David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

i like mccallany a lot - i think the scene where he's saying goodbye to his son was tremendous. jonathan groff and anna torv have had some false moments imo. some of hannah gross + groff's conversations in particular have been pretty meh and in general that relationship feels pretty auxiliary to the entire project.

― Mordy, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 2:39 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

guess i dont disagree with the relationship comment but cant really say til ive finished. i caught Torvs accent a few times but not too bad. mccallany is the best part of the show for me so far.

Ah, I thought it might. xpo

I am not done, but I am expecting this season to end with holden and bill interviewing the can of tuna

and agreed that mccallany is the best, but I'm afraid to check his imdb because I suspect he's been a twilight werewolf or something

https://typeset-beta.imgix.net/uploads/image/2017/10/13/c405ecf7-191f-48f1-9c1d-cd3776cea081-177_mindhunter_107_unit_02157r3.jpeg?w=740&h=444&fit=crop&crop=faces&auto=format&q=70
http://cimg.tvgcdn.net/i/2015/06/30/c8c7e44e-d7ec-4715-b6e1-b898464bc8e2/vegetables.gif

loooool

lol that works too well

I was gonna say, what else has McCallany been in? I instantly recognized him as the “his name is Robert Paulson” guy from Fight Club but he has the familiarity of a character actor you see all the time.

he was also in Three Kings in a good, but small role. He had a key role in the haunted submarine movie Below, if you ever want a decent spookfest and to see his butt.

He was on CSI: Miami in an occasional role for several seasons, and he was super overqualified for that show. He was in Blackhat, the Michael Mann movie. He's been in a ton of stuff. It sounds like he had an interesting upbringing as well, and sounds like a pretty sharp dude IRL.

he was also in Fincher's Alien movie

enjoying the fact that every time they cut to a Quantico establishing shot of some kind, there's automatic gunfire. foreshadowing the future of violence in america vs what occurs in the '70s and '80s? just a neat device?? idk, i like it.

Loved this ^

I was also terrified of the tuna

The bit right at the end where Kemper's big feet flop down on the floor as he gets out of bed. Flop plop. Fuck.

Who's the scary alarm electrician supposed to be?

I came to this from American Horror Story which is a pleasant jump

btk

The music was eh overall but the very last cue was amazing.

Also when can we talk spoilers?

I'm still not finished! but I can avoid the thred...

again I recommend McCallany fans seek out FX's boxing drama Lights Out, though it might be tough to track down these days

Oh shit that’s where I know him from that was great!

otm i dug that too

final scene made me jump like nobodys business GAH

it was a jump and then giggle bit

thought they might interview Jake Blues in Episode 9

lol i started singing She Caught the Katy when they rolled up to Joliet
BUH-NAAAAAAAAA

I accidentally got off the interstate a couple exits early on the way to a destination in the outer Chicago area a couple months ago and ended up driving through that part of Joliet. Looked a little familiar for a minute, and then it dawned on me.

finished this last night. it ended really well and i think they've def got enough material for another season so i'm anticipating that. kinda glad i'm done with the show for a bit tho since watching it was giving me all kinds of anxiety and at least one restless night. some spoiler material below:

the thing i liked most about it was how well they balanced the line between deviant and normal behavior. this isn't a new trope to serial killer fiction -- the subtext of lots of Hannibal was "is Will a serial killer hunter or just a psychopath himself" and they replicate a lot of that with holden. but there's other really interesting stuff they look at too. the principal is probably the principle ambiguity - when is behavior creepy/weird but not psychopathic? even at the end i wasn't sure if holden had done the right thing. his behavior was legitimately concerning and yet his wife was right that he hadn't done anything violent or abusive. it wasn't right that he was ignoring parent's requests but was that wrong enough to ruin his life? maybe. there's a lot of stuff like that throughout the show - esp thinking of stuff like the shoe fetish and transgenderism which the show rightly points out - despite it being associated with particular serial killer cases - are also practiced by ppl who are not murderous. is it right to use these kinds of things as descriptors of sk behavior when they're also non-sk behavior? how do you even parse out what makes something perverse / deviant vs just an unusual fetish or personal identification etc?

the best thing in the show was the conversations with the serial killers and the analyses of the interviews afterwards. i'm guessing holden's /illness/ at the end is just a combination of the sublimated stress from over the season that he hasn't been addressing and the extreme stress over the encounter w/ kemper? his breakup w/ debbie was predictable. i was surprised they never really addressed her sidled up to her research partner during that lab experiment. and holden never tells debbie about why her lingerie/high heels get-up turned him off. presumably that was intentional - if you don't talk about your problems they fester and ruin relationships and ruin your health, etc.

the interrogation in the final episode was amazing. extremely intense and unsettling. the moment when he revealed the rock to the rapist was bone chilling.

I thought the interrogation went well enough, but Holden's cultivation of this hardman FBI agent sucks! He started crossing lines in order to get better interviews with serial killers, now he's just crossing lines because... that's what a badass cop does? The whole "is the tape recorder rolling or not" bit, which he got called out for, is just his reaction to getting busted for saying misogynistic shit on tape. He did a good job of pulling out the details, but the showmanship part was mostly bullshit.

I think the breakdown is the obvious result of all this play-acting. The cracks were showing -- getting unnerved by Debbie's shoes, turning the school principal thing into a FBI matter when he has no real case. Trying to adopt the swagger of a serial killer so he can relate to them when the act is paper thin, it's all really obvious when he goes back to Kemper, because that was his mentor!

I didn't really get the point of the school principal thing - like it was sort of interesting but it felt vague as a subplot. It felt ambiguous in the sense of the writers not knowing what the point of it was either.

It kind of echoed the beginning of the series where Holden's enthusiastic to help local cops but he has no idea how to deploy his skills and ends up offending them. He's got a whole new set of skills, and now he's doing actual damage with his petty meddling.

how long until he brings in the murder weapon and his little "I'm like you" shtick and ends up soliciting a false confession

Is it wrong that I was disappointed in the scene where Anna Torv goes back to Boston, and the writers couldn't just let the clear dialogue and acting convey the fact that she's a lesbian, they had to put a kiss in as well? It felt like the show having its cake and eating it as well -- heaven knows television needs more healthy LGBT relationships and normalized displays of affection, but it also seemed sort of "gotta get that girl/girl kiss on screen."

i assumed they were building towards her character hooking up with holden, regardless of the lesbian scene.

I thought it was pleasantly unclear what the dynamic was going to be

now she's definitely work mom

yeah it's veered away from that i suppose.

the whole can of tuna thing was p weird. and the final scene too.

I thought it was incredibly relatable?

Trying to stealth your way down to the laundry room without pants to put a load in the washer, only to immediately walk back there, forgetting your lack of pants, after hearing a cat. Returning for a few nights, taking your glass of wine to sip on and hopefully spot this mystery cat. Then, forebodingly, the tuna remains uneaten one night. Probably the cat just left the neighborhood, but you study serial killers all day, so....

yeah i get you, i suppose it was just unusually subtle for a tv serial. nothing wrong with that but maybe a slight imbalance to have suggestive tension from an absent cat alongside all these tense interviews with violent rapists.

it's more of the innocuous details of everyday life taking on a new dimension because the work is really getting into their heads!

Bill eventually breaking down to his wife was probably the most heart-wrenching aspect of it

funniest version of it was Holden looking at Debbie's feet and being unable to not think of a guy fucking a shoe

the principal is probably the principle ambiguity - when is behavior creepy/weird but not psychopathic? even at the end i wasn't sure if holden had done the right thing.

The point of this subplot was abundantly clear but it's funny because also, in 2017, "I'm gonna tickle your children's feet and you can't stop me" is 100% a fireable offense and good riddance!

what do you think the point was? to me it's establishing that weird does not mean serial killer. but yeah, a hand on a kids's shoulder could prob = fired today.

yeah the point = ambiguity, changing mores.

i think holden was totally right to talk like a serial killer while interviewing / interrogating the serial killers. it's kinda hard to believe that the FBI would want an agent to refrain from speaking vulgarly/misogynistically for the sake of propriety. surely the more important thing is getting the information / getting justice for the victims?

it still felt kind of weird to me - like i didn't know how i was supposed to feel. i dunno if ambiguity is a good point, just my opinion tho.

xpost

Changing more particularly in the sense that the advent of public consciousness about these kinds of criminals certainly changed what we think of as normal or acceptable behavior. Who hitch hikes anymore? Adult men choosing to be around children are often automatically suspect, etc. Which is why this topic is actually a lot broader than just wallowing in serial killer lore, it's about cultural changes that are pretty broad and long lasting.

x-post

it's kinda hard to believe that the FBI would want an agent to refrain from speaking vulgarly/misogynistically for the sake of propriety. surely the more important thing is getting the information / getting justice for the victims?

Wouldn't surprise me if this hasn't changed as well!

also the principal was about holden trying to take the material they're developing it and applying it to real life. a lot of the back half of the season is about the consequences of the work - see also torv being upset about them trying the one guy w/ the death penalty. they talk a lot about how the end point of this research may be stopping these crimes before they happen next time (not just catching the suspect after the crime) but that kind of approach would necessitate what holden did with the principal - trying to read innocent ppl's behavior to see how it's likely to develop. the question of whether that's an appropriate job for the FBI is an important one. even if the principal should have been fired (he probably should have) maybe holden shouldn't have gotten involved.

it just felt a bit incomplete to me for whatever reason. just nitpicking really tho, i thought this show was excellent.

It's really a pretty fascinating instance of something that had presumably been going on all the while (I always thought this was where folk tales about witches eating children, or vampires, came from) then being named, identified, and studied and in that way leading to massive cultural changes in how people relate to each other--and of course the attendant risk that this new "object" (the serial killer) can now be mistakenly seen even where it is isn't. There's something Foucaultian about the topic (if not the show, really).

The shift in Holden felt v believable to me but I was already a fam of Douglas. The lore is that his ego created a schism with his partners & they differed over methodology

Reading off the questionaire might get you the baseline answers but Holden knows that the subjects are probably just going to tell them what they want to hear & that to him defeats the point of talking to them. To him this is an opportunity...but it’s also a stage. They’re performing the role of subjugated criminal, and he KNOWS it’s a performance. So why not meet their performance with one of his own devising to disarm them & get them to a point where they are no longer in control of their mask

He wants to get into their heads & see who these men were when they were killing, ie who they truly are because that never really goes away - (this is a key element in sexually violent homicides, idk if they address it in the show but it’s similar to pedophilia in that once you act on the fantasy the only thing that will sate the need is to keep doing it).

Holden wants to see who they were to their victims, without the mask of performance. But it is driven from curiosity at first - he does not know that what’s there isn’t something you can see without being changed by it.
The questionaire is the safety glass.
He does not realize that until he’s done away with it completely.
His position of authority in the interview feeds his ego & he wants to be the one to remove the mask. But in doing so he’s changing the nature of the interview AND changing himself.

I think I relate hard to Holden's curiosity, and w/ his impatience w/ ppl who are reticent and find some of that curiosity prurient. I asked Michelle McNamara (RIP) in a Reddit AMA once if she thought that there was a prurient or titillation aspect to interest in True Crime and she gave an answer I really liked:

I absolutely think about this and struggle with this. But I think it's wrong to conflate interest in crime with the creepiness of the criminal. Crime stories shed light on so many aspects of our culture --- what victims get priority, how our criminal justice system works, what certain crimes say about us as a society. They're important questions, and just because lurid shows like Wives with Knives exist doesn't mean people talking and discussing real-life crime stories in a thoughtful, meaningful way can be lumped in with the prurient rubber-neckers. I also always go back to what one detective told me when I asked him about working on GSK: "I love puzzles." He had no shame or regret when he said that. It's been helpful for me to think about it that way.

I’ve talked abt this in the true crime thread but there is also an element of naming your fear, esp given the prevalence of women interested in true crime

we (women) account for a large portion of the victims of these crimes. true crime for me is being afraid of the monster under the bed but leaning down with a flashlight & looking underneath anyway.
because i would rather know what i should be afraid of

for me a little bit is fear but i think it's mostly a part of a general interest in extreme human behavior. looking at stuff like this (as well as other extreme crimes, affiliation with radical groups/ideologies, other sorts of extreme psychological afflictions) brings up important questions for me about what normal people are capable of (and what is required to be capable of things beyond reasonable ken), how radical fringes of society reflect inner pathologies of that society, etc. i really like this show bc i think it's also v interested in these questions.

the Tickled documentary pairs well with this show