Netflix’s film “Unabomber” arrived last Friday, and by the weekend it was the most-watched movie on the platform — despite reviews calling it “dangerously simplistic” (IndieWire) and “another box checked on Netflix’s long, long list of true crime content” (Decider). Mixed is putting it kindly.
I watched this streaming content through a unique lens because I have a vantage point on this story almost no one else does: I grew up next door to Ted Kaczynski. For 16 years, the Unabomber was my neighbor in Lincoln, Montana. Which is why you’ll notice I don’t call this a “true-crime thriller.”
The violence I uncovered in our shared backyard was harrowing: the strychnine fed to my beloved jet-black dog, Wiley, a threat against my little sister’s life when she was still a toddler, and evidence that Ted had built and tested bombs in the very woods where I’d ridden horseback and built childhood forts.
Ted wasn’t always the wild-eyed figure the FBI dragged out of a 10×12 cabin in the woods. He was a son, a brother, a student, a professor — the perpetrator of one of the longest domestic terrorism campaigns in American history was once a baby in his mother’s arms, a boy idolized by his younger brother, David. When Ted and David bought 1.4 acres from my grandfather in 1971, Ted still looked like the buttoned-up Berkeley professor, not a disheveled hermit with a taste for murder.
“Teddy,” as our family called him in those early years, didn’t just live alongside us. In the ’80s — before a text message counted as a greeting — he shared meals and dinner conversation with our family. He held me in his arms when I was a baby, brought me gifts as a child, played cards with my parents, and even worked for my family. Ted didn’t present as a monster. He presented as an eccentric neighbor who’d chosen a peaceful, off-grid lifestyle.
(Illustration by Salon / Images courtesy of Jamie Gehring) A young Jamie Gehring, left, in the early 1980s in the cabin where her family shared meals with Ted Kaczynski. Right, her sister, Tessa, with the family dog, which Gehring says Kaczynski poisoned.
I only began to grasp the full extent of his violence while writing my book, “Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber.” For five years, my evenings were spent trying to crawl inside not only a killer’s mind, but the mind of the man next door who spoke to me in the gentle voice in which people reserve for children. I interviewed people who knew him and people who hunted him, reading thousands of pages of his journals, and corresponding with Ted himself at ADX Florence — the federal supermax known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
The violence I uncovered in our shared backyard was harrowing: the strychnine fed to my beloved jet-black dog, Wiley, a threat against my little sister’s life when she was still a toddler, and evidence that Ted had built and tested bombs in the very woods where I’d ridden horseback and built childhood forts, under the ponderosa pines.
But here’s what complicates the monster story, and what Hollywood has failed to illustrate in this movie: I also found a young man failed by nearly every system around him. A baby separated from his mother during a critical window of his development. A child so advanced in school he couldn’t relate to his peers. A teenager shipped off to Harvard at 16.
It’s that Harvard chapter where the Netflix film plants its flag. And look — the Murray experiments make for good cinema. Jacob Tremblay’s young Ted sits under bright lights, electrodes on his chest, while Russell Crowe’s Henry Murray takes him apart. The film wants this to be the moment. The scene where the monster gets made. A monster that discovers he cannot be “broken.”
Here’s what complicates the monster story, and what Hollywood has failed to illustrate in this movie: I also found a young man failed by nearly every system around him.
Some of it is true. His code name was Lawful, and Ted did want to prove that he couldn’t be defeated. There was a camera rolling, electrodes measuring heart and respiratory rates. The experiments were designed to break down a subject’s ideals and measure the stress response. They were unethical and cruel — especially for a 16-year-old who placed such importance on identity and intellect.
But the film mistakes a chapter for the whole story, and a dramatization for the record. If this is your first encounter with Kaczynski, the movie hands you a clean origin story and calls it a day. The experiments were not the single catalyst that turned a teenager into a man who would kill three people and injure 23 others. Were they part of the imperfect storm? In my opinion, yes. But an origin story is what Hollywood needs. The story is deeper, more complicated, and far from clean-cut black and white. There are so many interesting facets of this story, and I wish that the film would have taken the time and the care to tell them.
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Ted isn’t here to give his take on the reenactment, but I can tell you what he said about the experiments themselves. In a letter Ted wrote in response to a pen pal who was concerned about what the man went through with the Harvard study, he said: “The truth is that in the course of the Murray study there was one and only one unpleasant experience. It lasted about half an hour and could not have been described as ‘torture’ even in the loosest sense of the word. Mostly the Murray study consisted of interviews and the filling out of pencil-and-paper personality tests. The CIA was not involved. . .”
(Illustration by Salon / Images courtesy of Jamie Gehring) A young Ted Kaczynski stands outside his cabin near Lincoln, Montana, left. Interior photos taken after his 1996 arrest.
I believe I know which half hour he meant. Buried in a transcript of one session, I found the interrogator attacking the young man’s philosophy, then pivoting — with a cruelty so casual it’s almost worse — to his appearance: “. . .don’t interrupt me, please. On this avoiding of society or of society is a bad thing, is that why you’re trying to grow that beard?” Ted: “. . .I mean, really, this isn’t really a beard yet.” The interrogator: “. . .you’re darn right it’s not.”
It was cold. It was damaging. But was it the singular experience that set a man on a decades-long mission to dismantle technological society? Simply put: no.
And as far as the additional timeline in this movie — the hunt, just read my book. The agent is fictional, the heroes were erased, and just about the only thing I found factual was the re-creation of Kaczynski’s mailbox. But I will admit that Russel Crowe, Jacob Tremblay, and Shailene Woodley all deliver riveting performances. Jacob Tremblay embodies a young Kaczynski almost exactly as I have imagined him, minus the smiling and the forging of his mother’s signature. But there were moments of his performance in which I recognized a young version of my own childhood monster.
Hollywood keeps asking what made the monster, because a monster with a making is a monster we can understand — and contain. The harder truth, the one I lived next door to for 16 years, is that there was no single breaking point. There was a baby, a boy, a brilliant teenager, an eccentric neighbor — and, somewhere in the shadows, a killer. No one scene explains him.
When I graduated from college, I aspired to be a war correspondent and report on the humanitarian crises shaping our time. My life, too unconventional for a husband and kids, would be lived out of suitcases, a dog-eared passport forever in my back pocket. My family would be the other journalists embedded with me in military zones.
That’s not what happened.
I failed the test the Associated Press gives to prospective foreign reporters. Instead of being wedded to my work, I got married to a finance guy from Boston, had twin daughters and wound up working in the creative department of a New York City ad agency as a copywriter. After 15 years in the business, the logistics and expense of childcare became overwhelming and I left advertising for the one job I never imagined for myself: stay-at-home-mom.
As much as I loved being home with my kids and understood the privilege it was, I was bored. All my friends were at the office. I wondered if I had made the right decision leaving my job. I was good at advertising; I won awards for my work. But now, I seriously doubted anyone was going to hand me a bronze statue for the way I yelled at my kids for not finishing their chicken nuggets. I had gone from making Super Bowl ads to snack bags and I was struggling to find the glory in any of it.
In the middle of this identity crisis, I started to bake. I missed the creative process and dreaming-up desserts seemed like the perfect outlet. The added bonus— I could do all of this between school drop-offs, pick-ups and everything in between.
The first thing out of my oven were chocolate chip cookies. I was floored by what I could create with flour, eggs and sugar. I felt like I was back at the ad agency brainstorming new ways to brand old products — but instead of standing in my all-white office, I was at my kitchen counter concocting bespoke cookies — potato chips and butterscotch, rum and dark chocolate, fresh corn from the cob and cranberries. And then one day, when I had a bunch of almost-rotten bananas sitting on my kitchen counter, I threw them together and made a cake.
Not banana bread— there was no cinnamon, cardamon, nuts or loaf pan involved. Instead, it was a layered cake made from whipping butter and sugar until it was frothy and then sifting in the dry ingredients. Just before everything came together, I folded in sour cream, infusing a bit of tang to balance the sweet. Lastly, I added an abundance of bananas—which gave the cake its classic, all too familiar feeling. Like running into an old friend you didn’t realize how much you missed.
I frosted the cake with a Swiss meringue buttercream that required bringing egg whites and sugar together over a pot of simmering water and then whisking it into stiff peaks. The last step was drizzling a tablespoon of good olive oil over the batter which was a trick I had learned in one of the myriad baking newsletters I now subscribed to.
The result is a crumb that is delicate, every forkful a moist, subtlety sweet bite. Deceptively light, the cake is easily devoured. It was an instant hit.
Since then, I’ve baked the cake for countless weddings, birthdays and gender reveals. It was even flown across the country for an 80th birthday.
A couple in Los Angeles keeps it in the back of their freezer just in case. An NBA player swears it brought him good luck after devouring it the night before a big game. When I was the head baker at my local homeless shelter, I baked it hundreds of times and saw how one slice, served on a paper plate, could become a catalyst for dialogue. It is the cake I overheard a caterer say to himself, Jesus, this is good.
Now, almost 40years later, as I watch people cut into my banana cake, I see it all— independence, grief, hope, joy. I once thought I would have to travel to the frontlines to witness humanity up close. It turns out I am already there.
“I love bacon and chicharrónes, but I could never eat pork uterus,” I confess, wincing at our 60” Insignia television screen.
“Foot soup doesn’t sound great, either,” my mother replies, squeamishly shaking her head. “But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
And I have. As a finicky eater who happens to be queer, Black and disabled, I wouldn’t touch durian, duck tongues or most of the basket items on the Food Network TV show, “Chopped.” Yet my family has been watching it faithfully for nearly two decades.
The reality competition features four chefs who transform baskets of mystery items into an appetizer, entrée or a dessert. Round by round, one contestant is eliminated, or “chopped,” until a single winner emerges and is awarded $10,000. The foods are extreme and run the gamut, from silkworm pupa to a whole goat head.
In our Valley Stream, Long Island home, my youthful 80-year-old, African American mother and I — her Gen X son and facial clone — comment on each episode like armchair judges.
“Greg’s dish really looks appetizing,” Mom says, holding a bag of sea-salt Popcorner chips, “but he forgot a basket item!”
“Uh-oh,” I reply, extracting a Ritz cracker from its sleeve. “You know what that means?”
“He’s getting chopped,” we sing in unison, laughing.
My 92-year-old West Indian father, a US Army veteran with Alzheimer’s-related dementia who once did half of the cooking, now observes quietly. Though, we do pepper him with questions to keep him engaged.
His responses, while brief, are as meaningful as the on-screen action — more so, even, because every moment he can respond to us is a precious one. The few words he pieces together help anchor us the way they did before dementia transformed our lives.
My mother, younger brother — who watches when he’s not busy bartending — and I share caregiving duties for my father, who requires round-the-clock care. Mom handles the daytime with help from an aide, while Jeff and I split the nighttime, when Dad restlessly roams the house. “Chopped” helps fill the downtime between chores, meals and other primetime events.
I began following the series in 2009, because of a crush on Ted Allen from his days on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” (He seems genuine, knowledgeable, and funny: an irresistible combination for me.) And though his passion is food — and mine is scrutinizing it skeptically — I forgive him, because the show has become a minor obsession.
When I introduced it to my parents in 2010, they thought I had lost my mind.
“You, the picky eater, watching anything to do with food?” my mother asked.
“Yeah. It’s the creativity. I really enjoy seeing what they make out of the funky basket items they get. It reminds me of my art-school days. And Ted is so much fun!”
“And who is this Ted person?” my then-well father inquired.
“Ted’s the host — and the cutest dork!”
The program has been our family ritual over the years, especially now, as we weather the havoc dementia continues to wreak on our lives. Its reality format allows for perfect projection and escapism: no coordinating specialists and home care agencies, certainly no paternal tantrums. For the hour the show airs, we leave our stresses behind and focus on enjoying each other’s company.
We also love catching the cooking tournaments, from “Alton’s Maniacal Baskets,” where quirky foods are chosen by superstar cook and presenter Alton Brown, to “Name Your Price,” where the chefs are given three products and must outbid each other for a fourth. My personal favorite is the “Military Salute” challenge, with the enlisted competitors hailing from the US Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Army. In the finale, the officers team up against the judges, illustrating the power of working together, like our family.
Seventeen years of watching “Chopped” has left its mark on our nuclear unit: Mom and Jeff are still finding new ways to elevate hot dogs — Dad’s current culinary obsession — most recently mincing and serving them in a spaghetti bolognese. And I’m still persnickety but exposure to so many extreme foods has broadened my palate. I’ll always prefer Mom’s barbecued chicken, fried chicken and French fries, but I have branched out, trying an array of new, relatively tamer foods, ranging from albacore tuna to zucchini.
The program’s most enduring lesson for us has been one of persistence. Much like a high-stakes competition, caregiving forces us to confront the insurmountable daily. And we triumph over the chaos by staying present, flexible and focused on the tasks at hand, whatever they may be.
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