In 1995, I was a fresh graduate from university, facing down the licensure exam. I passed. In the meantime, halfway across the world, the United States FBI was making headway in a case that had remained unsolved – with aa significant cost in lives – since I was six years old. In 1995, the hunt for the Unabomber started getting some traction because of a combination of two things: the bomber’s desire for acknowledgment of his genius, and the slow emergence of a new kind of investigative strategy: forensic linguistics — the application of linguistic knowledge, methods, and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure (there, I Googled it for you). Let me simplify further. Forensic linguistics is the use of language – spelling, word use, speech patterns, etc., to identify an unknown person. And that’s the story in the heart of Netflix’s Manhunt: Unabomber.
Starring Sam Worthington and Paul Bettany – that weird blue guy from Avatar and that weird red android from the Avengers respectively – Unabomber does a good job of taking the viewer back to the days when foreign linguistics didn’t even exist yet and hardnosed G-men had difficulty taking it seriously. To their chagrin, of course, as the language nerds eventually carry the day. We witness Worthington’s frustration and feel it ourselves as his antagonists (who are supposed to be searching for the same target) unwittingly slow him down simply because they don’t understand what he’s doing. Who hasn’t felt that way, am I right?
But the plucky linguist keeps at it and eventually, through a series of apparently perfectly timed events, manages to cobble together an explanation for why a warrant could be issued. And here, luck once again intervenes and the case lands before a judge who says it’s thin but, serendipitously, had a war time experience that validated the whole idea that language used in a certain way would be enough to identify a person with enough specificity to justify the issuance of a warrant.
I guess truth is stranger than fiction.
Watch it for yourself and tell me in the comments how you liked it. Me? I give it a 7 out of 10. It’s a solid thriller but it doesn’t blow you away (pun probably intended).
Oh, and I can only assume, since this is a series, that the next season will be about the hunt for someone else. Like Manhunt: Zodiac Killer or something. So watch out for that. In the meantime, read the official account of the pursuit and capture of the Unabomber.