ABSTRACT

Joe Berlinger’s docu-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) explores the violence, victims, and social context of Ted Bundy’s crimes. The documentary critiques the ‘handsome genius’ image created by the media and recognizes the power of privilege within Bundy’s story. However, website reviews suggest conflicting readings of the documentary. They reveal that some viewer responses come from a reading of the text that relies more on their ingrained responses to the genre conventions of the documentary than the nuance Berlinger builds into the straight-forward narrative. In the process, these reviews show the potentially fraught emotional capability of the documentary, particularly when content focuses on well-known cases like Bundy’s. In addition, they expose the capability of true crime documentaries to produce necessary emotional responses in order to reframe established narratives.

摘要

乔·柏林格的纪录片系列与杀手的对话：泰德邦迪磁带(2019) 探讨了泰德·邦迪犯罪的暴力、受害者和社会背景。这部纪录片批评了媒体创造的“英俊天才”形象，并承认了邦迪故事中特权的力量。然而，网站评论表明对纪录片的解读相互矛盾。他们透露，一些观众的反应来自对文本的阅读，这更多地依赖于他们对纪录片类型惯例的根深蒂固的反应，而不是伯林格在直截了当的叙述中构建的细微差别。在这个过程中，这些评论显示了纪录片潜在的令人担忧的情感能力，尤其是当内容集中在像邦迪这样的知名案例时。此外，它们揭示了真实犯罪纪录片产生必要的情绪反应以重新构建既定叙事的能力。