David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

For PREPOSTEROUSNESS i meant

😎

sorry i should be clearer tbf

i did read it as a kinda scathing comment out of nowhere and reacted badly, but as it was meant its a fair query

can only say i guess that the gaps i feel are in mindhunter pull it below what id wish for based on what it achieves on other levels, whereas the likes of king, if i were to read these days, keep their faults to a level of consistency/vibe within the work that does the job i need it to

obv highly subjective.

nb will probably watch this as a result of going over the cooler parts in my head in order to defend position

what does “chat me up” in thread title refer to?

i guess the evolving BTK sideplot is supposed to be a carrot for us? but i dont really care about that, the show will just as likely suffer as improve if and when the action moves to that case, and no more freak of the week.

i'm not super excited about S2, but what the show does well (pretty much: freak of the week) is too good to miss so i'll def watch

i just wanna watch dude talk to sociology grad students

thanks kinder. Was debating whether to step in myself :)

Despite my feelings that serial killer stories basically appeal to the same impulses as superhero stories -- the daft codenames, the secret identities, the silly MOs, the OTT violence, the titillation, the characters living outside rules of society (which is why I think Heath Ledger's Joker was such a hit, combining the comics and serial killer worlds so successfully) -- I have enjoyed Mindhunter tremedously, even with its flaws.

I've never been a particularly huge fan of the titillation factor in serial killer fiction (or fact!), what does work is the element of solving the mystery or the great spooky unknown out there and trying to stop them, and also the ultimate reasons behind their killer instincts. well i guess it's arguable as to whether or not that involves a bit of the titillation factor, probably it does. but i appreciate how the show doesn't linger long on graphic violence, and how in fact beyond the opening scene of the show the only onscreen violent act is a very quick, non-graphic one involving a bird.

The one thing confirmed about “Mindhunter” Season 2 is that it will feature the Atlanta Child Murders. As executive producer David Fincher told Billboard in 2017, “Next year we’re looking at the Atlanta child murders, so we’ll have a lot more African-American music which will be nice.”

i uh

what

Xpost yes, i thght the lack of violence was refreshing. serial killers interest for me was not ab the violence but the understanding of all types of ppl. understanding society.

I've been waiting for this. (Very awkward quote about the music there--the music in the first season was quite good at times.) I think I started James Baldwin's book on those murders but may not have finished it.

That quote is so gross. Fuck serial killer entertainment.

"Nice"

Clem, what book is it? By Baldwin

I was watching Marcella but just bailed on season two because it's all about child murder and pedophilia and I am like ffs, this is not entertainment.

It's weird how they keep making seasons of shows I don't watch.

i refuse to believe it

(xpost) The Evidence of Things Not Seen:

http://www.amazon.ca/Evidence-Things-Not-Seen-Reissued/dp/0805039392

(Coincidence: reading another book right now, a true-crime thing, that uses that for a chapter title.)

I agree that that Fincher quote is insensitive to say the least, but as far as the show goes, it can't be news that great art comes from the worst sort of human behaviour imaginable.

Season 1 might not have been great art, but it was good art for sure.

Thanks! Will order the book.

Found out that Damon Herriman (Dewey Crowe from Justified) is playing Charles Manson this season & I am v happy with that casting, i reckon he’ll be great

He's also playing Manson in the Tarantino movie

Yeah, the idea that no art should be made about crimes is completely moronic and censorious, though not quite as stupid as the notion that all art is no more than entertainment, as if the reaction of every viewer to every piece of art ever made can be assumed to be the same and thus this subject is off limits.

Works should be judged on their merits but even things we find stupid or cheap probably still prompt a broadening of our perspective as we form those views.

Well, maybe not, but I get Yerac's point.

yeah, like how many more times do we need to see gratuitous rape that serves no purpose to a plotline (fictional plotlines not true crime docs). I was reading a thing about Hannibal and how they purposefully stayed away from those types of things and still managed to make a singular, super expressive and beautiful show about gruesome crimes.

Some things are good, others are bad.

i just started this (s1, e4 so far) and made the mistake of watching an ep right after an old brooklyn 99 and now i can't unsee tench as scully :(

i have other thoughts also inc.the fact that a piece i wrote for arena mag in 1989, abt serial killers as a rising pop cult phenom, quoted the kemper head-on-a-stick line that's upthread -- and that bret easton ellis probablhy read arena mag in those days and so i gave him the idea for american psycho. but not the idea that ed gein said that line

the giant dateline intertitles are excellent and hilarious and always a bit scary

my sister pointed out that holden looks like MACRON so this is a wild ride every time i'm reminded this is the sequence-killer-chatting adventures of macron and scully (but not that scully)

I've thought that myself, he really does.

lol the sequence i am finding it hardest to watch is when he is teaching the little schoolkids abt the "disturbed" -- it's like DON'T SAY THAT, DON'T SAY THAT EITHER, OH NO OH NO, DON'T SAY THAAAAAAAT :(

i didn't really like the holden ford character to start with -- it was like someone over-performing not having a clue, his levels of rigidity and of openness seemed bogus -- but after the tickling ep maybe it's beginning to gel

(i also feel like each ep is beginning with the chesspieces of each character's stance and perspective not in quite the same place (or quantity) they were at the end of the previous ep -- something like that, i don't know how to explain it -- but i like this aspect, it fits in with goffman kinda) (i have read no goffman, but what i imagine goffman is talking about)

huge letters:

JOLIET
Illinois

ok the scene where they brainstorm thru to "serial killer" is bad

mark do u plan to read goffman

not tonight

i'm watching mindhunter

so would u say you’re

waiting for goffman

quantico i'd like to report a murder, it was justified everyone says so

i like that the local cops are mostly smart not dumb

you should read 'relations in public', it's the best

(it's not actually great for what you're hinting at itt but it's great nonetheless)

the kemper scene in e10 is very thomas harris: where lecter says that a "real bottomfeeder" came up with the organised/disorganised category, also (from memory) "do you think you can dissect me with this little tool?" -- also the orderly leaving the pen

(tho i'm guessing harris knows kemper's interviews and habits by heart, so maybe the ideas are running the other way)

I was in a cafe earlier and In The Light by Led Zeppelin came on and it'll forever be associated with serial killers for me now because of this show

Donovan's Hurdy-gURDY mAN the same, due to Zodiac.

Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” too

I love Mindhunter but am determined not to allow anything to diminish Hurdy Gurdy Man for me

OK I completed S1 and these are my thoughts!

There are three interlocked structures, two developmental, one (for want of a better word lol) dialectical.

One: is Holden’s own journey. The season has to get him from wide-eyed puppy full of innocent curiosity to an improvising maverick who has (a) semi-mastered a certain kind of interrogative technique and (b) found he enjoys the power of it, to fuck with heads (not all of them the subjects of the research programme) and (c) is hooked on finding out what happens when he takes it further. There’s the FBI rules — which we start off thinking are wrong and fuddy-duddy and end up thinking wait, maybe some of these constraints are good, evil puritan perv Hoover notwithstanding. So in answer to the Q what goes on in the serial killer’s mind, we actually watching a version of it unfolding in Holden: he’s not killing but he is exploring the pleasures of freeing himself from social (or in this case professional) limits.

Two: is Foucaldian lol. The evolution of a new discipline: towards a set point (the viewers’ modern understanding of it, as shaped by endless post-Hannibal True Crime and Made-up Crime serial-killer books and docs. Two tough elements here: one is re-establishing how people thought before any of this arrived, and not having it just be laughable and ridiculous. Like the FBI restrictions on interviewers acting in sympathy with the perp to get them chatty — not because it encroached on entrapment (like Hoover cared about that) but because it might make the Bureau look bad. Respectability in advance of effectiveness.

(Sidenote: I remember seeing a true-life UK copper — a grizzled old sergeant in charge of the motor-pool, as it’s not called in the UK, sighingly describing the effect of The Sweeney on force behaviour in the 1970s. He said that before The Sweeney everyone parked tidily and neatly: afterwards they all pulled in their cars higgledy-piggledy to the kerb, or up on it, and ran about. Also far more cars came in scratched and dinged. Cops watch cop shows and copy them!)

Three: every ep more or less takes a related “issue” and dissects it morally and procedurally, via discussion between the main three (plus subaltern discussion with the old-school boss and the GF and local cops). So far so good so O/G Law and Order: a quasi-Socratic discussion with each character taking a line, throwing in their truth-bombs, to produce a clearer understanding that remains dynamic and dramatic and conflicted and in tension. I haven’t mapped this out, but it feels like they also switch it up a bit: so that for each new ep and issue, the main three (and sometimes the the old-school boss and the GF) come in with their truthbombs from different perspectives. Like they take it in turn to use the “how can you sympathise with this guy who raped and murdered a child?” line, to reshape the discussion from whichever angle. Partly this is because everyone is on a One-type learning curve, as Two evolves. But it feels like there’s a bit of formalist playfulness also going on here, for the purposes of ambiguity and disorientation.

Re One: well, I found early Holden a bit annoying and convincing, because he’s always balancing his two poles, and this was a bit over-evident because he didn’t always get the balance correct (in the sense of convincing).

Re Two: you get the Beethoven’s Fifth / Manzarek keyboard biopic effect, the depiction of someone in the process of arriving at something they don’t yet know, which you the viewer are so intimately aware of and familiar with that it can’t not be funny when they hit on it. Like the scene where they brainstorm through to “serial killer” as the term of art. Something like that probably happened! (Though not in 90 seconds of discussion…) It was a bad and silly scene: but this is tough stuff to do well.

Re Three: possibly a more effective way to deliver all of the above would be Brechtian (i.e.stylised, so that the games and the goals were more foregrounded) and also funny, like a comedy, Brooklyn 99 via The Good Place, maybe. I mean more of a comedy than it is (it’s a comedy, albeit kept very very low-key — that’s why the datelines are in such big letters). Could it have been greenlit as a stylised Brechtian thing what was also stone-face serious? I think not: formal play of that kind is still locked out of real-life television drama. So as a result, one two and three grind against on another a bit, so that the sense of the scriptwriters heavily moving the moral-analytical chess pieces is (occasionally) on the nose. I don’t mind this — it’s kind of part of how a critic she be attending to a drama anyway, trope watch stuff — but I think they could actually have more (more effective?) fun with foregrounding it! It shd be a choice not an unavoidable error — something like that.

Re the Tickling Principal: discussion above abt why this plot line? The ilx conclusion was that it pins down changing mores, which yes, that’s part of it. But another part is this: the evolution of the tale as it’s being worked needs at some (late mid) point to focus the viewer’s spotlight of worry — re getting the wrong guy, or overreacting, or manipulating to a bogus arrest/execution — and to properly dramatise what’s at stake. But there’s no scope in the show — perhaps because of historical fidelity but also because of plot believability — for Holden in particular and the Unit as a whole to have made a horrible moral/professional error, in re an actual case (or an actual interview). One slip like that and it all falls in. So the story has to step sideways, and create an analogy which makes the stakes clear while actually being more or less risk-free for the main project and plot-line. It gets us to think “Did Holden fuck up there? What if he likewise fucks up on main?” But without causing a catastrophic wobble on main.

(by "Brechtian" I guess I partly mean that being "convincing" needn't be such a big deal. Comedy is one way through this, various kinds of formalist anti-realist stylisations offer others: and in fact i think this drama is very low-key formalist anti-realist stylisation as well as very low-key comedy…)

Good stuff.