David Fincher's serial killer chat 'em up MINDHUNTER

Took me forever to twig that Kemper was also the guy who played Hazel in Umbrella Academy.

which brain genius at netflix decided to keep the credit-skipper activated for all the expensive outro music

The interviews are all great but five or six episodes in, I have no idea what the central thrust of the storyline is.

I guess it's just solving (or not) BTK and Atlanta.

The Guardian is not fooled:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/19/the-real-mindhunters-why-serial-killer-whisperers-do-more-harm-than-good

As Clark points out, plenty of people experience violence, rejection and trauma in their childhood, but don’t end up burying severed heads in the garden beneath their mother’s bedroom window. Instead, they have the strength of character to overcome.

I really don't think whether you end up being a serial killer is to do with "strength of character" lol

there is a bit of dramatic nullity to them looking into btk when you know he gets away scot free until he sends a floppy disk to the police with metadata in the 00s

The interviews are all great but five or six episodes in, I have no idea what the central thrust of the storyline is.

The lack of a "thesis" or whatever doesn't really bug me. If anything I feel like the overriding theme of the show is that all that bloody-minded analysis and investigative work is 99% folly

i think the point of that (and a big theme of the season) is that all along these monsters are operating and there may not be any satisfying resolution in sight xp

xxp well, this season ends with their atlanta suspect being nabbed for 2/27 murders ~maybe~, and a title card noting that none of the child murders are closed by 2019, so that may be kind of a thing going on.

and that was a thing in zodiac too obv

I know it's only 'based on' real events but the scene with the cross had me all [citation needed].

haha

The faux (I assume) archival footage cutting in there was amazing though, like Holden is trespassing on history

xp got conspicuously found-footage there for a sec or two

the footage of the march would have been much more powerful without holden's keystone cops act, imo.

Sure, but out of place/theme in a season that's explicitly about the FBI's intrusive and ineffective methods generating further indignity

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

personally I took it as "Holden has given himself a self-important, symbolically-important-to-him task that is effectively worse than useless"

I feel like I watched a different season to a lot of the Twitter commentariat. I liked this one way better than the first - no lionization of FBI tactics, replaced instead by a clear indictment of just how untethered from reality their methods are, and just how tone-deaf and worse analytically inclined obsessives like Holden are in the face of systemic problems. The fact that Carr and Tench are so manifestly incapable of dealing with their personal lives despite their supposed perceptive gifts and/or training helps to underline this. Also, I thought this season did a great job of giving the middle finger to MFM-style obsessives who laugh off the human toll, while simultaneously acknowledging just how infectious these narratives can be (Holden's glee at getting to interview Manson for example).

(Also, McCallany is fantastic so the increased focus on Tench over Ford was a huge plus for me.)

and that was a thing in zodiac too obv

just finished this and yeah my first thought was how this ends on the exact same note as zodiac. which, if you're gonna copy...that's a good thing to copy.

I really enjoyed this a LOT, despite a bit of impatience with some of the "domestic" storylines...which felt a little too patly reflective of their work.

also I had my mind blown a bit by this sequence of facts

Surprised to learn Holt McCallany, a brick shithouse who in another age would play heavies and stevedores in studio Bs, a) is theater royalty whose mom is Julie Wilson, b) attended La Sorbonne, c) studied Shakespeare at Oxford, d) has a French-language Dany Boon movie en route.

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) August 21, 2019

I still have a few episodes to go but Simon H. otm. I was especially pleased by them putting right on the screen how wrong FBI got BTK from the very start. (Must have a menial job, can't have meaningful relationships with women, etc.)

While the show is obviously critical of profiling (contrary to what come credulous viewers think) it’s also going to far to imply that it’s flatly dismissive of it. I think what attracts the creators’ interest is precisely that profiling takes place in a zone of indeterminacy and intuition that *can’t*, fundamentally, provide certainty. I think that indeterminacy is also what’s so interesting about the show and why it’s not just a fancy detective show (though it is that of course).

Holt McCallany is so good in this. This season I am starting to feel like J Groff was miscast though. He kind of disappears in most scenes.

I wonder if Tench will get a one-season gf next

Also, re the Tench subplot with his son, I know some ppl found the depiction cartoonish, but

reading this old interview between Rooney Mara & David Fincher in which Fincher said when he was a kid he used to fill up baby dolls with hamburger meat and throw them on to the freeway

— Davis. (@realdaveimboden) August 20, 2019

Does no-one else have a problem with the colour on this thing? Look at these fucking oompa loompas!

The colour wash feels right to me. It makes it seem like everything is drenched in cigarette smoke, even though hardly anyone actually smokes in it.

I was trying to figure out why the yellow walls felt right for the period, and that’s it.

There's a bunch of articles on the color grading for the show. I'm into it.

I did cry foul over Bill's natural wood kitchen cabinets. You'da been accused of witchcraft for choosing such prosaic housewares in that era.

I was going to say i felt this petered out to a weird ending, but Simon's comments have made me rethink that. They never really succeeded at anything, which is more real, really.

Even though I enjoyed it, the Gary Numan montage felt really out of place.

I was critical way above about them doing the atlanta child murders this season but it was drastically different than the shitty ass Marcella series 2 that I was was bailing on at the time which was just a nightmare of using gratuitous child predation/murders.

I didn't see it noted yet, but at least the rest of the cases were reopened this year.

Good interview w/ McCallany

https://www.vulture.com/2019/08/holt-mccallany-mindhunter-season-two-interrogation-scenes.html

I always love when an interviewer asks about a scene in a certain way and it makes the actor go back into character just to explain themselves.

i had low hopes for this but it was v good tbh

This was excellent, better than S1. Felt more focused and I even liked all the non-work subplots. It's a little strange that by the end so many things get ignored or don't exactly resolve - BTK, Holden's panic attacks, Bill's family situation, Wendy's role in the BSU - but it fits thematically into the show, that we don't have the answers to a lot of things

holdens tummy

- i am entertained by this show enough that i watched both seasons (though i ff'd some of the brian-nance stuff near the end) so that's the caveat for any negative stuff i say below
- this is a dumber show than it wants to admit. so many "DO YOU SEE???" parallel plotlines, so many antagonistic serial killers who suddenly tell them everything once they find the one button to push (e.g. if you give a racist killer some candy then he's not racist anymore), so many cliched plot and character beats. i think part of this is the result of the 21st century streaming show short season, you've gotta take some shortcuts when you only have eight episodes)
- mccallany is great, most of the serial killer actors are great (though the son of sam prosthetics/makeup was distracting)
- what is holden's deal supposed to be? we get home life and background on carr and tench but not really on holden (i don't remember s1 that well, i know we saw him with his fantasy girlfriend but do we know anything else about him or his life?) he's such a frustrating twerp that it has to be intentional but it also makes the show less fun to watch
- i appreciate that it's ultimately a show about failure. more art should be about failure.

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

I’m glad they didn’t hold out re the antagonistic killers longer even tho it might be more realistic but the interviews are the meat of the show and delaying that could’ve gotten tedious quickly I don’t mind the shortcut breakthroughs

sure, i'm just saying for a "prestige" show they pull a lot of SVU moves

there were a couple of classic "get important clues from someone doing their job" law & order scenes - the recording studio guy, the neighbor trying to get to work, etc.

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