What Vulture Gets Wrong

Conversations with a Killer: the Ted Bundy Tapes is the four-part Netflix documentary series about Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer of young women across the western United States in the 1970’s. Director Joe Berlinger retells the story of Bundy’s crimes as well as his conviction and execution with new releases of archival footage and interviews with some of those involved. In the article “The Ted Bundy Tapes Examines an Infamous Serial Killer, But Finds Only a Horrifying Void,” Matt Zoller Seitz argues that the series misses an opportunity to tell a more necessary and fulfilling story and falls short by focusing on the facts that every true crime buff already knows. Seitz claims that the series is a waste of time insofar as it attempts to figure Bundy out. It never accomplishes this goal, and time and energy surrounding Bundy’s crimes can and should be spent commemorating the lives of his victims and learning from those who knew him. Ultimately, Seitz is correct in his assessment that everyone is tired of hearing about Ted Bundy — what we want to know and need to focus on is who we lost, not more of the same about who killed them and now.

Seitz begins by summarizing the series. Bundy was a misfit child who learned to network and became a sleek law student. He felt inferior due to his family’s socioeconomic status. He employed various strategies for evading law enforcement both before and after his arrest and detainment. He recounts the fact that the interviewer who recorded the famous Ted Bundy tapes convinced Bundy to talk about himself by constructing a narrative in which Bundy was a psychoanalyst looking at his own actions from the outside. Ultimately, he writes, the series ends where it began — with the premise that Bundy is fundamentally unknowable. His motivations, methods, and psyche are not able to be fully understood, because he is not capable of discussing them honestly, and anyway he is long dead and there is nothing new to learn about him.

Seitz then argues that, from a filmmaking standpoint, there are two things wrong with the documentary series. First, Berlinger seems to very obviously be setting an audience up for his upcoming film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron as Ted Bundy and Lily Collins as his wife, which is to be released also on Netflix in the fall. This makes it difficult for the documentary to stand alone as its own piece. Second, Berlinger missed the chance to diverge from the “adolescent” fantasy analysis that is typical of the true crime genre and instead reproduced the exact kind of film that has been made about this man hundreds of times before, with nothing new to say about him after over four hours of content. It is because of both of these reasons that Seitz criticizes the series and dubs it a waste of time. It would have been far more worthwhile, he suggests, to tell the stories of any of his victims, or possibly those who knew him as a child.

However, despite his claim that the stories of the women Bundy brutalized need to be told, and despite the fact that several victims were named in the very documentary he is reviewing, Seitz names only one throughout the duration of his review. It is Karen Sparks, who survived an attack in which Bundy bludgeoned and sexually assaulted her in her bed. In the rest of his review, he falls into the same trap as Berlinger. His focus is entirely on Bundy, even if he acknowledges that this is misplaced. In the same way that those who knew Bundy acknowledge his horrible crimes and then backpedal to recall how polite and charismatic he was, Seitz criticizes the series as morally bankrupt and then emphasizes how well-structured and well-edited it is. So Bundy is excused on account of aesthetics, and the film is excused on account of its being technically good.

Setiz’s claims against the film again fall on technical grounds, showing no actual consideration for Bundy’s victims. Seitz argues that Berlinger should have told their stories because it would have made for a more interesting or ground-breaking film, not necessarily because any societal debt is owed to their memories. He argues that Berlinger should have done the work to tell their stories, because that is what is necessary, although he himself will make no attempt to do so. Bundy’s victims were people with full lives and should be treated as such, though one learns from Seitz’s article only that Karen Sparks was the girl who was bludgeoned in her bed. Seitz argues that “the people whose lives Bundy damaged or stole remain abstractions, one step up from numbers on a ledger,” but he makes no attempt to relieve even one of them of their erasure.

Davies and Lyon write in “Overview of Victim-Defined Advocacy” that victim-defined advocacy is founded on the belief that one has the most to learn from victims. They write in the context of survivors of intimate partner violence, but their maxim can be extrapolated to stories of Bundy as well. Rather than report that Karen Sparks was bludgeoned, one may benefit from contacting Karen Sparks and asking how the event impacted her life or what else she might know about Bundy. Rather than resign oneself to the fact that we will never know what happened to his victims, it is more productive to commemorate their lives and prioritize them over Bundy, rather than fulfill his dream of self-centered prioritization in yet another attempt to understand what he has made purposefully obscure.

If we are to hold filmmakers like Berlinger accountable for their fetishization of human monsters such as Bundy, we must be willing to not just tell but show them what they are doing wrong. If the public wants or needs the stories of the people whose lives Bundy damaged or stole, then someone has got to do the work to make it happen, and that someone is evidently not going to be Joe Berlinger. When critiquing Berlinger’s work, and the celebrification of serial killers in general, one must be careful not to fall into the trap of repeating his mistakes. Seitz criticizes Berlinger’s bland recitation of public knowledge and lack of interest in Bundy’s victims, yet he recites the same knowledge that Berlinger shares in his review and makes no attempt to demonstrate what Berlinger has omitted. He names no victims, no childhood friends, no family members, no investigators who he claims were traumatized. He claims that victimized women should be present in discourse about Bundy while contributing to their erasure.