Original subtitles

-Hey, Fred. -Hey, how are you?

Hey!

Hey, Ted.

Hey, Theresa.

Oh. Oh, my gosh. Ted.

I am so glad you're here.

You know, would you mind helping me a tiny bit today?

It's going to be so crazy.

-Hey, Alan! -Good morning.

Oh, great. You brought the extras.

Could you just pick these up?

What's the big event?

I read the whole thing. I couldn't wait.

I read it this morning on the FBI's Internet web page.

He's obviously very well-educated,

very intelligent man.

A lot of what he says makes sense to me.

Sympathizing with a serial bomber, now?

Be careful.

The FBI might come by asking questions.

We had to order a ton of extra copies.

There's actually a wait list for it.

-For what? -For the manifesto.

You have to sign up.

Well, they explained it in the Times.

I guess he was choosing representational targets.

So, like, all the stuff he talks about,

the environment, computers, cloning, all that--

He was sending bombs to people who represented

what he was fighting against.

Robert Wright, "There's a little bit of the Unabomber

in most of us. We may not share his approach

to airing a grievance, but the grievance itself

feels familiar."

And then, here, look. Robert Sale in the Times.

"The manifesto's first sentence is absolutely crucial

for the American public to understand

and ought to be on the forefront

of the nation's political agenda."

I forgot what the first sentence was, but--

"The industrial revolution and its consequences

have been a disaster for the human race."

See?

See? You act like I'm crazy,

but it's kind of true, right?

If you're here for the Washington Post,

you have to be on the list. Did you sign up?

No, not yet.

"Dear David,

I'll begin by saying

this letter is not to be construed as an apology,

and my feelings about Linda have not changed.

However, I find myself

at a strange crossroads in my life,

and I'm in need of some fraternal advice.

A certain activity which has been very time-consuming

for nearly the entirety of my adult life

now seems to have become

no longer necessary.

Forgive me if I say no more than that."

Hey, Ted.

"David, you know I've always had trouble

connecting with people.

I just can't tell what they're feeling,

what they're really thinking about."

Come here. How was school?

Oh, did you talk to Miss Noble about Saturday?

Yeah, I did. She said it was fine.

"My whole life, I've felt like I'm watching the world

from the other side of a window,

and I just don't know how to pass through to the other side,

where everything is effortless."

"David, I need to know.

How do you know if it's too late to change?

How can you tell if it's still possible

to begin again?"

I was doomed to be a freak from the start.

I still blame Mom and Dad for that,

skipping me two grades ahead.

I wasn't ready.

But the worst part was

I was still smarter than everyone else.

I never told you about Doug,

but I think that's where this all began.

I know that's where this all began,

because that was my first one,

my very first experiment.

Even 40 years later, I guess you can say

that Doug was the only real friend I ever had.

Eight, seven, six, five,

four, three, two, one!

Lift off!

Aah!

Get him!

Get him out of here!

Get out of here!

Leave! Leave!

Throw it in his eye!

Get out of here!

Aah!

Hey, Timmy.

Hey, Ted.

What'd you learn in math today?

Dang. Miss Chipman sucks,

and these quadratics are just giving me a headache,

and she can't even explain why we'd ever use one.

She can't?

No.

But they're everywhere.

Wh-When you throw a ball,

when you shoot a gun, that's quadratics.

David, I keep asking

how'd I go from this innocent little kid to this?

...Have that equation.

I think it was Harvard that did it.

You don't know about that, either,

about Murray,

about everything.

Mom and Dad, they loved that,

"My son attending Harvard."

Can you imagine how lonely that was,

to be in college at 16?

All these questions, all of the evidences,

-to the students. -Thank you.

Professor Henry Murray, he was everything I wanted to be,

a beaming Greek god of Harvardness.

Get these out as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

I have full confidence in you.

As soon as we entered the room,

we were all desperate to make the cut,

for him to select us,

to bring us into the inner circle of the fold.

His was a hand of God,

separating sheep from goats.

Gentleman, if I call your number, please stand

and remain standing.

Number 1,

5,

21, 24,

47, and 89.

If you are standing,

thank you for your participation today.

You may leave now.

Please keep your papers face-down

until I say begin.

Begin.

Number 4,

7,

8,

15,

23,

37,

42,

61,

80,

91, 96.

Congratulations.

If you're still here, you've made the cut.

Individual sessions will start next week.

Nobody in my life ever asked me

how I was doing or if I was okay

or even if I knew what time it was.

Theodore, thank you for coming by.

And here was this Harvard professor asking me

what I thought about the world, listening.

It's a wonderful office you have.

Taking notes, even, when I spoke. Imagine that.

It was as if Christ himself came down

and asked me about my life.

Well, we work so hard to justify emotional responses

with morality that the--

the moral code becomes so attenuated as to be meaningless.

And do you think that that's an inevitability?

I think it has to be specific to each individual...

It was almost a year of that.

Those weekly trips to the annex were like heaven to me.

I mean, science thinks it has this perfect,

empirical evidence of everything in the universe,

but it actually can't tell us anything about people.

Two poodles looking at each other.

Don't you think there's a sense

in which freedom is only what we call it?

Call it prison and not, say, a monastery.

What makes a monastery different from a prison

is that the monks can leave if they wanted to.

They have self-determination.

...science, we read this article about stress effects in mice.

You put two mice in a cage,

and they're fine-- happy, live long lives.

You put 20 mice in the same cage,

it messes them up psychologically.

I basically feel that technological society

is incompatible with individual freedom.

And, therefore, we have to destroy it

and replace it with a more primitive society

so that people can be free again.

Nothing was off-limits between us.

We talked about everything, every crevice of my life,

my dreams, my fears.

I'm self-taught, you know.

My father couldn't comprehend chess.

And he appreciated me for who I really was.

Personally, I never understood the appeal

-of a woman's backside. -No?

Except perhaps a Negro woman.

Thank you for joining us today, Judge.

Absolutely.

Morning, Mr. Kaczynski. We'll be right along.

Well, maybe I'll have one, too, if we have a minute.

Balkan Sobranies, huh?

Good man.

These are some friends of mine, Ted, the federal government.

Theodore is one of my star subjects.

He's been sharing some very interesting ideas with us.

Let's go this way.

We're trying something a little different today.

Those government men are here

because this study is not just about

expanding the boundaries of psychological sciences.

You're part of something much bigger than yourself, Ted.

This is important for the future of the free world.

I can't really move.

Well, you can walk out anytime you want.

You know that, right, Theodore?

Yeah, no, I'm-- I'm okay, Professor.

Good man.

Over the past year, you've provided us

with hundreds of pages of material

laying out your philosophy of life,

your dreams for your own future, and the future of the world.

It's been wonderful getting to know you,

getting to see inside the deepest recesses of your mind.

I hope that you feel that you've been fully honest with me,

that your work truly represents who you are

and what you believe.

Of course.

I've really enjoyed our conversations

and the assignments, too.

I wouldn't hold anything back from you.

Good.

Let's begin.

I've taken the liberty of sharing those pages

with a panel of fellow scientists,

some of Harvard's most distinguished thinkers.

I'm flattered.

-Good morning. -Unfortunately,

their conclusions were unanimous.

They found the majority of your ideas to be derivative,

cliched, and juvenile.

The remainder they found self-evidently absurd.

Well, professor, I'd be happy to explain myself further--

Let's take a look at the film from our last session.

I'll help clarify their findings.

I basically feel that technological society

is incompatible with individual freedom,

and, therefore, we have to destroy it

and replace it with a more primitive society

so that people can be free.

Our reviewers found this to be a tepid,

sophomoric regurgitation of Jacques Ellul.

You talk so much about autonomy,

but you've stolen all of your ideas

from a third-rate thinker's mass-market paperback.

Well, I didn't claim that my ideas were--

Oh, wait. Here's the best part!

Technology and the social structures that it's created

have made the individual passive,

powerless, trapped by rules.

Delusional self-justification.

"If only I were born among cavemen,

then I would have been a star."

It couldn't be your own inadequacy that's to blame.

Well, that's totally ad hominem. I--

It couldn't be just a mediocre mathematician

grasping to some justification of his own failures.

No, it must be that the whole system is completely wrong,

because, of course, you're more perceptive than anybody else.

Right, Ted?

We have to shed all of the unnatural stuff

and get back to nature.

If society broke down, you wouldn't stand a chance,

a creepy, beta-male shrimp like you!

You'd be sodomized to death

and turned into dog food in 10 minutes.

-You'd probably enjoy it. -Now, now.

Now, now. I told you not to bring up

Theodore's sadomasochistic tendencies.

That's not fair.

People will look at me, and they'll respect me.

They'll hear my ideas and see that I'm right,

and they'll make me the ruler of the world.

When I wrote your mother to get permission for this study,

she didn't just sign the permission slip.

She sent a whole letter back in return.

"I'm afraid Theodore is in desperate need

of psychological intervention.

Many people regularly call him a creep."

Mom-- Mom wouldn't say that.

She wouldn't call me that.

"He's a bed-wetter,

and he masturbates so excessively

that I worry about his mental and physical ramifications.

He harbors delusions of grandeur completely out of proportion

to his mental and physical capabilities.

Anything you could do to fix my boy

would have my permission.

Wanda Kaczynski."

His mother really wrote that?

Of course not. We use the same letter for all of them.

I imagine we could get even better results

with more customized verbiage,

but I'd prefer to have this phase be standardized.

Modern man has essentially handed over the reins

of how our society develops.

I only found this out years later,

but it's well documented.

Murray was part of MKUltra,

the C.I.A.'s vast mind-control project,

working to perfect brainwashing techniques

to use against Soviet spies

to break them permanently and change their core beliefs.

And we were the guinea pigs.

He selected the most vulnerable to see if we could be broken.

And the other kids, they were at least 18 or 19.

I was 16 years old.

Let's get those electrodes off.

Theodore, you did a wonderful job.

You truly exceeded my expectations.

You did so very well.

I couldn't have asked for more as a subject or as a friend.

I can't wait to see how well you do next time.

Next time?

This phase will continue for about 18 months.

I'm anticipating more great things from you, Ted.

Oh. Um...

I never believed any of that stuff anyway, you know?

Is that right? I thought you believed strongly--

I never really believed any of it.

Those ideas were just--

Well, they were stupid,

juvenile.

Well,

either way.

I will see you next week.

Ted?

Your cigarettes.

- Ted. -Huh.

Ted. Hey, Ted.

Uh, I'm finished, and I saw where you tried to trick me.

Nice try.

Oh, well, Timmy, see?

Got a good head for mathematics.

That's special. Not everybody has that.

Actually, can I ask you a question...

-Sure. -...privately?

I can't really ask my mom.

Theresa?

Can we go for a walk?

Oh, yeah, sure. Go ahead.

They're on me every single day.

They call me pigeon-boy, and they bend my fingers back.

And my mom, she just says, "Be yourself,"

but that's mom stuff.

I need man-to-man advice.

These kinds of people, they prey on fear and weakness,

and they respect only strength.

You should be doing push-ups, sit-ups, every day.

Soon, they'll sense your strength,

and they'll leave you alone.

You won't even need to fight them.

That's good dad advice.

I'll start tonight.

If they try to mess with me, bam.

-I'll make them pay. -Well, you won't need to.

That's the beauty of it.

I want to.

I want to get even.

You don't need to get even, Timmy.

You don't.

What the world thinks about you,

what those bullies say about you,

none of it matters.

You are different from those kids.

That's a good thing.

You do see the world differently.

That's a good thing, and that's not "mom stuff."

It takes incredible strength and courage

to be different from everybody else,

but it's a good thing.

I promise you.

Hey.

I promise you.

All right.

Oh, hold on a second.

Here. We're having a party for my birthday.

-Do you think you can come? -Oh, well--

You don't need to bring a present or anything.

-We'll have a cake. -That's really--

I'm-- I'm not-- I'm not sure I can make it.

It-- It's just a small party.

-Yeah. -I don't have very many friends.

Um, you don't have to come, though.

No, I want to come. I just--

I'm... busy.

You don't have to if you don't want to.

I'll try, okay?

Okay?

Yeah.

Now, you-- You get on back, now.

All right.

Murray spent a year seducing me

and then spent two years breaking me,

two years.

Why'd I keep going back?

To prove to them

that they can strap me into an electric chair,

but I will never give in.

They will never break me.

And they didn't.

I didn't break.

They did not break me.

I can stop now.

I can stop.

But every time my mind drifts,

it goes back to that room at Harvard.

Whenever I close my eyes, I'm there,

strapped to that chair,

helpless, angry, impotent,

stripped of all respect,

and I feel so much anger.

I've been living on anger my whole life.

Anyone I ever loved,

anyone I ever admired,

betrayed me.

-Mom... -You sold me out!

You made me look bad to Professor Murray!

-Why would you write that letter? -What letter?

I signed a permission slip because you asked me to.

...Doug...

Murray...

and you, too, David.

Even you.

I'm going to get you!

Now I'm going to get you!

Roll back.

Couple times.

Hey. How about a smile?

You better take these down. People are--

Ted.

Ted, stop it. Come on.

Stop.

Ted.

Hello? Hey!

Hey! Okay, fine! Then go home! You're fired.

Betrayal after betrayal after betrayal...

...till I couldn't trust anyone.

I want them to listen to me.

I want them to pay for what they did to me.

Well, let them hate me,

the sheep.

They will not ignore me.

It all used to make sense to me once.

It all used to feel justified,

but now, when I think back on it all,

how many years have I spent here at this table?

Every time, I think, "This is the one

that's finally going to make me feel good,

feel happy."

But it never does.

Sometimes, I think I'm just trying to punish those people

because they have what I really want--

a home, a family,

the ability to be normal.

I am 53 years old,

and I'm a virgin.

And I realize only now

that the time I've spent on all this destruction

is the time I would have spent on a family,

having a son,

someone who would look up to me,

who I could just... love.

I gave up everything for respect.

But what I really want is...

My past doesn't have to dictate my future.

Does it?

I can still grow.

I can still change.

Can't I?

Whoo!

-Oh, nice! -Oh, my gosh.

My life wasn't supposed to go like this.

By God, damn it,

it wasn't supposed to go like this.