Between May, 1978 and April, 1995, a man named Theodore John Kaczynski perpetrated a series of domestic bombings that killed three individuals and injured 23 others. His targets tended to be locations or individuals identified with airline companies and universities. This earned him the FBI identifier UNABOM or "University and Airline Bomber"; and, thus, the media supervillain alter-ego, "Unabomber."
A child prodigy when it came to mathematics and a social maladroit when it came to virtually everything else, the disillusioned Kaczynski suddenly resigned from his assistant professorship at U.C. Berkley's Department of Mathematics in the summer of 1969 at the age of 25. Within two years he was living a subsistence life out of a cabin that he and his older brother David built in the mountains of the unincorporated community of Lincoln, Montana, making ends meet by doing odd jobs, but mostly living parasitically off his family. From the physical and emotional privation of his little shack, Kaczynski would frequent Lincoln's local library as part of a rigorous process of self-education in the classical humanities, sociology, and political philosophy, trying to make sense of his own feelings of alienation and hopelessness. Heavily influenced by the works of the social philosopher Jacques Ellul and the zoologist Desmond Morris, Kaczynski developed his own philosophy amalgamating contemporary strands of radical environmentalism, anarcho-primitivism, and right-wing libertarianism. Expounding upon his ideas in a manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski became convinced that the technological foundation of modern society since the Industrial Revolution had harmed human potential, destroyed the environment, and was itself doomed to cataclysmic self-destruction. In order to mitigate the environmental and human toll of this collapse, it would be all the more imperative, in Kaczynski's view, to hasten this collapse through decentralized revolution.
Kaczynski's expression of his radical philosophy was at first contained to acts of local vandalism and sabotage against not only the industrial developments around Lincoln, but also the private cabins and resorts of its seasonal residents. According to a New York Times article by James Brooke from March 14, 1999, Kaczynski booby-trapped motorbike trails, burned logging equipment, tore up vacation homes, and killed dogs. But if the occasional angry missives to newspapers and human resources departments about government corruption and corporate unaccountability failed to grab attention, Kaczynski was convinced that more spectacular forms of violence would be necessary to make his call for direct action more credible. So, of course, he graduated from attacks on machines and dogs to attacks on educators, airline passengers, and computer store owners. Apprehended by the FBI in April, 1996, Kaczynski would end up pleading guilty to ten counts of the transportation, mailing, and use of bombs, as well as three counts of murder. He is currently serving eight consecutive life sentences in a "supermax" prison in Fremont County, Colorado.
Almost immediately after Kaczynski's capture, the Unabomber case became the stuff of dramatic reenactment, first with a quickie T.V. movie broadcast on the USA Network in September, 1996, and most recently with the first season of the Discovery Channel's true crime anthology series Manhunt. Now, we have Ted K, the latest from independent filmmaker Tony Stone, and starring Sharlto Copley as Kaczynski. Having toured the international festival circuit in the final quarter of last year, it started its limited first run this month courtesy of Super LTD and Neon.
As opposed to its T.V. predecessors, Ted K is not a true crime procedural. It is, rather, a stylish character study. The film flaunts its bonafides in shooting on location in Lincoln, Montana and pulling narration directly from Kaczynski's manifesto and letters. But, at the same time, it plays fast and loose with the particulars of the Unabomber case in order to paint a non-judgmental, sensual portrait of one man's isolation, obsession, and social phobia.
But, then, perhaps "non-judgmental" isn't quite word.
Stone made his debut as a writer and director with the extremely limited 2009 release of Severed Ways, an adventure film about Vikings in North America that he shot on a shoestring budget over several years with cinematographer and frequent collaborator Nathan Corbin and scored with anachronistic heavy metal music. After a substantial hiatus, Stone and Corbin finally returned to cinemas with Peter and the Farm, an intimate documentary about a Vermont farmer and artist who has clung to a life of rugged individualism even as he's alienated himself from his family. Stone's films consistently straddle narrative lines that are mirrored in their aesthetics, between the primitive and the modern, between the vulgar and the poetic, between the academic and the populist. They center on characters who become defined by their Sisyphean struggle against the forces of time and nature, striving not merely to survive, but through the act of survival ascending to moments of mythopoeic grandeur against a backdrop of towering trees, rolling hills, and the creep of change beyond it.
The story of Ted Kaczynski, or at least this version of Ted Kaczynski, is a perfect fit for Stone. After a decades-long manhunt, the Unabomber turned out to be nothing if not this sort of character. Stone portrays "Ted K" as a man very much of his time, but among the most extreme exemplars of it. He is viscerally offended by the noise and artifice of modernity, but when he finds it impossible to escape, decides to exploit it to his advantage. He retreats from the complacency, the pointless formalities, the sense of powerlessness of contemporary society, but then lashes out, blaming the world for his own self-imposed loneliness, betraying his latent desperation to be a part of and working towards something more than himself. Stone follows this version of Kaczynski from invisible hermit to nationwide terrorist celebrity. In the process, with all other perspectives pushed out of frame, Ted K increasingly lost in flights of fantasy that will prove his undoing, the filmmakers' intensive pursuit of this character's subjective nonetheless reveals a sympathy of values.
It is not enough to say that Ted K portrays its Kaczynski without judgment, because that is not quite true from either an affirmative or negative perspective. Co-writers Stone, Gaddy Davis, and John Rosenthal, depict their character in frank terms, as a creature consumed by a narcissism that is as pathetic as it may be compensatory or defensive. Contrasting both his intellect and fortitude against an "over-socialized" and supplicant world, he is, in reality, highly dependent on the very people whose love he abuses. With the benefit of hindsight, the filmmakers are able to soberly portray Kaczynski as both the product of a period of radical environmental consciousness, while also being otherwise entirely isolated from it, even posturing in his writing as if he represented a unified group. They also highlight their character's pathological fear of social interaction and interpersonal investment, especially with women. Rationalizing his fear through misogyny and posing as a "free man," this Kaczynski is clarified by the filmmakers as just as much, and perhaps more importantly, a product of a wave reactionary antifeminism. Here, the threat of modernity is not merely to "human potential," but specifically of an imagined "male potential," the belief is some mystical "male energy" that is being polluted and sucked dry, just as the the pure water rapids of the Great White North are darkened by natural gas contamination. This conflation of nature and masculinity, Ted K's overt sense of entitlement, and when he clarifies that he really doesn't have any hope for a positive outcome to his outbursts of stochastic violence, that he is out for personal revenge; all this renders him the clear missing link between the counter-feminist men's movements of the '60s and the involuntary celibates of today.
There is a very coherent thesis behind Ted K. In the pessimism of Industrial Society and Its Future, this Kaczynski, when he refers to the inevitable cataclysms of modernity, is, after all, only talking about himself and his spiritual antecedents as they exponentially multiply and encourage one another in their solipsistic, mystical thinking about something pure and right that is being denied them. He is describing, more often than any other clear externality of environmental destruction and collapse, the very outbursts of revenge that he will bring about.
At the same time, there is a qualified romantic attachment to Stone's film. While Kaczynski's actions, to say nothing of his very personality, are disturbing and abhorrent, the ghosts of a mythical and undiluted past, nature, and manhood that he pursued are still so sadly salient and identifiable. To call Stone's approach "non-judgmental" is therefore also imperfect to the extent that it suggests a critical distance from his subject that Stone evidently does not feel compelled to assume. It is not merely that Kaczynski's crimes and ideology are fascinating. Indeed, the former is portrayed as remote from his Walden-esque dream world as the chance of human companionship, and it isn't long before the narrations of his Industrial Society and Its Future run together in a pretentious soup. It is Kaczynski as the self-styled new primitive and intellectual barbarian that attracts Stone and occupies the center of his film. It is this life, so thoroughly and convincingly inhabited by Copley, striving to assert the "natural" and free man, only to prove himself the perfect embodiment of modernity and all its contradictions, that informs the fascinating enigma of Ted K. When Copley's character recalls his more naive fantasies of himself running around the wilds of the northwest with leopard-skin tunic and club, this is a dead-ringer for Stone himself in his youth, galavanting across epic vistas in cheap Norse costume for Severed Ways.
All the declamation of this Kaczynski's violence can do nothing to elide the fact that he remains what his real-life analogue made himself to be, which is a most horrific and compelling archetype of social alienation, sexual dysfunction, and mounting generational pessimism regarding the future of modernity, nature, and human potential. Just as the real-life Kaczynski's ramblings lent themselves to the inspiration of parties as disparate as radical-left environmentalists, anarcho-primitivists, so-called "eco-fascists," and bog-standard neocons, so too are elements of this dramatized versions' values increasingly sympathetic, and his social and psychological condition, more importantly, increasingly empathetic and identifiable. This Kaczynski is no revolutionary or hero, and the power of Stone's film comes from his provocation of the idea that it doesn't matter. The brutal reality is that it is Ted K's self-obsession, his narcissism, his deep-seeded envy and abstract desire for revenge, that is so disturbingly reflective of a widespread pathology of our own paranoia and helplessness. We may not identify as deeply, as Stone does, with Ted K's particular veneration of the mythopoeic masculine yeoman of the hinterlands. But when he rules that the modern world has doomed itself, that as human beings we are all becoming the cogs and fodder of a self-aware system in which our individual potential doesn't matter, who can say, with honesty, that they don't feel a pang of truth? And who can look at themselves in the mirror and say that, in the depths of our powerlessness, we did not escape into fantasy worlds, and semi-knowingly lash out and take our revenge on those who had nothing to do with our trauma, simply because it felt good to take revenge on someone?
In unintentional accordance with the predictions of his own manifesto, Ted K is presented by Stone not as the fully embodied free, unpolluted man that he attempts to manifest from the pit of his longing into reality. He is, rather, a self-aware machine in microcosm of the destructive modernity that he detests.
With Severed Ways, Stone had previously juxtaposed his Viking cosplay with the sounds of black metal artists like Old Man's Child, Dimmu Borgir, and, most irresponsibly, the pagan white nationalist Varg Vikernes. The Norwegian black metal that underscores his cinematic debut, at least in part, does not merely exemplify a juvenile, fantasy art version of ancient history. It echoes the very real and prevalent fetishism within certain scenes of alternative music and cult identification with a freshly mythologized past, rejecting not only modernity but also progressive values, living through its depiction of Teutonic white warriors and gods the veneration of racial and patriarchal chauvinism. With Ted K, however, Stone has notably matured. In the intervening years, or perhaps when dealing with a subject where one's shared feelings of alienation and longing cannot be so easily reconciled or sublimated as mere fantasy fun, he has grown all the more formalistically sophisticated in his juxtaposition of sound and image. Ted K may favor classical music broadcast on his local NPR station, but when he comes out of the snowy hills of Lincoln like a Yeti to assault the compound of one of its yuppie colonizers at the film's open, the wisely commissioned electronic and drone artist Benjamin John Power, under his moniker "Blanck Mass," scores this act of spontaneous revenge with precisely the anti-romantic, synthetic, machinist tones that it deserves.
The dystopian fear of machine takeover is contrasted with Ted K's own highly computational brain as he meticulously converts his diary into a numerical code on a journal of lattice note paper. And when he dons a "disguise" to slip another of his incendiaries into a P.O. box, his hair slicked back, in spick-and-span suit, we may very well recall the Agents of The Matrix as Ted pulls down a pair of shades. Diverging sharply from the iconic FBI artist sketch of the Unabomber as a hooded rogue, one perceives in this representation of Kaczynski a much more honest mask, ostensibly distorting his features but nonetheless revealing something essential and truthful about the agent of chaos inside. That he commits this fresh atrocity to the backing of Alice In Chain's mainstream rock hit "Rooster" - the montage, it must be said, just a bit too perfectly timed in its cuts to the beat - only contextualizes Ted K further as a part of a definitively modern, music video reality. This is, indeed, no hero or revolutionary, but a necessary externality and evil of modernity, a shocking and pseudo-rebellious defibrillation to the great dying system's heart. One could say that the system couldn't design a better robot servant if it tried but, then again, it more or less did. Ted K and his horde of frustrated admirers, fantasist contemporaries, and even more repulsively fascistic imitators are what modernity creates to give it reason for being. Why hope for a better world when there are so many little Ted K's out there in the world, just waiting to be pushed too far. Best to take comfort with survival-substitute activities and business as usual.
It seems like forever ago that the Todd Phillips Joker movie was released and it inspired a full-fledged media panic on its way to collecting a billion dollars at the box office. Touted as an "incel movie" that would irresponsibly romanticize a lone-wolf extremist villain, make audiences sympathize with a misogynistic and reactionary white man, or somehow normalize and promote alt-right ideology, the Joker was more or less accepted by sane people as only a hallmark in our cultural degeneracy under late stage capitalism. The point wasn't the content of the movie, or even its technical quality. One could only acknowledge that Joker was, indeed, a fairly well made film that gave expression to a very real sense of social, economic, and political crises as they had developed under modernity, and the violent externalities that they inevitably produced. At the same time, one could also only collapse forward into one's own arms and sigh, exhausted by the idea that such a film was only possible in contemporary Hollywood as long as it came stamped with the brand of a comic book publisher and its intellectual property. That the media panic, part of a para-cinematic spectacle outside of but no less a part of the film and its spectacular distraction, effectively legitimized what would otherwise be juvenile trash could not be lost on anyone. It was another clean victory of the self-aware machine, conjuring up its own existential villains to threaten and thus sustain its relevancy.
Now there finally is an independent film making the rounds that paints a portrait of a real life domestic terrorist and incel godfather that is far more overtly empathetic of its subject, and much more technically impressive, than Todd Phillips' crazy clown tragedy filtered through nostalgia for New Hollywood aesthetics. And yet there has been no media panic, as if the various moral crusaders are, it seems, less worried about the continued propagation of Ted Kaczynzki's radical philosophy than they are about literally fictional characters. There has also been very little recognition of the understated artistic excellence of Stone's film. The reactions are pretty good on balance, but there is nowhere near the same level of passion in discourse and debate, which can only betray the fact that even the cinephiles are their own worst enemies as modernity progressively pollutes our sense of culture just as it picks the bones of our environment dry. We only ever seem animated when the machine tells us it's time to be, when it's time to see a movie so that we can become a part of that highly contentious (and entertaining) para-cinematic spectacle of argument and ideological posturing. When there's legitimate art, however - even when it should ostensibly be as animating in terms of discourse as its nearest blockbuster corollary - there are suddenly so many other things we could be doing. The work itself is treated as less important, if anything, precisely because its concerns hue so much closer to the world in which we actually live, as if the closer something is to reality, the less necessary it is to examine it. We always want movies like Ted K when all we have is Joker, until we actually get Ted K, and we realize reality isn't what we want at all.
You may laugh at Ted K's fantasy of the rugged white primitive, but you cannot claim that his pathology is not abundantly similar to our own. He revels in self-aggrandizing violence and petty conflict, and so do we. We are all on extended retreat, furiously typing on our phones as we sit on the banks of the little Walden ponds of our minds.
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