Yesterday I went to the cinema to watch Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. It is a biographical account of American serial killer and necrophile Ted Bundy (starring Zac Efron). There has been at least one previous representation of this story made for the screen, but this time it puts his long-time girlfriend Liz (played by Lily Collins) as a protagonist and we follow the tale as though through her empathic viewpoint which also clearly highlights his narcissistic behaviour towards her.
I’m not giving anything away by saying that Liz was at first oblivious to his crimes and later in denial of them. Manipulating her through his ‘caring ways’ as well as with his good looks, attention and even lies, Ted kept her under his spell for many long years.
Lily Collins is a superb actress as well as one who did research for this part. In fact, she even met up with the real Liz to get a first hand account of what it was like to be Ted’s girlfriend and what exactly she lived through when Ted was still alive.
The film struck a chord with me for a totally different reason to Ted’s atrocities. Rather, I saw myself in Liz, not as the partner of a conscienceless killer but as the woman in love with a man, come what may.
Liz fits the bill of a woman who experiences an unconditional love, never giving up the hope (even if this is partly instigated by Bundy himself in his phone calls) and feeling the pain throughout the multiple arrests, escapes, lawyer strategies, media coverage and ultimate trial. It takes till after Jerry softly infiltrate her life and slowly, even at his own expense, tries to put her broken parts back together, for her to start seeing outside of the veil of compassion she’d created through which to view the one big love of her life.
Some will argue she was a fool and that no grown woman in her right mind would tolerate Bundy’s insistent phonecalls and lies. Yet I am sure in her place, few would differ in their treatment of him. After all, love is really sometimes very very blind.
I am an eighties baby and one of the songs I remember most widely played in my early teens was Madonna’s Frozen. Totally unrelated to Disney’s later animated film of the same name, the song haunted me for its lyrics which, true to the singer’s style, clearly highlight human emotions.
“You only see what your eyes want to see”. Bang. Her very first line. Delivered delicately in Madonna's melodious voice to a background music that I would describe more classic than pop. We all do that don’t we? In Maltese we have a saying that translates to “You hear what you want” and well that is another facet of the same very human problem isn’t it?
Liz heard Ted’s lies and believed them because she wanted them to be true. We never question the person we truly love, simply because we want him/her to be perfect. Liz saw the desire in his eyes and never questioned why his look was so passionate till years later, when she could finally let her mind see him in a new light for what he really was. My guess is that even then, after she had unravelled and broken all the cobwebs he had slowly spun around her lucid mind and soft heart, she still loved him and wanted reality to be very different.
Liz’s case was among the most disturbing situations any person could find themselves in. Yet in our own way, in our maybe simpler and/or less dangerous life, we all see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear. That is why it is very important to use perception to always make the best out of a situation but also preferably, to try to attune to what is truly there. For only when we remove the fog and view pain, lies and deceit for what they are and take a stand to move away from them, do we start truly loving ourselves and becoming a better person with a better life.