under the radar once again but wiser in how to stay there.