Killer, profiler connect in series
Director/producer David Fincher has often displayed more interest in “whydunnit” than “whodunnit” in films from “Zodiac” to “Gone Girl,” and that search for motivation extends far beyond psychological profiling. Social and chronological context are also key to understanding why, which has often set Fincher’s films apart from other thrillers.
“Mindhunter,” whose first season is available on Netlfix on Friday, Oct. 13, finds the director going back in time and representing his own hunger for motivation through the character of a determined but green FBI agent with the allAmerican, Salingeresque name of Holden Ford. Played by Jonathan Groff, Ford believes that the world has changed greatly in the late 1970s, and that the old methods of catching killers, especially serial killers, don’t apply anymore.
Ford is convinced that understanding both the psychology of a serial killer, and the environment in which he has lived in the past, will aid the bureau in knowing how to catch him. At the same time, he is almost affectless, and seems to lack any sense of strategy to convince the bureau’s old guard that they need to modernize their crime-solving methods. He is paired with a veteran agent at the bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit named Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) who is open to Ford’s ideas but is reluctant at first to buck the bureau hierarchy to insert Ford’s ideas into the classes they conduct for agents in training.
Ford is a puppy unwilling to give up a toy as he presses the bureau for permission to spend time on research with convicted serial killers like Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton), a not-so-gentle giant of a man who has killed several people, copulated with the severed head of one of them, and consumed the flesh of another.
For real, as the kids say: The real Kemper is serving eight life sentences in the California Medical Facility.
The series is based on the book “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” by Mark Olshaker and former agent John Douglas, and is beautifully adapted by Joe Penhall with the kind of attention to character detail we see reflected in the hyperrealistic ’70s look of the series.
Groff is a fascinating choice to play Holden Ford, because he can be rather affectless as an actor. He was the wideeyed, semi-innocent center of the HBO series “Looking,” and even his turns at more complicated characters often have a patina of disconcerting calm about them, as in the Starz series “Boss.”
He uses that quality fully in the character of Holden Ford. We see it not only in his determination to instill his theories on the psychology of serial killers in trainee agents, but also in his personal life, after he meets Debbie (Hannah Gross). They date, they sleep together, they are by all appearances in love, but she’s far more sophisticated than he is, and even in bed, he is emotionally detached.
This isn’t accidental on Penhall’s part, because Holden is meant to be a kind of distorted mirror image of Ed Kemper. When we meet Kemper, he is as mechanical and direct as Ford, and the conversations between the two men in the second of the two episodes made available to critics are chilling, brilliant and intentionally disturbing. We never think of Holden as in any way predatory or dangerous, until he’s in the prison interview room with Kemper and we begin to see the personality similarities in both men.
Ford’s contemporized theory of profiling is rooted in the belief that society itself has gone through so many changes after the 1950s that it has, in a way, bred a new kind of serial killer by the 1970s, someone who is a lethal product of genetics, upbringing and living in an increasingly alienating world.
The description fits both Kemper and Ford, enhancing the adversarial interchange between the agent and the killer. “Mindhunter” suggests that many of the psychological and environmental “ingredients” that make one man a monster can make another man a gifted crimesolver.
After all, maybe it really does take one to know one.