Did a Harvard Professor Influence the Unabomber?

In 1959, Ted Kaczynski, then a 16-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, participated in a series of psychological experiments that asked gifted young men to debate their philosophies and values with other students. What they weren’t told is that an older graduate student had been trained to systematically humiliate them, and that the ultimate goal of the study was to “break” them. Over the course of three years, Kaczynski endured unrelenting ridicule of his intelligence, masculinity, and ideas, and along the way started journaling about revenge fantasies and dreams of escaping to nature. 

Until recently, the role the Harvard experiments likely played in the making of the Unabomber — and the bizarre story of their creator, the brilliant and sadistic psychology professor Henry Murray — has received relatively little attention in mainstream Unabomber lore (perhaps in part because Harvard sealed the files years ago). But the new film Unabomber, out today on Netflix, puts Murray (played by Russell Crowe) at the center of Kaczynski’s story. I spoke with the film’s director, Janus Metz Pedersen, who was behind the 2017 tennis drama Borg vs McEnroe, about the impact of Murray’s studies on young Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) and what’s behind the enduring fascination with the Unabomber 30 years since his arrest.

I researched Henry Murray and the Kaczynski experiments as part of my own recent book on the subject, so I was thrilled to learn that there was a film coming out that focused specifically on this. Given how many times the Unabomber story has been told and retold, what made this version of his story appealing to you?
It’s not something I’d seen before. I didn’t know about the Murray experiments. But I’m also coming at it from a filmmaker’s perspective and saying, “How does this story as a whole ask questions about the human condition and the time we’re living in?” The crafting of the script lent itself to that kind of inquiry. It’s not a Unabomber biopic or a docudrama. It’s a narrative feature that uses the Harvard years of Ted Kaczynski’s life as a cliffhanger into that. Maybe that’s when he jumped into the void and became set on the track of the Unabomber. Years go by from when he was a Harvard student to when he was a professor at Berkeley until he starts sending letter bombs to people. So it’s a transgressional evolution, and we are cinematically treating it more like a statement, a point in time where people and things are condensed.

There are two stories operating at the same time, in the 1950s and ’60s, and then the ’80s and ’90s. Splicing these two periods together, his Harvard era and the years of the FBI manhunt (led in the film by actress Shailene Woodley), makes a pretty strong case for a connection between the two. Is that how you see it?
I don’t think we are fully saying this made him the Unabomber, but we’re definitely saying it probably contributed. That is the polemic statement of the film because Ted Kaczynski himself said it didn’t really do much. But also, we can’t really take him as a truth teller about his own mental constitution. I certainly think it’s interesting that a lot of his bombing campaign was directed at universities and professors, and he was psychologically abused by this guy who was the head of the psychology department at Harvard.

And Kaczynski had reason to deny it because he desperately wanted to be perceived as sane. So admitting to any psychological trauma could undermine that.
Yes, and I don’t think he had that capacity for insight. Part of the tragedy is that he was so galvanized by his own beliefs that he could legitimize his actions to himself.

Jacob Tremblay portrays Kaczynski as a wide-eyed, vulnerable teenager who wants to prove himself so badly. But he also has a strong courage of his convictions. I wondered if you ever read transcripts from Kaczynski’s actual sessions, because in them you do see him standing up for himself quite a bit in the face of humiliation, at least at first. What did you want the audience to understand about Kaczynski from those scenes?
You’re touching on it by saying he had beliefs and a mission, something that was important to prove to the world and to be recognized for that. It was important for us that Ted Kaczynski as a 16-year-old didn’t just come across as some weirdo in the corner, but that he was proud and he was smart and, in many ways, could have ended up differently. Those experiments were constructed to break someone down.

One of my favorite scenes was when Murray opens up his notebook and instead of seeing data or diagrams, it’s just a jumble of deranged drawings and scrawled handwriting. He famously had these grand ambitions to map every part of the human personality, but in reality he was kind of a charlatan — he was a physician, but he never studied psychology. 
Yeah, and how are you going to come to a conclusion of what constitutes a person’s mind, really? Murray descends into this dark void of nothingness, and he’s at odds with his science. He comes out of such antiquated ideas of the human mind — that we could ever possibly map it, and that he could do it. He’s the one. It’s a classic hubris-nemesis story.

How did you land on Russell Crowe to play Henry Murray?
When you cast a movie you ask yourself, What do you want from this character? When I read scripts, I very quickly start thinking of certain actors in certain roles, and maybe it’s because we know Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind that he comes up when you think about Ivy League universities. But I could easily see him as that figure — he has so much authority and gravitas, and as a director you want that from Henry Murray. He can really play this Jekyll-and-Hyde type of personality. He’s very seductive and charming on the one side, and then he can be very demonic and dark on the other side. He keeps you on edge.

Kaczynski’s story has been resurgent in recent years. There are groups of radical environmentalists and anarchists who embrace him, and Luigi Mangione gave the Unabomber Manifesto a four-star review on Goodreads. Your film is now part of that resurgence too. What do you think is behind that?
[Mangione killed Brian Thompson] as we were preparing to shoot this. It was crazy. And in Scandinavia, we have Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people, many of them children, and he left behind a manifesto that plagiarized Ted Kaczynski. I think it’s part of the moment that we’re living through. There’s political polarization and marginalization and the sort of people who want to turn back the clock and have that line of thinking that Ted Kaczynski had. I think it’s sadly part of the political climate right now.

When you talk about turning back the clock, it sounds like you’re describing a more right-wing viewpoint. What do you make of the fact that Kaczynski hated leftists?
A lot of people have found something useful in Ted Kaczynski. There is also a place where the right-wing and left-wing extremists meet, and it’s probably more productive to think of Ted Kaczynski in that sphere. When I read the manifesto, I think about a QAnon type of thinking more than anything else. I mean, the first two paragraphs of his manifesto is about blaming the political left for their sense of inferiority and their political correctness. That gets forgotten in his story.

You can see today in the political climate we’re living in that there are people that are wanting to turn back the clock, that want to say, “We’ve alienated ourselves from our true sense of being, and now we have to reclaim that space.” But what is that? We don’t know what it is. We’re not Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. That’s the whole foundation of western civilization. I think that’s the Unabomber story to me. That’s why it’s interesting as cinema. 

Was his “going back to the land” thing his version of turning back the clock? 
Yeah. If you read the manifesto, there’s this whole idea that the world has somehow fallen apart. That political correctness is a thing he’s after, which we see also today, particularly in this moment with the extreme right. There’s this idea that there is a natural, direct correspondence between signifier and signified, that women are women and men are men, and if you start having different conceptions, you are not a real human being. Then you’re alienated and corrupted, and we’ve got to stop that. That’s also Ted Kaczynski. These ideas that the world is not in its natural state of being, those types of ideas are underpinning his thinking, and that’s why it’s dangerous. Who gets to decide? The world is evolving.

Well, it’s interesting that for all his rigidity around the natural state of things, he once visited a psychiatrist to ask for permission to undergo a sex-change operation, which of course he never followed through on.
There’s a lot of discrepancies in terms of what he did and who he was. What did you make of that?

He never said he felt like a woman, only that he was frustrated by his inability to access women. So I think he ultimately decided, ‘I’m unfulfilled sexually, I want to touch a woman, so I’ll become a woman.’ 
I read it like that too. His desire for touch was so desperate that he wanted to transform himself into a woman because he thought that would probably make it easier for him to experience any sense of human connection. Now we’re talking about something very deep in trying to understand who he was, and I think that’s touching on how if you’re marginalized to the extent that he was, and you take that isolation upon yourself, and at the same time you think you’re smarter than everyone else, that’s where I can see revenge coming up as a motivation. That’s personal; it’s different from chasing a political cause.

Switching gears a little, I wanted to ask you about the colors in the film. The palette varied slightly between the earlier period and the later years. What was your thinking behind that?
It’s kind of subtle, but we wanted a sense of intimacy in the past, which is when it’s warmer-toned, because he is young, innocent, and sensitive, and when he meets Henry Murray and [Murray’s mistress and collaborator] Christiana Morgan, they become sort of surrogate parents. They become the image of what he may want to be, at least in our creative appropriation of the Ted Kaczynski story. He did reject his own family; he was very at odds with his working-class background when he came to Harvard, and he was two years younger than everyone else. It must have been hard. I can see how that would trip you up when you’re 16 years old.

As we face growing threats around AI and robotics, a lot of people think Kaczynski’s writings were premonitory. Do you?
We like to think, “Oh, he was a prophet of our time.” But was he? He wrote about it, but he wasn’t the only one who wrote those things. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in finding people that seem ahead of their time and name these phenomena. We should be careful not to ascribe him too much credit in that sense.