ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the mass killer and the serial killer, two of the most toxic male figures. The focus of analysis are Michael Moore's Oscar-award winner Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Joe Berlinger's docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019). The chapter argues that Moore is not particularly interested in school shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, using his film mainly to endorse his own masculinity by undermining the iconic masculinity of actor Charlton Heston, associated with the boys’ crimes through his presidency of the National Rifle Association. The reading I offer of Harris and Klebold emphasizes their dissatisfaction and sense of entitlement regarding the bully society that school and, by extension, all of America is. Serial killer Ted Bundy was similarly motivated by a hyperbolic sense of his own masculinity and by a misogynistic fear of rejection, which Berlinger's docuseries fails to acknowledge. Paying little attention to the victims, Berlinger participates in the rape culture that transformed the allegedly good-looking Bundy into a criminal icon of lasting notoriety.
