Mindhunter

Mindhunter (Netflix -- season 2) is an excellent example of a Police Procedural.  The Police Procedural is a genre in crime films and fiction focusing close attention on the efforts of a team of law enforcement officers working to solve a crime.  The genre is ideal for television because it lends itself to the sit-com format -- that is, a group of recurring characters interact in an amusing or dramatic way.  In effect, a Police Procedural is a sit-dram -- that is, a situation-drama.  When applied to crime, the form is intrinsically satisfying:  the chaos and lawlessness of crime contrasts effectively with the rational procedures and rules applicable to law enforcement:  this generates a stark contrast between lawlessness and the law (and, also, allows for interesting thematic developments in which the police may be tempted toward lawlessness in order to solve particularly heinous crimes).  The form allows for all sorts of productive conflicts:  good v. evil, means v. ends, personality conflicts and romantic intrigue threatening the police team, conflict between the rigid "by-the-books" boss and his (or her) more intuitive, flexible subordinates, and, of course, also authorizes development of subplots involving the families and associates of the cops.  The form is rich with potential and provides a pleasure always intrinsic to genre art -- that is, the tension between the formula required by the genre and the individual artist's creativity in expanding limits of the genre.  Frames exist to be challenged and a good genre work will acknowledge the fundamental tenets of the form while also working to subvert them.

I didn't watch Mindhunter (1st season) on the basis that I knew nothing about it and, of course, wished to avoid the shame attendant upon devoting many hours to squalid and horrific stories about serial murderers.  These kinds of shows are always a guilty pleasure -- everyone, more or less, has morbid curiosity about serial sex criminals:  these people display the outer limits of human nature and, although freakishness is always fascinating, I'm not sure that it is morally defensible to gawk at freaks or, for that matter, gruesome sexually inflected murder scenes.  But when I discovered that Mindhunter (2nd Season) features work by the directors David Fincher, Andrew Dominik, and Carl Franklin, all major talents in my estimation, these auteurs, as it were, gave me cover to watch the show.  And, I must admit that the show is morbidly fascinating to the point of being addictive. It's all a gruesome tease, but the tease works and the shows are beautifully directed, featuring  showy arias of nihilistic discourse in the scenes in which the protagonists interview various famous serial killers.  The effect is similar to True Detective with elements of David Fincher's film Zodiac thrown into the mix.

The basic premise is a group of FBI agents stationed at Quantico are working to pioneer "profiling" with respect to serial sex murderers.  The group is led by Bill Tench, a straight-up man's man sort of guy with a flat-top haircut and the general demeanor of a 1980 industrial arts instructor.  He is assisted by a cipher, the strangely expressionless and coolly analytical Holden Ford, a young agent who looks eerily like a mannequin and may have mental problems of his own.  In addition, the team includes a beautiful and cerebral professorial type, Wendy Carr.  Carr is a lesbian, something that she keeps to herself since the show is set around 1980.  (In fact, she icily endures homophobic statements made by others on the team -- when a serial killer specializing in torture murders of Gay men is interviewed, Tench jocularly suggests that he "just picks the low-hanging fruit.")  These characters have various love interests who complicate things from time-to-time, although all of them seem committed primarily, and, indeed, obsessively to their work.  The tough boss is Ted Gunn, here a master manipulator who hosts cocktail parties to get the agents to regale other law enforcement about their adventures with serial murderers -- it's sordid, but Tench, at least, seems to like to tell people about the villains (he seems to be telling his buddies hunting stories) and, of course, the morbid interest of the other FBI employees mirrors our interest as an audience.  I haven't seen the first series, a group of shows that I will need to watch at some point.  In the second series, the team becomes involved in working to solve the child murders in Atlanta, Georgia.  Simultaneously, the BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill murderer) is fantasizing about killing people in Kansas.  Individual shows follow a predictable format -- the team members interview some famous serial killer (in this case the Son of Sam and Charley Manson among others -- most of the bad guys I didn't know about since I haven't really devoted much time to studying the subject:  suffice it to say that the prisoners interviewed are all imitating real people who were serial rapists, murderers, and necrophiles.  (The giant genius necrophile Ed Kemper has a re-occurring role in the show -- he plays the Hannibal Lecter character in the program.)  These interviews are always fascinating and give the actors paying the villains a chance to chew-up the scenery -- this is particularly true with respect to the guy playing Charley Manson.  I should note however that police are notoriously bad interviewers -- they have always preferred to just beat the confession out of the criminal -- and the interviews shown in the TV program, presumably based on actual tapes, are exceedingly amateurish and poorly conducted from the perspective of the supposedly sophisticated G-men; simply put, they don't really have any idea how to effectively interview anyone.  Fortunately,the bad guys are self-aggrandizing and loquacious.  Wendy Carr is slumming with a bad-girl girlfriend a bartender -- one senses that the relationship will not end well.  Bill Tench's own seven year old is tangled up with the murder of a toddler in the neighborhood -- he's adopted and the show creates the unsettling implication that the chief FBI man's own son in a nascent serial-killer.  Holden has had a mental breakdown and seems on the edge of collapse -- his icy reserve is quivering over an emotional abyss.

There's  much to admire about this series.  The acting is mostly excellent and the scene-setting is hyper-realistic.  The dialogue is crisply written and the mass killers get spectacular soliloquies.  There are innumerable tiny details that seem just right -- the callous, condescending attitude of the social worker supervising Tench's son and making "unannounced home visits" captures the type perfectly.  The Tench's have to cooperate with the woman who has threatened to take their child away from them, but she is a sadistic as any of the killers on display in the film.  Tench becomes increasingly enraged with Manson and, even, unprofessional -- he can't tolerate Manson's assertion that his followers acted on their own, choosing to commit the murders.  (He can't stand this argument because it places, by analogy, complicity in his own son, who he denies is responsible for the death of the toddler.)  About half of the serial murderers are not criminal masterminds -- in fact, some of them are almost comically stupid.  The casual sexual harassment and gender discrimination of the era is well-documented -- it's subtle but omnipresent to the extent that Wendy Carr almost doesn't seem to notice that she is a not full-member of the team, although she's clearly smarter than both of the men.  The powers-that-be in Atlanta are Black and want to pin the child murders on the KKK if possible, although this is manifest idiocy:  how does a White man infiltrate the ghetto and kidnap Black boys without alarming the neighbors?  Indeed, one of the themes of the film is that the FBI team, notwithstanding their obsessive hard work, really don't have a clue.  They're making things up as they go and the vignettes of the BTK killer show how completely wrong many of their theories and criminal profiles seem to be. The show's design features low-key but intelligible lighting -- everything is pale beige, light blue, light yellow:  even the sun seems vaguely beige, the color of tasteful wall in a tastefully decorated house circa 1980.  The shows are crisply edited and the composition of the shots praise-worthy. The program isn't overly larded with portentous drone shots -- when this is done it serves a purpose.  I have noticed that the show is best enjoyed in one hour sessions -- when you view two shows back-to-back the formulas on which the program operates are too overt, too schematic, and the show's pervasive gloom and morbidity seems almost comical.  The titles establishing where things take place are remarkable -- they fill the whole screen with huge white letters, one line cursive and one line in blaring Bauhaus-style type-face.  It's like something out Samuel Fuller -- I think this kind of type face also appeared in David Byrnes one and only movie True Stories.  The effect of the titles is like some sort of scarcely repressed hysteria.  The soundtrack oozes with faint shrieks and sirens and there are also great versions of songs contemporaneous to the action, everything familiar but slightly disorienting.

A metaphor for the entire series is the opening title sequence.  We see a hand manipulating an old reel-to-reel tape recorder.  Cut into these shots are subliminal flashes of bound and decaying corpses -- you can't quite see the images; they're too short -- but you have a sense of the pale fungal texture of a rotting body, contorted fingers, empty eye-sockets.  Of course, you want to see but can't and the simultaneous exposure and, then, denial of these images is foundational to the whole enterprise.  Something awful has happened and we want to know about it -- but common decency intervenes to conceal the horror from us.  The show has almost no violence:  everyone treats everyone with civility, even the serial killers are, by and large, polite, but bad stuff is always happening where we can't see it.  In one show, a man has been disfigured by being shot in the face -- apparently, he hates the way he looks and, so, when he meets with the G-men in their car, he asks the cops to turn the mirror so he doesn't have to see himself.  The guy is filmed in long-shot hurrying to get into the car's backseat. The interview with the cops is shot with the victim's face in shadow and blurred, focus pulled tightly onto the two cops so that we perceive the interview through their reactions -- this is extremely effective:  you want to see, but you can't and are grateful that you can't.   

Addendum to review -- I've now completed watching all episodes of the Second Season.  Mindhunter remains true to its premise to the bitter end.  (Here "bitter end" is more literal than metaphoric.)  The last four or so episodes focus intensively on the child murders in Atlanta, somewhat to the detriment of the subplot involving Wendy Carr and her barmaid lover.  (In fact, Wendy is scarcely on-screen in several of these episodes and we have the unsettling sense that the director and scenario-writer have simply forgotten about her.)  The Atlanta narrative is particularly dank and unsatisfying -- in some ways, the show's fidelity to its sources and its pervasive despair is depressing, although the show never fails to be surprising and, even, gripping in a low-key way.  There has never been a police procedural so thoroughly skeptical of police procedures and basic competence as to detective work.  Twenty-eight or twenty-nine young men, most of them adolescent boys, are strangled and, then, pitched into waste lots and rivers around Atlanta.  The young men are all African-American and the crimes touch a nerve that is so raw and basic about race-relations that the crimes are essentially insoluble because of deeply entrenched biases.  Simply stated, the Black community wants the police to arrest a White supremacist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, for the crimes.  But Holden Ford won't retreat from his statistical studies that show that serial killers always kill within their own race.  This leads him to "profile" the killer as a Black young man between 21 and 29.  The African-American citizens of Atlanta are rightly suspicious of the FBI and unwilling to accept that the predator is a member of their own community.  Local Black politicians, of course, side with their constituents, further distorting the investigation already under considerable pressure from the public.  Reconciliation is impossible between the different factions and, ultimately, the show dramatizes how race is a "third-rail" -- if you touch it, you are electrocuted and racial tensions cloud and confound all civic issues, including those as fundamental as protecting children against serial murder.  The investigation, arduous and conflicted in all respects, is unsucessful and takes a toll with Tench and Ford.  Ultimately a plausible suspect is apprehended pretty much by accident.  A leak from within the police results in the Press reporting that the cops are collecting "fiber and hair" evidence from the corpses.  This causes the killer to start throwing the bodies in the murky brown and perpetually flooding rivers around Atlanta.  Using brute force, the cops stake-out all the river landings and bridges and ultimately arrest Wayne Williams, an arrogant Black hustler who is recruiting children for an act like the Jackson Five.  Williams, it seems, had committed two of the murders -- but the victims were both adult men.  The police announce that the serial killer's rampage is over and the investigation is quietly scotched.  An advocacy group comprised of the mothers of child victims is not satisfied -- they want to see a White man arrested for the killings of the children.  (And there is some evidence that the killing spree involved several other murderers, at least, one of them a White supremacist.)  Holden  Ford promises the mothers that he will continue the investigation but he can't keep the promise -- he's pulled off the job.  Tench's family problems, which have harried him through the series, increase to the point that his wife leaves him.  He comes home from Atlanta, hailed as a conquering hero, but his house is empty and dark -- his wife has left.  When Wendy's girlfriend tries to placate her ex-husband and conceals their relationship from her son, Wendy lashes out with gratuitous cruelty and ends the affair.  At the conclusion of the show, Tench and Holden Ford are hailed as heroes but a deep and pervasive sense of failure haunts them.  The women whose children have been killed remain wrong-headed, insulting, and intransigent in their view that the FBI has betrayed them -- even the local White judge is skeptical:  when asked for a search warrant, for a wire tap he says:  "I recall the last time the FBI wanted a wire-tap on a Black man" -- referring to Martin Luther King, Jr.   The idea of criminal "profiling" has been irretrievably contaminated by the notion of racial profiling.  No one trusts anyone and the BTK killer in the last scenes dons an inexpressive female mask, coquettishly adjusts his decolletage, and, then, engages in a little auto-erotic asphyxiation and masturbation, using souvenirs of his seven or so torture killings.  We know that no one will catch him for another twenty years.  Ultimately, this show -- without on-screen violence, without any car chases or showy action sequences -- dramatizes the futility of even heroic and self-sacrificing effort in the face of unfathomable evil.