Netflix Conversations with a Killer: Ted Bundy's Strip Review

By Jesse Schedeen

Note: This is a review without conversation about Conversations with a killer: Ted Bundy's tapes, which will be streaming on Netflix.

Many real documentaries about the crime of Netflix are known to highlight business that few people know well: to make a murderer, the innocent man, and so on. Conversations With a Killer focuses on one of the most notorious and fascinating serial killers of all. But in the process, it painfully reminds us that it is all the more difficult to bring something new to the table of discussions on such an infamous subject.

The biggest selling point of this four-part documentary is right there in the title, the so-called "Ted Bundy Tapes". The series is inspired by the eponymous book by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, which was written after the duo recorded about 100 hours of audio interviews with Bundy, a jailed man. These recordings occupy an important place in these four episodes. The hope is that they can give a new insight into the mind of a man responsible for the brutal killings of at least 30 victims.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, these recordings do not really lead to a thorough study of the characters that real aficionados of the crime could hope for. Much of this can be blamed on Bundy himself. His mystique comes from the fact that he was so charming in appearance and so charming in his various TV interviews. The gulf between the picture that he was in the United States that he was trying to create and the cold-blooded sadist who was hiding under it was and is still hard to reconcile.

This same type of voltage appears clearly on the recordings. Bundy is very happy to be able to talk about his childhood and his career aspirations in these recordings. He is much less eager to discuss the details of his crimes and his methodology, to the point where he generally avoids admitting murders in the first place. When Bundy "talks", he often does so from a third-person perspective clinically detached. Sometimes these recordings do not elicit more intimacy or authenticity than Bundy's public interviews.

In short, this is not a real situation in Silence des Agneaux. Bundy himself is sometimes a pretty boring narrator. Most of the information that can be drawn comes from the clash between his way of talking about himself and his life and the way other people think about their experiences. Over time, the viewers really understood how much Bundy could be narcissistic and illusory. And there are some chilling moments in the documentary where the mask slips and the real Bundy emerges momentarily. One is an audio segment particularly sensitive to the skin. Another center is centered on a Bundy clip in the audience hall because it seems to use cross-examination as an opportunity to relive the sordid details of a crime scene. Such moments may be enough to justify watching the series for themselves.

Conversations with Conversations with a Killer offers a fairly traditional and direct approach to Bundy's life. These four episodes cover his entire story, from his seemingly innocuous childhood to his multiple murders, to the media circus that was his trial and execution. Director Joe Berlinger mixes interviews with archival footage and still picture collages. Michaud and Aynesworth are involved, as well as various law enforcement officials and friends of Bundy. This simple approach gets the message across and offers a fairly comprehensive account of Bundy's life to the uninitiated, but again, beyond these tapes, there is not much that distinguishes this documentary of those that have been made before.

Just wish that Berlinger takes a more focused approach and tries to focus on a specific element of Bundy's story. For example, very early in the documentary, Bundy was considered the product of the average and paranoid 1970s United States, but he never deepened this idea. The same goes for the last episode, which touches on the public's obsession with Bundy's lawsuit and how his execution has become a omen for the future for our voyeuristic, TV-obsessed culture. -reality. But again, the series never adopts this more unique angle.

At the very least, it would have been better if the documentary had focused more on the crimes themselves and less on the before and the after. With so much time on the screen devoted first to the childhood and college years of Bundy, then to its pursuit, the documentary sometimes loses sight of the many lives that it has ruined. It goes a bit too far trying to humanize Bundy without providing enough counterpoint. If there is a complete and complete account of Bundy's life and crimes to tell, it is not that.