David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

so many antagonistic serial killers who suddenly tell them everything once they find the one button to push

I think a major conceit of the show (and maybe real life) is that these guys LOVE to talk...they just need to be assured they've got a sympathetic (maybe even sycophantic) audience.

Another conceit is that they unconsciously (maybe consciously in Kemper's case since he turned himself in) need/want to be caught...this was a major argument in ILX favorite Hunting Humans too iirc.

Williams is a funny exception that proves the rule since (imo) he's obviously a kind of psychopath who feeds off of protesting his innocence and he has plenty of people willing to indulge that.

On a second watch it's really interesting and poignant how many parallel possibilities and conspiracies are broached in the Atlanta Child Murders and pointedly left by the wayside once Holden finds his perfect suspect. There are a lot of things conceded to making dramatic television but overall I think the show is very smart about what it's about.

I found that whole "race to place the cross" scene really bizrre, tbrh. Maybe I missed the point.

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Tuesday, August 20, 2019 10:45 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

it seemed weird to me too

― na (NA), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 3:37 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i claimed upthread that this entire project is devised as low-key (i.e. unsignalled) dark comedy, and the cross scene confirms it (at least to me, admittedly the most easily convinced person re my own good theory). just like curb yr enthusiasm i find a lot of it hard to watch w/o pauses. holden is indeed a frustrating (=larry-david style) twerp -- except i don't think groff has quite worked out how to play this (which is why i called him "unconvincing" upthread)

one massive upside is that i went back and reread james baldwin's "evidence of things unseen", his book-length essay abt williams and the atlanta murders and (of course) race in america

xpost to myself: and I think, in general, that once people are given a kind of permission to talk about their perversions they can't stop.

whenever they mention organised vs disorganised i remember the bit in silence of the lambs where HL scoffs at that as useful analysis: "a real bottom-feeder came up with that one"

which is half thomas harris sketching in what a dick lecter is meant to be but also i think half him agreeing that a lot of profiling is just useless rubbish

I think there's a set of overlapping tensions:

1) There's a sense in which cataloging and classifying "deviance" is bound to be self-defeating...and so as in the darkness/light metaphor from the first season when you shine a light you just disperse and refract the darkness (to stretch the metaphor) into ever more nooks and crannies.

2) A Foucaultian idea about "norms"--where those lines are drawn, and in particular, who gets the draw them...and the rather creepy possibility that it's the ~FBI~ drawing them. But this is only an extreme case of something like the DSM defining and then revising under cultural changes what counts as a "disorder."

3) Profiling has a very limited utility in catching a perp in action (catching Williams was a much a product of desperation and luck as anything else) but if the alternative is to say "we can never understand the depths of human depravity" that seems unsatisfying as well. One of the obvious provocations of the show is that extreme forms of deviance (ie, serial killing) are on a continuum with the everyday perversions/deviance that we all have in private. Additionally, serial killing is observable as a ~social~ phenomenon and not merely privative of social norms.

the best decision made throughout season 2 was for every local cop/chief/gatekeeper throwing doubt or an obstacle in the boy wonder's way, it was at pains to portray each of them as people who disagreed from experience but cared, or who had a job to do that needed to work independently of the latest whizz fad from quantico.

most of the development in holden was written into the character being confronted with these scenarios and *not* reacting like a clichéd frustrated genius, which v much was of a piece with the muddy and compromised outcome of the series as a whole

sorry, a bit scattered, too tired to try to make sense rn:

a lot of good things came out of the atlanta child murders setting—i think june carryl has had the absolute best bits so far, with her statements of resolve about how they know what's happening and being ignored and written off—but i liked how it gave an extended balance to the show's sense of the public space, especially with being there a while, moving through neighborhoods, offices, stakeout scenes.

if you compare to a garbage serial killer procedural show like criminal minds, with its standard reliance on cutting to scenes of the unknown (often unshot, on camera, too, to manipulate the viewer) killer killing or torturing more victims, it seems like fincher et al are aware of the need to do something to dislodge the sense of the fbi protagonists as existing within the privileged vantage point on public space, being able to safely make incursions into it, and penetrate the secret places where the killers hide.

so all season long we get BTK doing his thing secretively but comically under the heading of the WICHITA KANSAS titles so hueg as if to declare, this is effectively right out in the open under the noses of the law and the normal safe society, in a zone of the storyline that manages to be somehow secure from the camera-eye's intrusions, out of keeping with the way killer-centric scenes do in a more compressed/single-evil-focus narrative.

i think that has to do with the various developments in the characters' off-work storylines, but the whole thing with doc feeding the cat seems most apt for it. she first gets involved in that when darting down to the laundry room in her underwear, then strikes up this extended fascination, kind of a little perversion (thus the ants at the end, the role of food and luring in it, the wine and pleasure), which is in an out-of-the-way yet public so not safe from discovery kind of place.

comparison point, to BTK rigging himself up in the bathroom or wherever.

along these lines, the profiling unit is made from the outset to be kind of an uncertain/unknown kind of zone, dropped in the basement, defined mostly by the mutual uncertainty not exactly being erased but being modified in the course of the professional relationship that develops between the principals in the midst of institutional politics and private motivations. the bit from the first season, that seems to be a little overdone but maybe is not, about being caught on tape luring speck out by talking about 'four ripe cunts', is essential for destabilizing the sense of the profiling unit as the privileged zone of privacy-within-the-public-world that it would otherwise enjoy by default of the serial killer narrative conventions. the main thing they rely on, speech that produces evidence and data, is turned to a use that strikes everyone but holden—even the unflappable doctor expresses disapproval—as being unacceptably base and dehumanizing and akin to the worst of the worst killers, yet as soon as there's fear of its being caught on the permanent record i.e. belongs to the in-principle-public world, their group integrity seems to collectively vanish for various reasons enacted dramatically.

the 'ease' with which they get/make breaks in interviews seems to me to be basically a matter of long-term wrongfooting the audience, playing to holden and not tench. the use of kemper is essential here. his weird affect, genial candor, matter-of-fact about himself and his criminal deviance, his loquaciousness—this is all in the service of gaining ~knowledge of killers~ so they can be caught, anticipated, predicted, etc., which is to say, in the service of an overarching goal that will never be reached within this narrative, unless you think that by seeing the story catch up to the present-day version of the-art-of-serial-killer-hunting you will be satisfied in that. this goal could seem to be realized piecemeal by individual apprehensions in the course of the story, which of course they go on to do a lot to undercut. but the core idea of gaining this knowledge from interviews of incarcerated serial killers seems to be fundamentally at odds with the identify-and-apprehend plot logic that drives filmic action. two different scales of motion and change, and potentially different orders of character/audience relation to them. the allure of kemper is that his speech seems so open, yet he is so obviously not trustworthy; so his counterpart holden is subjected to corresponding agonies.

(at the party, contrast between tench gamely telling killer stories and holden boring people with his idealistic tripe gets at another angle on this. tench is the most ordinary character because he has the most unaffected relationship to speech, which does not preclude its performative use in social settings. i think looking at the characters in terms of their way of occupying various sociological backstages would be interesting—holden sitting too close to tench on the bed in the hotel room where tench just wants to turn off for the night e.g.)

going on with some bits unresolved, available to be relevant, is part of that—like holden's panic attacks. as the profiling unit becomes more 'successful' and its power more established, we can expect more embarrassing/shameful irresolution inside it.

i thought it was very interesting how at this early date (it had not been too long since the first women were even being awarded ph.d.s from ivy league schools!), they play the doctor as weirdly immune to all manner of social and institutional sexism that would be de rigueur in this sort of narrative. one reason seems to be so that they can keep it in reserve to deploy it for specific purposes. it seems that it's only once the profilers ascend momentarily into the world of dc power politics at the new boss's party that we're given that kind of look at men on 'the good side' rather openly treating women as objects of domination. again, say in keeping with the doc's deployment of an analogy between her relationship with her academic mentor, and the killer she's interviewing, this is a way of placing the secrecies/openness of power and control etc. within the narrative's public and private worlds.

seems like the dramatic power of the atlanta moms has to do with the way that they are not shown with any private grief. they hold down public spaces—the regular breakfast at the restaurant, the organization offices and the march, the public meeting scene—and their inner lives are in those spaces defiantly asserted but walled off. june carryl's glasses in her first appearances are an amazing symbol of that—with the glare from them, her eyes are not at all visible, her private feelings are inscrutable, holden and the camera can only confront them from without and at best see themselves. as is apt, since the atlanta moms represent actual (cosmic) justice and its neglect.

golly thats a cracking post thats better than the show tbh

i would need to watch more carefully but rewatching s1 this year i thought i noticed how the extreme cleanness of the ~80s reconstruction~ was more deliberate than i took it to be; seemed like they were enabling a bit of differentiation between regions of the public/social world, by trimming away certain expected mixtures/holdovers that would normally be visible aspects of history/social interconnection.

when tv's greg of dharma and greg shows up with his fbi team, they are in charge (they assist local authorities etc etc); the law is in charge, the president in charge

on this show, no one is in charge

On a second watch it's really interesting and poignant how many parallel possibilities and conspiracies are broached in the Atlanta Child Murders and pointedly left by the wayside once Holden finds his perfect suspect. There are a lot of things conceded to making dramatic television but overall I think the show is very smart about what it's about.

Yeah, I almost think the most important line of the season is when the local FBI agent asks Holden, "What if a white guy had gotten out of that car?" and all Holden can respond is, "But it wasn't a white guy."

That and Kemper pointing out that the only things they can say with certainty (or what they think is certainty) about serial killers is based on the ones that got caught. (Which notably does not include Kemper himself, who turned himself in.)

yep tho tbf i think holdens theory didnt impede an awful lot on the investigation of other leads until the chief on the ground was left with either no other option or was just searching for the administrative equivalent of a divining rod

I can't remember where I heard it--maybe even John Douglas--but someone referred to Kemper as having "arrived at the Source" of his disturbance...which is a funny implication since it suggests that Kemper more or less did something akin to a completed psychoanalysis by realizing that it was his actual Mother that he wanted to kill, and that his articulateness about himself (feigned or not) is a result of that.

the allure of kemper is that his speech seems so open, yet he is so obviously not trustworthy; so his counterpart holden is subjected to corresponding agonies.

this is really well put and reflects, I think, the logic of the show as a whole.

holden was p much right tho is the thing. the other suspects that he didn't much fancy ended up being wastes of time

i don't think this show is v critical of profiling. holden is obv v flawed but he's supposed to be brilliant.

xxp the hug

yes jim but the question he was asked stands- Holden is certain, even when hes wrong

holden is brilliant

profiling is worthwhile

profiling cannot be perfect

holden doesnt accept this

i think all of season 2 holds the r statements nicely

holden was p much right tho is the thing. the other suspects that he didn't much fancy ended up being wastes of time

― Seany's too Dyche to mention (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 12:24 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

we don't know that though. no one, including holden, thinks williams killed all of the kids

Speaking of alternative theories...I did love the ominous silent presence of Homer Williams in this.

holden was p much right tho is the thing. the other suspects that he didn't much fancy ended up being wastes of time

― Seany's too Dyche to mention (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 12:24 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

we don't know that though. no one, including holden, thinks williams killed all of the kids

― na (NA), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 10:28 AM (one minute ago)

and holden wanted to continue investigating! baldy boss at the fbi took them off the case, to holden's chagrin

holden's 'brilliance' is depicted mainly as being a matter of recklessly playing a game of identification with his killer-interviewees, which is shown to produce apparent 'finds' of which little has really been made as yet

the doctor is an interesting character because she's made out to be the kind of member of the trio who is least tempted by identification-with. tench is of such sound disposition that he will do what it takes but basically finds identification or sympathetic performance with the monsters disgusting. holden is set up to be problematic because he has a weird bent that others feel the (wise) need to control. the doctor is by professional disposition and personal inclinations not prone to identifying with anyone or anything, which makes her a kind of ideal, but in the way the show focuses on a narrative of striving to understand the unidentifiable-with via scenes of controlled interaction and identification (the interviews), the liability of her role is that she might have no real contribution to make other than a scientific one, and only stands to be compromised by engaging in any identification/participation at all (hence, her own interview scene later in s2).

holden was p much right tho is the thing. the other suspects that he didn't much fancy ended up being wastes of time

― Seany's too Dyche to mention (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 12:24 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

we don't know that though. no one, including holden, thinks williams killed all of the kids

― na (NA), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 10:28 AM (one minute ago)

and holden wanted to continue investigating! baldy boss at the fbi took them off the case, to holden's chagrin

― Seany's too Dyche to mention (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, August 27, 2019 12:30 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sure, at the end. before that, he consistently rejected the klan as suspects even though everyone in the city kept reminding him that based on history the klan was probably involved. he also rejects any white suspects as possible (based on flawed testing) until the very end of the show when he's like "oh yeah maybe we should have checked out these old pedophiles that everyone told us about three months ago."

xp holden reflects the nature of knowledge in general - to understand a killer one has to identify with them inevitably. his pursuit of this (forbidden) knowledge at least serves an altruistic purpose (to aid in the capture and prevention of future sks) but what is my/the audience's excuse?

well, just to start with, it seems that a false belief would be that the audience is in a position to get understanding by watching, as if seeing an entertaining documentary; i think fincher probably rejects that, wisely, as many filmmakers would

also, the conventional procedural reward would be a renewed sense of security (perpetually threatened but perhaps never really given the fixity of formulas), and another false belief would seem to be that understanding and plot-level apprehension coincide. even in many sk stories they partially deny that belief for the sake of theme or effect, say a killer is apprehended but remains horrifically alien or inscrutable or just won't explain themselves. but the coordination between understanding and the effective action of law enforcement in their protective function is a deep-seated conviction, or wish. so if we go back to your 'forbidden' gloss here, looking for something the audience does/indulges to be excused, i would look for some kind of wishful thinking about securing 'safety' through knowledge. what's forbidden for them is not knowing the evil man, but transgressing the seemingly safe bounds of the ordinary and what it 'knows'. idk.

if there's something to the latter then it probably hooks up with fincher's general pattern of relation to his audiences, which (i couldn't say how this ultimately sorts out) readily invites interpretations of being too shallowly edgy to be really substantial. if that is not the case then the substance would lie in some kind of reversal of expectation about just what is supposed to be edgy or non-edgy in ordinary existence. (anthony edwards in zodiac, tench here—their relations to family in contrast to ruffalo/rdj and holden/the doc.)

^^ “Fincher has a knack for presenting and pacing seemingly dull events in such an involving manner, with such reassuring procedural inevitability, that I am now spending 12 hours in a single month thinking about weird creepy stuff serial killers did, instead of approximately 45 minutes twice a year skimming Wikipedia entries like a normal person”

(I’ve actually noticed watching this that I dislike when things happen. There really is this odd Fincher effect where everything sweeps neatly along a certain process and it feels annoyingly disruptive when something new intrudes on that. And yes, last night, amid that sweep, I did find myself thinking: I read the Wikipedia entry for Dean Corll years ago and wasn’t that a large enough share of my life to spend thinking about him?)

maybe why the tench son storyline doesn't really work for me - too literally "bringing the sk home" (and i keep remembering how the kid got into the case photos last season) xp

xp yes, that's good; i think it might have to do with why zodiac has to be so long.

it seems to be regarded as very costly for tv-makers to have characters that can genuinely have moments of unlikeability, probably one of the few minor novelties of the post-prestige era. betty draper a big one. holden often threatening here to ruin the mood with his annoyances.

xp my impression early on was that they were setting tench jr. up to be an early on-the-spectrum storyline, bc ~tv~, but even after the events of s2 i now think that perhaps he is a big misdirect, perhaps rather inelegant. tench needs something within the family zone of the narrative to make for shaky covert stuff that must be shielded from public view, so bam. perhaps the audience lust for autism characters is just being exploited; easy to get 80s sk-related folx thinking this kid is gonna be killing cats soon, send tench spiralling, etc.

but the opposition between him and his wife in the state-mandated oversight portion is interesting; 'she is not your friend' yet dutifully participating in the process, as opposed to his wife's more understandable bridling at it.

he was going along with it more because he accepts that their son isn't necessarily blameless in the whole thing, while his wife was in denial

one of the less elegantly integrated themes (perhaps because it’s so clearly forefront in everyone’s mind) is the “nature or nurture” thing which Manson underlines.

definitely the most surprising thing I learned in my post-watch wiki trawl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bateson

Paul Bateson (born August 24, 1940) is an American former radiographer and convicted murderer. He appeared as a radiological technologist in a scene from the 1973 horror film The Exorcist, which was inspired when the film's director, William Friedkin, watched him perform a cerebral angiography the previous year. The scene, with a considerable amount of blood onscreen, was, for many viewers, the film's most disturbing scene;[1] medical professionals have praised it for its realism.[2][3]

In 1979, Bateson was convicted of the murder of film industry journalist Addison Verrill and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison; in 2003 he was released on parole, which ended after five years. Prior to Bateson's trial, police and prosecutors implicated him in a series of unsolved slayings of gay men in Manhattan, killings he had reportedly boasted about while in jail, bringing it up at his sentencing.[4] However, no additional charges ever were brought against him. The experience inspired Friedkin to make the 1980 film Cruising which, while based on a novel written a decade earlier, incorporated in its storyline the city's leather subculture, with which Bateson had identified.

"nature vs nurture" is the main thing the tench sub-story is doing: refusing to resolve in either direction

also i liked (and also i think it's related) when they realised that tales of manson were helpfully distractive with the professionals now invading and somewhat controlling their homelife: the shrink and the social worker both (briefly) turn from judgmental and forbidding to ppl excited to be two degrees of separation from an actual famous monster

The scene where Bill first gets briefed on BTK was like "Zodiac" in miniature. I was like, "Yes, more of this!" The fact that Fincher can make dry recitation of procedural material so tense and involving is amazing to me.

i'm sorry if i ask this in a way that is insensitive, but is holden supposed to be autistic

forgot this isn't twitter and i can't delete stuff when i immediately change my mind after posting

i hadn't imagined so, he's just supposed to be weird. i think the characterization of him meeting his girlfriend was defining, as were further interactions where he clings (not the right word) to his Fed identity: square like he seems, and not embarrassed by it, except that the appearance hides a refreshing/disturbing inclination for free thinking and mind-broadening that in his norminess he is ill-equipped to steer into mature development. thus his susceptibility to visioneering, imagining himself as a heroic innovator, etc.

the mentorship sort of relation to tench is interesting because we're slightly supposed to think that it would work out in a predictable way if not for the fact that tench is a bit too much of a throwback despite his seasoned judgment to be able to authoritatively steer this greenhorn who is eager to drown in the mad seas they are embarking onto; the kid just won't listen

tench is an established caricature cast and written and played to surprise us with subtle and more 2019 touches than that initial position would have us expect

holden is a v 2019 netflix series lead, cast and written and played much more through the lens we would maybe expect from this show if it was being made in the 80s

like...hes clearly on spectrum, its just a handwavey cliche pre-rainman 'weirdo' with a technical gift and no people skills.

whether this is fincher being clever, or how the actors/characters turned out, or an understanding that developed with the writers reacting over time....or i made it up...who knows

everyone keeps decribing this as a fincher project -- and obviously his name is going to be biggiest on the marquee -- but it was devised and written by joe penhall, and i believe it's ultimately his concept that fincher is realising (tho i think penhall is more of a backseat role in s2)

holden reminds me a lot too much of the lead in numb3rs (in role and affect), except he cocks more up

mindhunter is better than numb3rs obviously, everything is

everyone keeps decribing this as a fincher project -- and obviously his name is going to be biggiest on the marquee -- but it was devised and written by joe penhall, and i believe it's ultimately his concept that fincher is realising (tho i think penhall is more of a backseat role in s2)

I mean yeah, but Fincher's style and tone are so specific to his body of work that it can't help but seem like it's in conversation with stuff like Zodiac. It's a very specific aesthetic and it greatly informs how we interpret the narrative! It's very easy for me to imagine the same scripts redone in the style of Criminal Minds or whatever and just being background watching at best.

ok fair, i haven't seen zodiac -- i just feel some of the cloudiness of intent we're identifying (by disagreeing!) may be the consequence of this being a collective project in a way that a kneejerk auteurism is muffling?

ok fair, i haven't seen zodiac

i was watching adventures with tip and oh

oh, here’s a tip: watch zodiac

oh yeah, I just rewatched zodiac last month because my spouse had never seen it and I think it may be my favorite fincher thing by a whole lot.