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A Fictionalized Story of the Ted Bundy Murders

Author: Jessica Knoll

Bright Young Women is an ambitious attempt to tell a segmented story of trauma, misogyny, exploitation, resilience, and women fighting against a biased and broken system. While the true crime story it’s based on (the Ted Bundy murders) is interesting, Bright Young Women fails to capture the tragedy of those involved. Instead, it comes off as a caricature of what happened, an outline of complexity that fails to capture a deeper, bloodier story. It strives to do something honorable, to highlight the victims instead of the insidious, egotistical perpetrator, but instead, it once again objectifies the dead for cheap sensationalism, becoming part of the very system that it claims to hate. It also fails to be interesting or original while doing so. A fatal sentence on both parts. It’s objectification with no payoff. Bright Young Women exhumed the dead, paraded their corpses around, and failed to entertain us.

It starts in 1974 with Ruth, a young woman who flees a toxic family, falls in love with a wealthy widow, pursues her new life, and goes missing at a crowded lake. Her lover, Tina, tries to pursue justice, but is repeatedly silenced. Ruth’s family would rather the authorities say that she ran away. Anything is better than the truth of Ruth’s sexuality coming to the forefront, even if that means letting her killer go free.

Meanwhile, in the herky-jerky timeline, a conveniently rich and ruthless Tina seeks out answers and follows a blood trail to a sorority murder. Now we’re in 1978. Pamela Schumacher, the sorority president, caught a brief glimpse of the killer and mistook him for one of the girl’s on-again-off-again boyfriends. It’s a misidentification that will cost the case dearly.

Throughout Pamela and Tina’s self-styled investigation, the author tries to reveal the Defendant as the cocky sleazeball that he is, instead of the dashing, half-genius All-American, sex-killer the media created. Perhaps it’s a good intention, but the payoff isn’t here. Instead, we get into a mess. An outline with an intention, some ideas on a page, half thought out stories, and filler.

Tina and Pamela, and to some extent Ruth, are one-dimensional characters. We spend a lot of time with them, but there is very little action, and even less suspense. It is mostly fluff – a stream-of-conscious narration that allows the author to break the fourth wall and tell us what the narrative is failing to portray through good-storytelling: the Defendant is an idiot. Only his youth, his base attractiveness, his maleness, and the ineptness of a male dominated society is protecting him. But this would be more impactful as something that is shown. The Defendant himself is rarely seen, and instead we spend most of our time in Pamela’s mind on side-quests where the men in her life all prove to be untrustworthy scumbags. Her boyfriend, the journalist she befriends, the cops she encounters – all are misogynistic creeps who turn on her. It’s a slow slog through growing awareness, and along the way Tina unravels a bit of her love affair with Ruth and what she has learned over the years about The Defendant. It’s tedious, to say the least.

In the end, things speed up a tiny bit, although it is hardly organic. Pamela’s timeline accelerates. We lose a decade (or is it more?), Pamela somehow becomes a high-powered attorney, the ne’er-do-well journalist friend of her youth becomes demented and spills all and wham, we get an answer, a little excursion, a body, and some sloppy closure. It’s a tangle, with just enough of the true crime details to make anyone who has read anything about the case, such as Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, shake their heads.

The storytelling is bad. The pacing is bad. The details chosen are random and unconnected. The moments that are fictionalized are equally haphazard and seemingly illogical. The jumping timelines fracture the story instead of building on it. The victims are once again paraded for entertainment, but this time the story isn’t even told fully or well. It’s a caricature of a caricature, with a biting point at society that misses. Instead, the anger merely highlights an intention that was good but remained undelivered. This reminds me of The Girls, which tried to ride the resurgence of interest in the Manson killings, telling a hazy story about a side character who knew nothing and said nothing, but tagged along on the periphery and tried to get a bit of fame out of sort of being there. This has the same cheap feeling, the same “hey, hey, buy me!” feeling, the same sleight-of-hand, riding a moment wave that it claims to hate. Not recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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