Ted Bundy just won’t quit. Or at least our cultural obsession with him won’t, long after he was executed in Florida by electric chair just over thirty years ago. Netflix’s Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, released in January, has reignited interest in Bundy once again and introduced him to a new generation of American viewers at a time when everything true crime is exploding with popularity. And with Netflix’s debut of its biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, starring Zac Efron as Bundy, his popularity shows no sign of waning anytime soon, even though many critics have rightly pointed out – and have been rightly pointing out for years — the disturbing, pernicious nature of romanticizing this vicious killer of women.
Bundy is famous for his brutal rape, mutilation, and murder of what is suspected to be north of thirty women across several states between 1974 and 1978. He is also famous for his supposed good looks, charming personality, intelligence, and charisma — his all-American, boy scout persona. His lurid crimes shocked the nation because, as the media determined and Ted enthusiastically reinforced, he appeared so affable, so unassuming, so “well-spoken,” so “normal.”
In other words, Ted Bundy is famous for being white.
In order to understand the cultural juggernaut that is Theodore Robert Bundy, I’m convinced we must reckon with this country’s uniquely ugly history of white supremacy. Bundy’s “fame” is only comprehensible within the racialized frameworks that have long dictated how we perceive masculinity and criminality in the United States. What I mean by this is that the cultural construction of Bundy’s whiteness only makes sense if we consider how white supremacy has built up whiteness as a foil to blackness.
The truth is Bundy is far from exceptional. In fact, he is exceptionally mundane. The vast majority of legal and extralegal violence in this country has been perpetrated by white people, specifically white men. The vast majority of serial killers have been white men, and though there are some exceptions, white men have received the lion’s share of media attention. The vast majority of mass shooters are and have been white men. They have mostly been seemingly normal, if “normal” has actually meant “white.”