What’s up Wisecrack, Jared again.
Convicted serial killer Ted Bundy is HOT right now.
And, uh, if you find that sentence as weird as I do, then stick around.
Thanks to the recent Netflix documentary series and the clumsily titled Netflix movie 'Extremely
Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile' by the same director, suddenly everyone’s talking 'bout
Bundy.
And not just in a 'wow, what an awful person' way, but in a 'that Ted Bundy was Hot' kinda
way.
So hot, in fact, the actor cast to portray him was two-time MTV 'Best Shirtless Performance'
award winner, Zac Efron.
After watching the film though we were left wondering exactly what the movie was trying
to say.
That’s because it makes a weird omission for a film about a serial killer: actual murder.
It makes a strong stylistic choice to deprive the audience of any scenes that show him murdering
his victims until its final moments.
For most of its runtime, it seems like the film is asking us to make up our own mind
about a dude CONVICTED of murdering a bunch of people.
Also, there was some necrophilia.
And with the casting of the undeniably handsome Efron, it feels like the film is trying to
make some sort of statement about appearances and what they hide.
This all seems kinda weird, right?
A movie about a serial killer that spends the vast majority of its running time not
on the murder stuff but building an image of a charming guy defending his innocence?
What is the movie actually saying about Bundy, or serial killers?
Is it about the nature of evil?
Is it saying anything at all?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly… whatever.
The Zac Efron Ted Bundy Movie.
And spoiler: Ted Bundy did it.
Alright guys, first, a
quick recap: Smokin' hot Law student Theodore Bundy meets secretary Liz Kendall at a bar
where they hit it off and start dating.
Not long after, handsome Ted gets arrested as a suspect in the murders of multiple young
women from the Seattle area.
Despite being initially released, and insisting to Liz he is innocent, Ted and his ripped
abs are soon arrested again and put in jail to await trial.
But he escapes!
Only to get caught a week later and sent back to prison, still protesting his innocence.
He escapes AGAIN but this time makes it all the way to Florida where - suspiciously enough
- more women get assaulted and murdered.
He’s put back in jail, yet again, but this time he finally makes it to trial.
Somehow he manages to find time to get a woman pregnant, and marry her in court
“will you marry me” “your honor” “yes” and then get found guilty and sentenced to
the electric chair.
Throughout this whole story Ted's partner Liz clings to the hope that he was innocent,
despite being the one who initially phoned him in to the police.
“Ted.
Ted Bundy.”
The movie ends with Liz demanding to know the truth from sweet Teddy Boy, who writes
'Hacksaw' on the prison glass and that counts as an admission I guess, prompting a flashback
to one of his many murders.
We then see some of the real life news footage of scenes depicted in the movie over the credits.
The End.
Even just from that brief summary, you kinda get the feel for how much the movie leaves
out and how much it enjoys having Efron as a lead.
Throughout the film we are forced to pay attention to how Bundy looks and how handsome he is,
and not necessarily what the character has or hasn't done.
Purely from the fact Teen Choice 'Male Hottie' award winner Zac Efron portrays Bundy, you
know we are being encouraged to buy into Bundy's attractiveness.
Even beyond the casting, the movie pushes the idea of 'Hot Bundy' with the way the movie
sees the character.
Some of the first shots of the film are women gazing coyly and seductively at the camera
from Bundy's point of view.
When he escapes for the first time, he stops regularly along the street to wink and smile
at women who all reciprocate.
Several women are seen being interviewed who say how cute he is and immediately conflate
that with how he must be innocent.
“I’m not afraid of him.
He just doesn’t seem like the type to kill somebody.”
And, well... wouldn't you?!
I mean, come on!
Look at that smile!
Even the way Efron is filmed makes you desire the Character of Bundy.
We see Efron both semi-nude and butt naked as well as multiple sex scenes either repeatedly
flashed back to or lingered on in the moment.
What we're saying is: This movie wants to bang Zac Efron and it wants you to as well,
which I believe is known as “laying a thirst trap”.
If we're being generous this could be what's smart about the film.
Even Bundy’s judge said how sad it was that such a bright young man was going to the electric
chair “It's a tragedy to look forth and see such a total waste, I believe, of humanity
that I've witnessed in this court.
You're a bright young man.”
The reason we even know that fact is because his was one of the first televised court cases,
mostly because Bundy was so unassuming and handsome.
The movie could be trying to depict him as a central figure in the move toward docu-drama
style news reporting that we’re so familiar with today.
Whether it’s the OJ Simpson’s trial, or the Serial Podcast, Bundy’s attractiveness
can be seen as patient zero for this move toward sensationalism in media.
If we're to understand this reaction to Bundy, we need to see him as handsome and who better
to accomplish that than High School Musical Heartthrob Zac Efron?
Well, maybe, but to understand why his casting and the way he's shot makes us uncomfortable,
we need to dip into some philosophy- specifically, the philosophy of aesthetics.
Aesthetics is a pretty broad term but it can be briefly summarized as the philosophy of
art.
The word gets its modern usage from Alexander Baumgarten who’s text ‘Aesthetica’,
a word which had - until then - meant “Sensation”, redefined it to mean a study of “good”
and “bad” taste regarding art and beauty.
Typical of Enlightenment thinking, Baumgarten was trying to apply principles of logic and
reason to subjective choices.
Today the study of aesthetics has branched out to almost everything beyond art, to the
point where my haircut and t-shirts are aesthetic choices.
It’s all about subjective things like beauty, taste and appearances.
In film, aesthetics can not only be about it’s appearance in the traditional sense,
but the variety of choices that we might call artistic: Think framing, points of view, editing,
costumes, the music, or how this all congeals into a mood.
Aesthetics is a big part of the Bundy story because they both deal with the subjective
appraisal of certain things, especially things we think of as being 'Beautiful'.
Beyond casting a sex-icon as Bundy, the film makes a series of aesthetic choices to play
up his appeal.
It's well shot with naturalistic lighting, uses traditionally attractive framing, and
makes use of sympathetic film grain.
That is to say, it’s not grungy like Saw, but visually appealing.
The production and costume design is certainly period correct, but the characters, especially
Bundy, are wearing expensive and fashionable clothes not just for the time but for today
too.
Love that sweater, Zac.
Combine that with the retrofilm stock moments, like the 8mm 'home-movie' footageand the whole
thing has the appearance of an extended Instagram post.
But deeper than that, the almost total lack of violence in the movie feels like an Aesthetic
choice too.
Some of Bundy's murders are described in court “Strangled with a pantyhose garrote so tight
that her neck was constricted to half its size.”but we don't see much more than the
occasional photograph of bloodstains.
Other than the last five minutes, Bundy is not shown harming anyone, and when he is,
the effectiveness of the scene is driven by the sound design of that hacksaw, not the
visuals Extremely Wicked is aesthetically driven,
just like – the movie would argue – the trial and legacy of Bundy is itself.
Except there's that Goethe quote at the start: “Few people have the imagination for reality.”
This quote implies the horrors the real life Bundy enacted should not, or cannot, be imagined.
Yet by removing them almost entirely, is the movie asking us to imagine them?
This is what people were forced to do with the real Bundy at the time, so the film-makers
make the aesthetic choice to keep his violence largely hidden.
If it’s not asking us to imagine his crimes, then should we just forget them?
If the movie withholds a sense of disgust and we come away from it thinking Ted Bundy
was more sexy than horrific, is that okay?
What responsibility do filmmakers have to convince us that bad people are bad?
This discussion on the ‘Aesthetic of Evil’ and the intersection of aesthetics and ethics
is something society has struggled with throughout history.
From the Devil in Milton's Paradise Lost, to Nazis wearing Hugo Boss, this idea of bad
things being beautiful has always troubled us, so how do we best represent that in art?
For example, consider the movie American Psycho.
Our protagonist, or the guy we’re supposed to relate to, is a serial killer.
We actually kind of like Patrick Bateman and want him to get what he wants.
But the film, under the watchful eye of director Mary Harron, and with a masterful performance
by Christian Bale, is able to achieve a tone in which we’re convinced that we’re not
supposed to take Patrick Bateman entirely seriously.
This is the “aesthetic” of the film.
So just because the hero of the movie is a serial killer, the movie doesn't celebrate
serial killing.
If it did, it would probably be a bad movie that we would all hate.
This would be us making an ethical judgment in response to the aesthetic choice.
This interplay between aesthetics and ethics has been explored endlessly by philosophers
like Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Ranciere - just to name a few.
But to figure out how to evaluate Efron’s Bundy, we’re turning to theorist Mary Devereaux.
In her essay 'Beauty and Evil', she analyses Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous Nazi propaganda
film Triumph of the Will and explains that it used a lot of innovative techniques for
what was meant to be a documentary.
Riefenstahl used dynamic camera movements, only seen in fiction movies of that era, by
training camera operators to shoot while wearing roller-skates.
She dressed her crew in uniforms to hide them amongst the crowds and shot over 60 hours
of footage that was edited together in dynamic ways.
As Devereaux puts it “Riefenstahl's concerns were aesthetic” which meant the end result
for the film is “A beautiful vision of Hitler and New Germany that is morally repugnant”
- Devereaux.
If the film is beautifully made but with a terrible message it should be possible to
separate those two factors.
Devereaux defines this distinction between the aesthetic appraisal of a work of art from
a moral one as 'Aesthetic Formalism', acknowledging that these two considerations may pull in
different directions and should therefore be judged distinctly.
Or as she memorably puts it “[You can admire] the beauty of a fog at sea, despite its danger.”
Except, Devereaux argues, that isn't, in fact, possible.
Because admiring that fog will get you killed.
A lot of Triumph of the Will's aesthetic principles are tied to its content.
Until her death, Riefenstahl insisted the film was NOT propaganda, it was a documentary.
But we can't ignore that her creative choices were overwhelmingly driven by a desire to
make Hitler and the Nazis look appealing.
Whether that's with interviews of people who solely express positive views about Hitler.
admiring shots of the goose-stepping soldiers or just the fact it was shot specifically
at a huge, grandiose, pro-Nazi rally with hundreds of thousands of attendees, this is
a movie about how popular the Nazis were.
Devereaux explains that, ever since Plato made the connection, society has always equated
Beauty with Goodness, an idea that has long been associated with the study of aesthetics.
But it is only in the relatively recent past that we have moved away from this idea, largely
because of fascist groups like the Nazis who demanded racial purity and the resurrection
of classical architecture.
The aesthetic of the modernist movement after World War II resulted in very not-beautiful
things like Brutalist architecture and bold, abstract graphic design to try and reconcile
the ugliness of a post-war world against the Nazis desire for purity and beauty.
“Beauty is no longer central to art” as Devereaux puts it, but art can certainly render
evil beautiful.
Because of that she says the best way to engage with something like Triumph of the Will is
not to separate its aesthetic principles from its moral ones but to “Engage with its vision.”
The 'vision' she refers to is what purpose the work of art has and how it is presented.
In film this means the story, themes AND aesthetic should be critically read as a whole.
By this standard Riefenstahl's film is NOT a good work of art, not in spite of its aesthetic
choices but BECAUSE of them.
It is a film specifically designed to make the Nazis, and the awfulness that went with
them, appealing.
Per Devereaux “There is a reason to withhold the highest aesthetic praise from works that
present as beautiful, attractive and good, what is, in fact, evil” - Devereaux.
So if we want to understand how something evil can be represented as beautiful and vice
versa, it's worth considering what the 'vision' for Extremely Wicked is.
We're going to do that by comparing it to another Ted Bundy biopic - there's a ton of
them by the way, we just picked one out of the hat – the aptly titled Ted Bundy from
2002.
This movie is a much lower budget, much more graphic, retelling of the Bundy story and
his crimes.
It covers the same sort of time frame as the Efron movie but goes all in on depicting many
of Bundy's rapes and murders, and unlike Extremely Wicked it's entirely disinterested with his
appearance.
A scene at the beginning where Bundy looks into the mirror and rehearses his greeting
“Hi there...
Hi there, my name's Ted, nice to meet you” makes the point to the audience that his charm
and attractiveness is false and he has to practice it.
He is seen as charismatic by some characters but we also see him rubbing one out in a bush
which kinda takes the sheen off him.
Beyond simply not wanting to make the character attractive to the audience, this film's entire
aesthetic is completely different than the Efron movie.
Its budget means the picture quality and cinematography is nowhere near as crisp as Extremely Wicked,
the period details and costumes are paid lip service but aren't as in depth, the violence
is visceral and lingered on, and, unlike Efron's depiction, at the end we see Bundy humiliated
in prison and die on-screen in a graphic way.
This low-budget, video-nasty aesthetic seems more interested in showing us the horror of
what Ted Bundy did and who he really was.
As such the 'visions' for the two films, despite telling the same story, couldn't be more different.
Extremely Wicked wants to tell Ted Bundy's story but maintain an appealing aesthetic
in much the same way as the real Bundy did.
The problem with this 'vision' for the movie, i.e. the way its aesthetic works with its
story and themes, is that it's more interested in how it presents itself than in telling
you the REAL story of Ted Bundy.
By focusing on the perspective of Liz Kendall’s character and what she knows about Bundy,
we spend most of the time just as confused as her as to how we should feel about him.
It’s also really uneven, in that it doesn’t actually spend that much time with Kendall
through the movie.
We see the personal effect of the trial on her, and her romance with the kid from Sixth
Sense, but we spend far more time with Bundy.
If they were trying to tell the movie from the perspective of someone other than Bundy,
it makes sense that we wouldn’t have seen his crimes.
Except that isn’t the story being told.
The majority is told from Bundy’s perspective and Kendall’s so why DON’T we see his
murders?
The movie tries to juggle these two perspectives but doesn’t fully commit to either and as
a result tells the story of a sexy MAN less than a sexy serial killer.
If the movie only wanted to give us a vision of Ted Bundy as a pop figure, it did a great
job, but if people come away from the movie seeing him as more of a sex symbol than a
mass murderer, is that okay?
The 2002 Ted Bundy movie’s intent, on the other hand, is to show a repugnant man for
what he was, and it certainly does accomplish that, but importantly, that doesn’t necessarily
make it a good movie.The movie is bad for...
Other reasons.
In the end both movies fail but it's Extremely Wicked that suffers in the most awkward, creepy
way.
Given the publicity surrounding its release and the headline-friendly casting of Zac Efron,
expectations were high and while we can see what it was going for, its preoccupation with
its own aesthetics leaves the viewer wondering “what was the point of that?”
What people think of as 'Beauty' comes with its own set of standards like clean, straight
lines, symmetry and a lack of blemishes, but all these things require hiding or removing
something deemed unattractive.
The real Ted Bundy knew this and used it to horrific effect by presenting himself as appealing
and hiding the worst parts of him.
Netflix's movie does exactly the same thing.
But what do you think Wisecrack?
Is Efron’s Bundy worthy of another Teen Choice award or should one of the most prolific
serial killers in American history be depicted as ugly as he really was?
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