Deconstructing True Crime, Reconstructing ‘Truth’: An Analysis of Netflix’s Conversation with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes

Abstract

“Documentary films speak about actual situations or events and honour known facts; they do not introduce new, unverifiable ones. They speak directly about the historical world rather than allegorically” (Nichols, 1991, p. 28). However, a significant section of scholars has a very disapproving take on how documentaries monopolise on the idea of what is perceived as truth. Recently, documentaries about serial killers have gradually gained mainstream media attention. Much of the scholarly research in this area explores how they fetishise the figure of the killer, the ethical implications about representing forms of entertainment based on violence and debates about the creation of such media. Set against the backdrop of these widely analysed aspects of such documentaries, and departing from them, our paper analyses the processes through which truth is constructed in documentary films. The paper, therefore, focuses on the construction of such versions of the truth. This kind of exploration has other ideological implications as it aids us in deconstructing a metanarrative about such documentaries representing crime as an unfiltered non-ideological ‘truth.’ For this purpose, the paper employs an analysis of the documentary-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes available on the OTT platform of Netflix.