David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

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.

https://ew.com/tv/2019/07/17/mindhunter-season-2-photos-jonathan-groff-david-fincher/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIazdDw4tao

oooh i am excite

That guy whoever he is really looks like David Berkowitz

Manson (45 seconds in) looks spot-on.

yeah the casting and make-up crews do amazing work on this show, that's an eerily manson-y manson they've conjured up there

it's the same Manson as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

that's a tough spot to get pigeonholed in

Kinda want to rewatch S1 now.

Is that really the same Manson actor? The do-over looks much more accurate in Mindhunter (which is probably three or four years later, mind you, so not exactly the same look).

Just found a long Fincher conversation with Elvis Mitchell about the new season.

more trailer action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHlJQCyqiaI

the guy playing Berkowitz in this is uncanny

New season’s pretty silly tbh. Several steps towards NBC Crime Show material.

how could nbc crime show material be silly???????!?

https://66.media.tumblr.com/086559e8de27747195afe463d9b3cb89/tumblr_n54sw2HrA91t4ihqpo1_1280.jpg

Sorry, maybe I should’ve said CBS. Network TV crime show contrivances, anyway.

Thought the ending of ep 1 was a bit ott, and the colour grading is *terrible*, otherwise I'm hooked again.

I'm re-watching s1. Ep 2, the girlfriend uses the word 'mentionitis' which I'd be surprised if it was a term in the 70s?

Season 2 starting off with Roxy Music. Yes please.

the end credit tunes are great (and very expensive)

Tusk at the end of s2 e2, unfortunately that one’s always gonna belong to The Americans for me

1. the end credit tunes are great (and very expensive)

My interest in Season 2, considerable to start, just tripled.

2. I always want songs to surprise me, so I'm ducking out for good at this point. (That's on me--I always name specific songs in movies and TV shows when posting.)

decided to rewatch s1 first

i am having a GOOD TIME

Tusk at the end of s2 e2, unfortunately that one’s always gonna belong to The Americans for me

I'm only 4 eps in but the filching of music from Americans is a bit on the nose - Tusk, Talking Heads "Overload", Roxy, Blondie. Cmon man.

Enjoying it so far though. Damon Herriman did a decent Manson for an Aussie (if y'all havent seen "Mr Inbetween" you really should check it out).

Prof lady's gay love sideplot feels a bit shoehorned in, I'm someone who will always be irritated by pointless sex/makeout/love/breakup scenes in shows though. I mean ok, her being gay and having to keep schtumm is important, but still.