With No Man of God’s premiere at Tribeca Film Festival, studying the Ted Bundy ingrained in our pop culture consciousness-Art-and-culture News , Firstpost

Grab some fava beans. Pop open a nice Chianti. We’re having an old friend for dinner. Not Hannibal Lecter. There’s a new addition to the Ted Bundy canon. Amber Sealey’s No Man of God, which had its world premiere at Tribeca Festival 2021, is like a Mindhunter special to make up for the third season that may never be. The talky chamber play is built around a stretched-out conversation between the stonewalling serial killer (played by Luke Kirby) and the FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood), keen on studying what makes him tick, and thus feeding him the attention he craves.

Three decades after Bundy fried in the electric chair, there’s still no stopping our macabre obsession with him. What Bundy is enjoying is not a moment, but an immortality. In just the last two years, we’ve had the story of Bundy’s relationship with former girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer told as a Catch Me If You Can-toned feature (Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile on Netflix), and a five-part documentary series (Falling for a Killer on Amazon Prime Video). Joe Berlinger in fact doubled up on his Bundy-as-antihero drama with a Netflix docuseries in 2019. Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes was based on 100+ hours of audiotapes recorded by journalist Stephen Michaud, who had interviewed the killer for his book. The streaming services have thus created a feedback loop, where true crime lovers’ desire for more Bundy content has fuelled the algorithmic engine to make more.

Canon has led us to believe that serial killers are all diabolical geniuses, whose pathologies require nothing less than constant, single-minded scrutiny to better understand them. It’s the whole damn plot of Mindhunter. No Man of God, which is adapted from the transcripts of Hagmaier’s conversations with Bundy in the final years before his execution, too hopes to unlock his psychology. The film doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. Hidden in his account of an idyllic childhood and later crime sprees are both truth and lies. Bundy is initially reluctant to talk about the murders with Hagmaier. We see this even in Conversations with a Killer, where he goes from taciturn to chatty on Michaud’s suggestion he talk about them in the third person. And as the hours of tapes reveal, you couldn’t shut him up once he launched into the details, privately proud of his crimes.

If Wood alternately appears calm and agitated, Kirby goes from scheming to desperate, as Bundy gets ever-so-close to his execution. Kirby reveals a man far less sure of himself than Zac Efron’s titillating egotist in Extremely Wicked. What we see is a man desperate to postpone death through whatever means necessary: confessing while leaving out key details, blaming his crime on pornography in a TV interview to gain the favour of an evangelist, and even pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. In these desperate moments, gone are Bundy’s charming demeanour and smooth-talking. A man who once got off on gaining power over his victims is rendered powerless.

In this fitting set-up for a battle of emotions and wits, Bundy insists his innocence, while Hagmaier urges him to confess his guilt to bring some closure to the victims’ families. In a movie about two men discussing murder, Sealey ensures the women still hold a forceful presence even if they say little and mostly exist in the periphery. When Bundy is describing his crimes to evangelical psychologist James Dobson, who is really using the interview to drive his crusade against pornography, the camera makes a detour past Bundy, zooming in on the disquieted gaze of a young female PA struggling to hold back her fear. The same expression is branded on the face of a woman who overhears Hagmaier listening to a Bundy tape at a traffic stop. It also haunts Carolyn Lieberman (Aleksa Palladino), Bundy’s appeals lawyer presumably based on real-life attorney Polly Nelson.

“It was really important to me that if we were going to make another Bundy movie that we made one that stood out from the crowd, that had its own voice and wasn’t just playing up to the interests that culturally we have in Bundy. I was like: look, it’s really important that this be a film for art’s sake as well, and say something larger about our cultural obsession with serial killers—and give a voice to the victims in a way that hasn’t been done before,” said Sealey in an interview. “I thought, well how can we sort of speak for them? How can we show what it’s like for that young woman in the scene where Bundy is being interviewed by Dobson. That woman, she probably was in college and was afraid of him. She was probably afraid of being murdered by him, just a couple of years previously, and here she is sitting in a room with him, having to listen to him talk and watching him get all this attention. I just thought: what must that be like for her?”

Key to the Bundy mythology has always been his disarming good looks, and how he used them as a disguise. In Conversations with a Killer, Bundy himself described how monsters don’t always wear scary faces: “People don’t realise that murderers do not come out in the dark with long teeth and saliva dripping off their chin.” Besides Kirby in No Man of God, he’s been portrayed by many a Hollywood heartthrob: Mark Harmon in The Deliberate Stranger, Cary Elwes in The Riverman and more recently Zac Efron in Extremely Wicked. Bundy will soon be played by One Tree Hill star Chad Michael Murray in the upcoming American Boogeyman. Effron’s striking resemblance to Bundy may have been a casting triumph, but it turned Bundy into an object of fascination for a whole new generation. Those who grew up seeing the actor on Disney’s High School Musical got to bear witness to a shocking slice of history in a more presentable form. Things got a little disturbing when viewers began to fawn over Bundy so much so that Netflix had to remind its subscribers there were “literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service”, who had not confessed to viciously killing over 30 women.

Even when he was alive, Bundy attracted a whole flock of groupies who often showed up at his trial. He even went on to marry one of them: Carole Ann Boone, with whom he had a daughter named Rose. Charles Manson, another true crime A-lister and subject of undying Hollywood fascination, built a whole commune of them, who similarly appeared at his trial. A groupie interviewed on TV in Extremely Wicked best described this strange attraction. “Every night, when I go home, I get very scared and shut the door and lock it. But, you know, he’s also really dreamy.” Another girl adds, “I’m not afraid of him. He just doesn’t seem like the type to kill somebody.”

In The Love of a Bad Man, author Laura Elizabeth Woollett wrote 12 short stories which imagined the inner lives of real-life women attracted to such terrible men. Their pathology is a form of paraphilia, a sexual perversion linked to the violent acts committed by the objects of their obsession. Forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland suggested how some of these women, whose self-worth is often determined by the men they’re involved with, are also playing to society’s ascribed role of women as nurturers. Others have a saviour complex, believing they can still motivate these men to change their evil ways. They don’t love these men, but the idea of who they could become in their influence.

Media-genicity also adds to the attraction. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, the press played up the persuasiveness of his charm, instead of the brutality of his crimes. Adding to his legend were books written by everyone who knew him or interviewed him: co-workers (Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me), ex-girlfriends (Elizabeth Kendall’s The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy), lawyers (Polly Nelson’s Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer) and journalists (Stephen Michaud’s Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer).

In the Extremely Wicked trailer, when Efron takes his shirt off and winks at the camera while rock-and-roll booms in the background, you might mistake the movie for a Magic Mike sequel. The Ted Bundy thirst also played into the success of You, where Penn Badgley plays Joe Goldberg, a sociopath armed with the same endearing qualities as Bundy. Hell, he even bears some physical likeness to Bundy. Giving characters like Joe and Dexter the antihero treatment feeds into the pop culture narrative that these white serial killers are nothing but impenetrable men simply embracing their “dark passengers”. Not that Bundy and his fictional counterparts do what they do because society is too enamoured by their charm to see them for the monsters they are. Mindful of this societal tendency, the killers feed their monsters and their delusions of grandeur. It’s another feedback loop really.

Elijah Wood in a still from No Man of God.

Shocked by viewers thirsting for Joe, Badgley had to set the record straight, reminding them not to romanticise his character. “Joe is not that far from some of the characters we love to see as art and dissect ad nauseam, who we’ve found in Jack Kerouac or JD Salinger’s work. But this was before we were having the kind of more nuanced conversations around race and gender that we are now,” he said. “If anyone other than a young white man were to behave like these characters behave, nobody’s having it.”

Refinery 29 writer Ashley Alese Edwards rightly called the Ted Bundy ingrained in our pop culture consciousness “a myth“, writing, “What Bundy [had] was the power of being a white man in a society that reveres them and has implicit faith in their abilities. This privilege gave Bundy the ability to make even the most heinous of crimes take second place to his personality.” Though No Man of God avoids it, nearly every other Bundy film frames his smug face against the yearbook photos of his victims, or the crime scene photos of the terror he unleashed upon them. Memorialising Bundy has come at the expense of the victims whose ambitions and lives will forever remain unrealised because he stole their futures. While Bundy enjoys a legacy beyond the mugshot, the victims have been rendered an afterthought. Bundy would no doubt be thrilled to know his infamy continues to live on, and how being portrayed by Hollywood’s handsome hunks has made him a household name. And that is a terrifying thought.

No Man of God had its world premiere at Tribeca Festival 2021. It was part of the festival’s Spotlight Narrative section.