David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

also holy shit at nomar's story

do you mean that he didn't remember any details? because he remembered that a motorcycle gang murdered his parents.

― you are juror number 144 and we will excuse you (Sufjan Grafton), Friday, October 20, 2017 9:52 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can't find specifics right now, i thought for some reason he had claimed it at the time but maybe he just later claimed someone else did it and didn't know who. it was a really odd story -- ultimately a couple he was friends with helped defend him, and then the wife left her husband for him.

I went to school with and grew up with the Republic of Ireland's most prolific serial killer, and knew him from the age of 6 as "Nashy". He fled to Ireland in the 90's because he had pissed off the wrong people. He is also a suspect in an unsolved UK murder, as well as killing 4 people in Ireland. I didn't think of him once when I was watching this!

In fact, Google reveals Kieran Patrick Kelly was much worse than him. This Nashy being "Republic of Ireland's most prolific serial killer" is just a local misconception, probably.

you should give your name as "Mindhunter" at Starbucks, regardless

first couple of episodes down and this feels weirdly like masters of sex

both are ongoing narratives about people coming up with new fields of research with case studies, so that kind of follows!

I thought the tuna bit was clever - illustrated a woman's consciousness of being vulnerable (stealth pantless), whilst keeping Torv hard, cool and collected. Kinda like the bit at the end of Alien. The cat meowing was a great choice - cats are mimicking human babies when they do that, also was it someone mimicking a cat to get her attention, small window to dark outside, etc, etc.

the best thing in the show was the conversations with the serial killers and the analyses of the interviews afterwards.

Especially Speck, I thought, because a) it illustrated the unplanned killing type and b) sort of threw a number on the idea of the serial killer as almost a cool super-villain, running rings around everyone (Kemper). Like Speck is just as they say 'a walking middle finger' who seems to live in a haze of anger and violence and so ends up being barely aware of just how far he's gone.

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.

Loved this bit too

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.

Yeah when the long-haired guy starts breaking down

This show his half really good Zodiac stuff and half kinda lame Law & Order SVU stuff and I’m conflicted.

i dont understand where the conflict is :D

Only part I wasnt into, as someone else said, was the whole Holden/Debbie relationship subplot. It felt a little gratuitous, though I suppose there was meant to be the conflict of "what is deviancy, really?" thread of things.

yeah i agree

Also I'm p damn sure they did not have self-stay-up stockings in the 70s.

All these anachronistic music cues and other things weren't really bothering me, but a serial killer in the 70s saying "yada, yada, yada" is a step too far.

finished this yesterday, really enjoyed it - they did a fantastic job of finding great but mostly unfamilar actors for the supporting roles. the guy playing ed kemper was fantastic, such a potent combination of naiveté, manipulation and menace

great to see anna torv again after losing track of her after fringe - she's kind of a unique screen presence. shame she's probably not going to get a chance to use her astonishing leonard nimoy impersonation this time around tho :(

i've obviously been listening to too much last podcast on the left because i ended up saying to my wife 'oh hey i think that's btk' as soon as he showed up and then annoying her with facts about ed kemper as i remembered them during episodes

luv2kempersplain i guess

did anyone mention the Cynics gig poster in the apartment kitchen yet? totally an 80's band. waiting to read thread when i've seen every episode...

catching the 21st century speech is actually kinda fun. it's like where's waldo. "fuckedupness"...

i still have a little of the last episode left. i find this show really frustrating. there's so much about it that's excellent - the look, the sound design, almost all of the acting - but the acting and characterization of holden is super annoying. it's hard to watch a character who just consistently makes the wrong decisions and is overconfident in his abilities and lack of knowledge. at the beginning of the series he feels like an alien who's gradually learning about human beings and their emotions, and then suddenly he's a grizzled jaded fbi agent. some of this might have been intentional but it did not work for me. but i'm still watching the whole thing bc the interview scenes are great and the guy who plays bill is amazing and it's nice seeing all these beat-up looking rust belt cities on tv.

does he consistently make the wrong decisions? he's basically responsible for the program getting off the ground, he frequently cracks open the interview subjects, his profiling instincts on active cases appear to be excellent...

he's play-acting imo, and I keep hammering on it, but I think the facade cracks by the end

hammering on the point, that is, not a fictional character's facade :)

he has some skills but he also seems to take credit, at least in his mind, for stuff that bill does. like in the last episode he's talking about how his gross sex talk helped catch the rapist/murderer, and bill points out rightly that it was him noticing the cut tree limbs that led to the guy being brought in in the first place. they wouldn't have caught the brother/sister/brother-in-law team unless the cop had identified the sister's baby as a weak point and used it to get her to confess. etc. etc. he credits everything to their very basic analysis knowledge when basic police work is still getting most of the work done. ugh. he's annoying.

holden is good at interviewing but he would never actually catch any bad guys on his own. also his interview techniques are built on leading and coercing suspects who they go in assuming are guilty, as debbie points out. he doesn't have any actual investigative skills.

you're right that noticing the cut trees found the rapist but if you remember he aced the polygraph and was going to go free unless they convinced him to confess. staging the interrogation and some of the gross talk was 100% essential to actually getting a confession out of the guy. it's not /just/ the profiling work - there's real detective work as well. but these local police stations don't really need the FBI to teach them how to follow basic leads. they need them for the experimental profiling stuff. and imo it has been essential.

and like the brother/sister/brother-in-law team the local cops weren't investigating them at all bc they found the crying sincere and felt bad for the fiancee. it wasn't until the fbi came in and really followed their hunch (that the crying was bogus) that they were really able to drill into the case.

holden just sucks

he's trying too hard, working a little bit above his skill level

he never takes off the fbi man pants, even when he's off the job. that's how hard he's trying.

booo

I love stuff like this

https://t.co/MU7U33DK05

— Rob Savage (@DirRobSavage) October 24, 2017

^ Breakdown reel showcasing David Fincher's invisible visual effects in the Netflix Original Series Mindhunter.

huh, that's great - i did find myself wondering where they'd found so many pristine vintage tvs!

cats are mimicking human babies when they do that

my favorite Groff-ism

I CAN SEE THAT YOU’RE NAKED

I CAN SEE THAT YOU’RE .. cold

i enjoy his comedic timing

i keep thinking about the comment that one of the killers makes that the urge to kill is like the urge to sneeze - creepy as fuck and distressingly relatable

cats mimick their own kitten vocalizations for life if they're raised by people, but afaik it has nothing to do with human babies. feral cats tend to not vocalize a lot.

cats mimick their own kitten vocalizations for life if they're raised by people, but afaik it has nothing to do with human babies. feral cats tend to not vocalize a lot.

― mh, Wednesday, October 25, 2017

no argument with that

we finally knocked out S1 so I'm ready for this thread

item #1: cmd-F "kristoff" 0 results; come on, nerds

<3 kristoff

http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/mindhunters-deft-commentary-on-toxic-masculinity.html

^^^ dind ding

man that is A+

Watching this again. The writing is fantastic, but the direction is even better.

I love the first meeting between Holden and Debbie meet in the bar, when both characters realize the other is smarter than they assumed. It gets very dense, moving quickly to a discussion of Durkheim's theory of labeling.

Sounds pretentious, right? But rather than submitting us to this directly, Fincher moves the conversation into a crowded bar, creating an excuse to use subtitles. This permits viewers to *read* the concepts and reflect on them, rather than *hear* them from actors and dismiss them on instinct.

I call that smart, functional directing.

i found the technical aspects of this show more enjoyable than the overall experience. i mean, i didn't know we'd have to wait til next year for the BTK thing to go anywhere. this is the first show i've watched in its entirety in a year and kinda wish i'd chosen something else, but i'm def a sucker for this thing.

it will be a true crime if Jack Erdie doesn't win something for the Speck portrayal. just mesmerising.

i think if anyone wins anything it'll be Cameron Britton, and well-deserved too. but you're right about Jack Erdie.

probably because this is a fact-based show, they have a group of killers who are all very different in demeanor and reasoning and accessibility and levels of self-control, while managing to lay out a foundation of some vague common ground. it's refreshing to see an intelligent presentation of these types of people, i mean it goes without saying that the godlike omnipotent serial killer with a plan is such a tiresome cliche. even when dealing w/historical fact i think it would be easy to fall into the "i'm most dangerous when i'm caged" Hannibal Lecter BS but it never does except when it toys with it a bit at the end, when Holden has his panic attack while meeting Kemper.

i guess the best comparison to make with this show really is Zodiac, since so much of it revolves around interviews that are remarkably reminiscent of the Arthur Leigh Allen interview scene.

are there funko pops for this yet? that's all i really want to know.

lol

yeah it def does a better job than most of these types of shows of not fetishizing the killers in that “ooh theyre such geniuses” way
like no actually when you scratch the surface they’re violent dudes who are fucked up & pathetic

i like the way it shows the origin of the language surrounding serial killers too, like ppl i think may take it for granted that it’s always been codified in this way when it’s actually only come about in the last few decades

I guess we're at the beginning of the funkopopalyse right now and I feel that it's a bad sign for the consumer market

after watching this i watched a couple of serial killer interviews on youtube and it's weird how mundane they are. the banality of evil and all that. was surprised by how lucid and articulate ted bundy was though. he knew exactly why he had done what he did. it was like listening to a psychiatrist talk about someone else.

that's the part that's most chilling to me. some people just become emotionally numb but carry this weight after they've killed someone or done something grave, but the interviews they dramatized (and some of the source material) have these matter of fact recitations as if they're talking about going to the store because they ran out of milk