Duplicity and the Depraved Uncanny in Mediations of Ted Bundy

Abstract

This article attends to the role of duplicity in managing serial killer Ted Bundy’s uncanniness. Texts such as Joe Berlinger’s Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile (2019) discuss acts of gendered violence that, though they differ in degree, are homologous to more quotidian performances of White masculinity. In so doing, they produce encounters with the depraved uncanny, or the affective intensities emanating from encounters with morally bankrupt or wicked acts that are formally homologous to quotidian performatives. Such texts also characterize Bundy as a duplicitous figure who masqueraded as a gentleman to conceal his true sadistic character. I argue that in fashioning “two Teds,” such texts absolve other performances of White masculinity and therefore mitigate the necessity of confronting the repressed yearnings for gendered possession to which Bundy gives expression.

Keywords:

• Ted Bundy
• depravity
• duplicity
• gendered violence
• masculinity
• serial killers
• uncanny
• whiteness

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Bernadette Marie Calafell, Ashley Noel Mack, editor Claire Sisco King, and the two anonymous reviewers for their indispensable feedback. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the 2019 National Communication Association Convention in Baltimore, MD.

Notes

1 Such aspects of the Bundy story are embellishments. He in fact botched his defense in many crucial respects during his trials for the Chi Omega and Kimberly Leach murders (Nelson). Furthermore, while Bundy frequently weaponized charm and sympathy to kidnap White young women and girls, he was an awkward man who struggled to sustain romantic relationships with women, thrive in law school, and maintain financial independence (see Rule). But the mythology of “Bundy the Genius” persists and finds expression in the vast majority of public texts regarding his case.

2 I understand a public in this article as an assemblage of bodies that exists as a public “by virtue of being addressed” (Warner 50). Thus, when I refer to publics, I am less interested in an empirical viewing public than in the publics texts such as Conversations constitute through the act of address (also see Lundberg).

3 Several scholars I cite regarding serial killing and its relationship to misogyny wrote in the context of the so-called feminist sex wars, in which figures such as Andrea Dworkin claimed pornography was an expression of a drive to violently possess women. While sex-positive feminists and queer scholars have amply demonstrated the severe limitations of the essentialist categories in which these authors trade (see Duggan and Hunter), their critiques also invite an appraisal of such scholarship that considers the logics of masculinity, specifically White masculinity, as performative and therefore not tethered to specific kinds of sexed bodies (see Mardorossian). The object of White masculine possession need not have a vagina any more than the sadist need wield a penis as a tool of domination. Rather, as numerous women of color and decolonial feminists tell us, the logic of violent gendered possession at the heart of White Western modernity is pervasive and manifests in myriad ways (see Hartman).

4 Kloepfer published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall.

5 Two notable texts that center White women’s voices when taking stock in Bundy are Kendall’s The Phantom Prince and the Amazon series Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer (Edwards).

6 An expression of White masculinity from which Kimmel is not immune (Flaherty).