Cracking the code of Mindhunter

The second season of Mindhunter arrived August 16, following up its contained, interview-format predecessor with high-stakes thrills. Based on the book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (by former FBI agent John E. Douglas and coauthor Mark Olshaker), the new installment of David Fincher’s Netflix series uses “criminal profiling” concepts studied in season 1 and applies them to then-ongoing cases — the Atlanta Child Murders, the BTK Killer — resulting in rip-roaring intensity.

The disparity between the two seasons, while tonally chasmic, is where the series lives and breathes as a singular text about the men who take center stage in crime fiction.

[Ed. note: this story contains spoilers for Mindhunter seasons 1 and 2.]

The show’s protagonist Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), based loosely on Douglas, is the linchpin for the series’ machinations on criminal psychology. On the surface, Holden and Mindhunter fit neatly into the “insufferable genius” genre of male-centric genre storytelling (Sherlock Holmes and his various descendants; Numb3rs, House, Good Will Hunting, etc.), and, given the premise, the series acts as a retroactive predecessor to the modern procedural. Set in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the show chronicles the real-world establishment of the very language upon which popular successors like Criminal Minds and The Silence of the Lambs would eventually be based — with one key difference. In academic terms, Holden Ford sucks at his job.

The first season of Mindhunter begins with Holden directing police traffic at a hostage showdown. The fast-talking, seemingly quick-thinking negotiator can’t seem to keep up with the situation (which grows increasingly complex, as the perpetrator claims to be invisible and begins stripping naked). By the end of the opening scene, the perp has killed himself and has left Holden slack-jawed. In the second episode, after an older officer requests his help with a particularly violent murder, Holden utters the three magic words that go on to define his trajectory: “I don’t know.”

This “I don’t know” is embarrassing for Holden, a man who speaks with the disposition of an academic (even his party stories sound like dissertations) and sermonizes from an egotistical pulpit. Over the course of the season, as he builds his criminal database alongside the FBI’s Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and consultant Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), he’s driven as much by acquiring knowledge as he is by the need to show it off. In his interviews with Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton) and other serial killers, Holden begins from a place of timidness; he’s often eclipsed by these larger-than-life killers, and often at a loss. But as the season wears on, the way these interview scenes are edited and shot tells a different story.

By episode 4, a key component to the interviews are the reaction shots of Holden and Tench. The duo throws each other knowing glances when they seem to be making headway. In earlier episodes, these looks start out as silent questions, concerns.. But by the time the duo gets to the shoe-obsessed Jerry Brudos (Happy Anderson) in episode 7, these looks — at least Holden’s — play like implicit “I told you so”s. Place the camera a little more head-on and throw in a crash-zoom, and Holden’s close-ups may as well be Jim’s from The Office.

Holden’s own MO becomes reductive in episode 8. The cold open consists entirely of words like “deviant,” “pyromania” and “torture” being circled in red ink, and nothing more. And while the function of these circles is eventually clarified — an elementary school principal wants them struck from Holden’s Career Day presentation — we’re left to sit with these highlighted buzzwords through two minutes of opening credits without further context. During the rest of the episode, Holden preemptively applies his serial killer roadmap to oust the aforementioned principal for his tickling habits. Everyone around Holden deems this an enormous waste of time. It’s a facile, borderline satirical application of criminal profiling, swinging far, far, away from the frigid prison settings of the rest of the series and towards a sunny town that, perhaps, doesn’t require the input of the Behavioral Science Unit.

The small-time investigation feels like Holden tumbling down a rabbit-hole of paranoia, based on a language he created. And yet, the lawman wields his own playbook like sacred knowledge that mere mortals simply don’t understand.

Holden’s obsessive codifying of human beings becomes all the more complex thanks to actor Jonathan Groff. Mindhunter presents Holden himself as a contradiction; part and parcel of many “insufferable genius” characters is their masculine prowess, which often plays out through intellectual domination and, on occasion, (hetero)sexual promiscuity. Mainstream cinema has practically been dominated by one such character since 2008: Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. Holden, on the surface, is primed to fit that model, in his numerous sex scenes with girlfriend Debbie (Hannah Gross), in his fruitless pursuit of Wendy Carr — turning him into a lapdog — and in his willing re-creation of violent, misogynistic language when trying to converse with various serial killers. Essentially, he engages in murderous locker-room talk.

Yet what makes these heterosexual pursuits so magnetic is, ironically, the demureness of Groff’s performance. He’s small in stature, so his attempted ascendancy into the throngs of aggressive malehood feels like a Napoleon Complex. Furthermore Groff, an openly gay man known for his campy King George in Broadway’s Hamilton, makes little effort to play Holden as traditionally masculine or heterosexual, be it in posture, gesture or tone of voice. In the process, scenes of Holden discussing cunnilingus with his girlfriend, or moments where echoes Ed Kemper’s sexual worldview in other interviews (getting “that young pussy before it turns into mom” — eugh) become dissonant. The show essentially deconstructs the egotistical, often sexual impulses driving these “troubled geniuses,” by unearthing the performative nature of their social masculinity.

By the end of the season 1, Holden is unable to hold on to this all-powerful, all-sexual, all-knowing masculine façade. When he visits Ed Kemper in episode 10 (after being reprimanded by the Office of Professional Responsibility for saying “cunt” one too many times), Kemper asks him why he came. Unable to maintain his status quo of being the smartest guy in the room, Holden finally allows himself to say “I don’t know” once more. The camera — for the first time in the series — leaves the tripod, becoming a frantic, hand-held mess as Holden stumbles through the hospital hallway. He repeats “I don’t know” over and over, as the answer to every question.

The second season reveals the logistics of this physiological episode: it’s an anxiety attack. However, the unrestrained language of this climactic scene, set to Led Zeppelin’s In the Light, makes the mere utterance of “I don’t know”— Holden stepping off his pedestal — feel liberating. After a season’s worth of codifying the masks worn by serial killers, Holden finally removes his own.

What, then, is season 1 of Mindhunter really about, if Holden’s pursuit of knowledge is framed with such disdain? The frequent vignettes of the strange man in his ADT uniform (Sonny Valicenti) speak to this idea. Nearly once per episode, season 1 cuts to a man in Park City, Kansas who fits some of the profile elements codified by Holden, Tench, and Carr. A knowledge of serial killer history might lead one to believe he’s Dennis Raeder, the BTK Killer — episode 6 of season 2 all but confirms this, when he’s seen photocopying BTK’s emblem — but the largely disconnected nature of his season 1 appearances casts at least a shadow of doubt.

History is not the main driving force behind Mindhunter. Holden, Tench and Carr are fictional characters, and their sessions with Kemper are composites of later interviews conducted by people other than John E. Douglas. In some of these sessions, the real Kemper — who comes off much more personably than Britton’s blood-curdling savant — even expressed remorse about his killings, which flies directly in the face of the characters’ serial killer system. In fact, the profiling created by Douglas (and by the characters in the show) has largely been debunked, something Mindhunter seems slyly aware of in its dressing-down of Holden.

The Kansas vignettes are odd, though in the first season, they come off as troubling because of the particular elements of criminal profiling with which they’re contrasted. The show, in essence, teaches you how to read these scenes — before eventually pulling the rug out from under Holden, the man who wrote the textbook. In the season’s final moments, all this ADT serviceman does (moments after Holden’s “I don’t know”) is burn a series of creepy drawings. Without the retroactive confirmation of his identity in season 2, all we know about this Raeder-like composite is his surface resemblance to some of season 1’s other killers.

This month’s season 2 reframes season 1 by not only confirming Raeder’s identity, but confirming the aptness of applying Holden’s hole-riddled process to identifying him. Therein lies the subtle finesse of season 2; Holden’s methods may lead one to be right about BTK, but Holden himself is wrong about so much more.

While season 2 begins with new BSU overseer Ted Gunn (Michael Cerveris) talking up Holden’s concepts — mere days after Holden’s anxiety-stricken admission of his own ignorance — the rest of the season forces Holden’s theories into practice. The results are less than ideal. On one hand, by swapping out the interview setting for an ongoing investigation, Holden is forced to bump up against not only the realities of bureaucracy, but the realities of racial, socio-economic and political forces that have, thus far, been mere abstracts in his studies.

On the other, it takes central questions of nature-and-nurture put forth by the BSU, often casually and callously, and dramatizes them. It makes them deeply personal for Bill Tench, as he’s now forced to question why his adopted son Brian — an unusually quiet child — would witness a murder and not say anything about it. (The show unsettlingly suggests Brian fits some of the profile bullet-points; the degree to which he’s culpable is mirrored by the debate around Elmer Wayne Henley, protégé to The Candy Man).

By shoving the BSU’s ideas out into the real world, Mindhunter season 2 pokes holes in them; equating homosexuality with deviance or violence, for instance, a suggestion that breaks down in light of the closeted Wendy Carr. Whenever Holden is right — like he is about the race of the Atlanta child killer — aspersions are cast on the degree to which he’s right, or whether he’s right by chance. Regardless of his reasons, Holden’s obsession with finding a Black killer while considering no other suspects plays like thoughtless racism, in a city mired by racial tensions. Unlike the previous season, we’re actually shown the pictures of many of the Atlanta victims. We even visit some of their homes. The horror is far more immediate and far more personal, and so Holden Ford’s methods have higher stakes.

The second season reintroduces Black FBI agent Jim Barney (Albert Jones), a conscientious counterweight to the blinkered Holden, who now scoffs at lowe- class, less articulate killers. Barney, however, meets these killers at their level in order to understand them. He achieves Holden’s initial goal, which now seems lost on the milieu of celebrity killers like Charles Manson (Damon Herriman).

Holden, while certainly well-meaning toward the mothers of the Atlanta victims, is far more concerned with being right than with actually catching the killer. And although it’s his suggestion of patrolling bridges that finally leads to an arrest, the season’s closing text — about how most of the killings remaining unsolved to this day — is ultimately an indictment of Holden’s M.O., which involves making conclusions and working backward from them. Holden caught Wayne Williams, a killer who matched his profile to near perfection, but justice, it would seem, remains unserved.

Holden Ford appears to have, like his own description of the school principal, “developed a compulsion he’s justifying as a choice.” His fawning fascination with killers like Manson is his overriding impulse; his fixation on the largely unempathetic, ironically, turns his empathy away from those who might need it: friends, loved ones, victims, and so on. In season 1, Ed Kemper, an ostensible villain, speaks about serial killing with the same casual cadence as he speaks about heterosexual dating rituals, and the quirks of modern romance as codified by dominant men. Holden Ford, our hero, who resembles so many heroes in genre, joins him happily. In season 2, he’s sent to Atlanta — a recipe for disaster.

By placing Holden at the center of season 1, Mindhunter expertly satirizes a now well-worn crime genre, in which the solver of crimes takes center stage, rather than the crimes themselves, or their victims. By yanking him into season 2, a story with more nuance and care than he seems capable of, the series holds a mirror to the revered concept of the callous genius, whose work matters more than his words, and whose charisma means more than his care.

Rather than holding the work alone as paramount, and as separate from human considerations (a concept one could easily apply to debates around great filmmakers being assholes), Mindhunter season 2 binds the original and new approaches together; the work is inherently empathetic, or at least it needs to be. In doing so, the show takes aim at the very values held dear in so much of western media, zeroing in on the kind of people, the kind of aesthetics, and the kind of mechanical social behaviours held up as the norm, positioning traditionally masculine components of crime fiction as not so different from that which Mindhunter codifies as sociopathic.

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Siddhant is an actor, independent filmmaker, television writer and freelance film critic. He lives in Mumbai, New York and online.