Kaczynski origin story fumbles its radical truth
I’ve followed the story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, since I bought the first printing of his political manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, when Jolly Roger Press published one of the first bound editions on Jan. 1, 1995. Most will know Kaczynski as a mathematician and domestic terrorist who killed three and injured 23 in a mail-bombing campaign lasting from 1978 to 1995. He infamously lived in a tiny shack in rural Montana, where he formulated his anti-technological worldview and wired the bombs he mailed to individuals he targeted as anti-nature technologists. Behind his blank stare and overgrown beard, Kaczynski was a mathematics prodigy who attended Harvard at 16. He tried out for a debate club as a freshman but soon found himself subjected to cruel psychological experimentation with shadowy ties to the military industrial complex. That’s the part of the Unabomber story that reminds us Kaczynski was another kind of victim before he became a monster in the woods.
Director Janus Metz (Borg vs McEnroe, All the Old Knives) and screenwriters Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves deliver a biographical thriller that focuses on how Ted Kaczynski became the Unabomber and also tells the story of the investigation that led to his capture. Unabomber essentially flips the script of the excellent Manhunt: Unabomber limited series (2017), which focused on the procedural details of the investigation while also highlighting Kaczynski’s disturbing experiences at Harvard.
The film follows Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) from his teenage years through his transformation from Harvard prodigy into elusive domestic terrorist. At Harvard, Kaczynski experiences brutal psychological experiments run by Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe). Crowe is masterful as the charismatic but manipulative researcher systematically breaking down his young subjects’ identities and beliefs. Tremblay is also great, playing arrogant, immature, brilliant and insecure line by line just like an awkward genius adolescent. Shailene Woodley plays Joanne Miller, a fictional composite FBI investigator representing the nearly two-decade investigation into the bombings.
This is the broken part of the film. Jim Fitzgerald is the name of the brilliant agent who pioneered forensic linguistics and successfully profiled Kaczynski based on his letters and manifesto, the fascinating portrait at the heart of Manhunt: Unabomber. The creation of Joanne Miller and the near-total absence of forensic linguistics details is meant to streamline the investigation side of this tale and focus on the origin story. It’s a good instinct, but not strong enough. The filmmakers give such short shrift to the investigation that the film would’ve been better off abandoning it entirely and delivering a straight portrait of young Ted at Harvard.
The experiments were real, and Kaczynski later cited them as pivotal to his radicalization. There’s considerable circumstantial evidence Kaczynski had been part of the MK-Ultra mind control program. Murray had worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor to today’s Central Intelligence Agency, during the war, developing personality tests for intelligence services and publishing an early criminal profile of Adolf Hitler. He also developed a test to see how well agents held up under interrogation, strapping subjects to a chair, shining a light in their face and demeaning them with personal attacks. This is exactly what he did to a 16-year-old Kaczynski.
Unabomber’s storytelling fails on a structural level, but the 100-minute film doesn’t shy away from framing Kaczynski’s tale as a radicalization narrative about a young man made by institutions before he declared war on them. That’s the part of the story most people don’t know.
Unabomber is streaming on Netflix.
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.