Ted Bundy

(2002) ****

The sociopath wakes up in the morning and steps before the mirror. "Hi, I'm Ted Bundy," he beams several times, his inflection changing with each repetition. Gradually, his speech devolves into a lewd snorfle; he smacks his lips together, his brain drifting absently over some brute fantasy. It is uncomfortable and ugly only because we know we're looking at a man who murdered at least 29 people. Otherwise, this could be the opening scene of American Beauty without the voiceover.

He knows charm, warmth, and tenderness at least well enough to mimic them. He's even got a girlfriend, Lee, who's head over heels for him. She, of course, has no idea who she's dating. I mean, she know's he's got "flaws" -- he gives her a necklace as a gift and she knows instantly that it's a stolen item, because he's stolen before. Also, she finds his lovemaking rather brutish and uncomfortable. All the same, she'd never guess that she's getting the lite version of Ted's true tendencies. And it's not just that she's unaware of how unplugged he is -- she's convinced everyone thinks he's the greatest. More than once, Lee refers to him as "the Great Ted Bundy," almost as if that's what other people are calling him too.

When his charm switch is off, he exudes an undeniable aura of wrongness. He makes eye contact with a gorgeous woman in a convenience store. Unaware of himself, he returns her smile with a hungry stare, lost in his dirty thoughts. Her attraction implodes immediately.

He's an honors student in psychology (in the film, he claims to Lee that he's flunking. I couldn't say if this is an inconsistency, or if he's lying about that too) so, unlike other serial killers, he knows exactly what he is and what he lacks. But, like everyone else reading about him in the papers after his capture, he has no explanation for why he is this way. Chatting with Bundy about the yet unsolved murders at the FSU Chi Omega house, Bundy's landlord asks what could make someone do something so terrible. Bundy replies in a rather thoughtful tone, "I don't know" -- as far as the landlord is concerned, Bundy is just another guy sharing his point of view; but Bundy isn't pretending, he's really considering the question and his response is genuine.

It's an inventive film. It's filled with double entendres like this, verbal and visual. Another of my favorites is the scene in which Bundy is chasing a female victim through the woods. She's stumbling and bleeding in her bare feet and bikini, while he's lumbering behind her with a gleeful smile on his face. Essentially, he's Leatherface, chasing down Sally Hardesty, giggling maniacally the whole way. But because Bundy is wearing a pristine tennis outfit, he could be at a country club chasing down an errant ball.

His Utah/Colorado rampage is portrayed onscreen as a montage of attacks and a graphic of a map of the two states with spatters of blood marking, one by one, the sites of his crimes. The montage includes a shot of Bundy lying in his sleeping bag in the middle of the Rockies, with the two mottled corpses he's just had sex with supine at his side. Again, this could be Y Tu Mama Tambien, but with the genders reversed and also the women are corpses.

All this reminds me of a joke by Patton Oswalt about how the worst name for a porno movie ever is Anal Graveyard -- it's a name that'll offend everybody. The anal-porn fans would come into the video store and ask, "Hey, is there anything new out?" Then after being told about Anal Graveyard, they'd reply "Ugh, they're dead?" Meanwhile, the necrophiliacs would come into the video store and ask, "Hey, is there anything new out?" Then after being told about Anal Graveyard, they'd reply "Ugh, not in the ass!"