A TIMELY HORROR STORY
Netflix series Mindhunter is revealing the misogynist roots of murderous behaviour
Mindhunter Now streaming on Netflix
Early in the first season of Mindhunter, Netflix’s new show from David Fincher about criminal profiling and the invention of the serial killer, FBI agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff ) tries to understand why crime doesn’t seem to make sense anymore. Beset by spree killers, men who commit grotesque acts of violence against women, and crimes that seem to lack any social or economic motivation, Ford is convinced the meaninglessness reflects a society that’s lost its moral centre.
Over the course of the series, Ford and his partner, Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), come to understand something — all these crimes have an obvious root cause: The men who committed them hate women.
One of the series’ strengths is the way Fincher manages to make these confessionals banal rather than pornographic; it’s the dull minds of the killers that are most clearly exposed, not the thrill they got from their crimes.
On Mindhunter, the men who have committed heinous offences against women are perfectly aware of their motivations, and are candid about them. They hate their mothers. They become enraged when women don’t respond to them sexually, or when they’re trying to rape women who don’t put up enough of a fight. They have a horror of female aging. Some of them, like Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton), feel entitled to female attention.
“My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me, not even our cats when we were kids,” Kemper says to Ford in a harrowing confrontation toward the end of Mindhunter’s first season.
“The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They’re still with me.”
It’s more honest than the men who persistently sexually harass female colleagues and then praise the strength and intelligence of the women they tried to diminish once they are exposed. I’d rather simply hear that a man hates women than for him to brandish the roles he created for older actresses like some sort of shield.
By the time the first season of Mindhunter had concluded, I trusted these spree and sequence killers more than I trusted Ford himself — at least on the question of who had more self-knowledge.
By the end of the last episode, Ford has become like his research subjects who see the world in profoundly distorted ways that allow them to justify their actions. And that’s not even mentioning his growing contempt for his girlfriend, Debbie Mitford (Hannah Gross). He appears disgusted by her sexual history. He’s impatient with her need to study. “Could you just be my girlfriend?” he demands at one point. “You mean, shut up and adore you?” she challenges him. “You could try it,” he shoots back.
By the time Mitford laments the man he was when they met, who was “so sweet and curious,” Ford has the self-awareness to acknowledge that he’s only one of those things now. But he doesn’t recognize what that loss of sweetness means: to a certain extent, he’s reverted to the mean of the society he seeks to understand.
Ford would probably never admit he feels contempt for women, even if he’s willing to adopt misogyny as an interview tactic.
But he’s not immune from the same feelings that infect men who kill women. Ford represents a dangerous tendency in all of us: to separate ourselves from society’s worst deviants and insist their actions are incomprehensible, rather than acknowledge they represent a dark destination at the end of a road so many of us walk.