Mindhunter, written by Joe Penhall and produced by David Fincher, is a crime drama series set in the late 1970s that follows two FBI agents- rookie Holden Ford (played by Jonathan Groff) and veteran Bill Tench (acted out by Holt McCallany) with famed psychologist Wendy Carr (played by Anna Torv). They conduct interviews with several incarcerated serial killers to make a criminal database for profiling and studying the motives and deterministic character traits of serial killers. The show, released on October 13, 2017, on Netflix, is based on the true-crime book Mindhunter by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker.
The show builds itself by examining the investigative techniques (uncanny at times) of the detectives, their interactions and encounters with some infamous serial killers, and the narrative effect of the serial killers themselves. It dramatizes the events inspired by real-life FBI agents, Douglas and Robert Ressler. In the forty years since the Behavioral Science Unit was launched into popular culture with Thomas Harris’s series of thriller novels, Red Dragon (1981) and Silence of the Lambs (1988), it has emerged as a popular setting for screenwriters interested in probing the nature of good and evil within the context of the American criminal justice system.
Every episode of Mindhunter is built around Agent Ford and Agent Tench visiting a new offender and soliciting his thoughts on his deviant actions. As we witness this layout of the show, we need to examine how the screenwriters of the show navigate between on-screen representation and off-screen reality to take into account the “authentic” quotient. So, how exactly does genre play an active role in writing for an expectant audience and how do screenwriters learn to manage expectations?
Ian Macdonald’s concept of the screen idea, defined as ‘the core idea of anything intended to become a screenwork’, may find expression in forms including, but not limited to, notes from development meetings, show bibles, research, treatments, screenplay, and final film. Macdonald traces the evolution of these paradigms, describing the cyclical process by which the screenwriter as a consumer recognizes a convention and begins to ‘incorporate it into their sense of experience before it is “converted” (produced or re-produced) into a new commodity’.
In Mindhunter, the dialogue in the interview scenes presents the killer as a fount of knowledge, the investigator as an eager receptacle, and the psychological boundaries between the two characters as disturbingly permeable. But how do we ethically accept the depiction of these ‘authentic’ monsters on screen? To what extent can we allow a piece of media to evade moral responsibility, and how do we deal with the fact that real-life killers permeate through the screen into the audience for consumption’s sake?
To me, perhaps the most interesting question of all is: how does a personality shine through and manage to enrapture an audience from behind the screen? Ever since my girlhood, I have found myself truly fascinated by the true crime genre. I have often found myself losing hours and hours deep-diving into the lives of these serial killers and their intricacies. What exactly piques this fascination with the serial killer’s psyche? There must be a reason there are hours of unedited interviews with real-life serial killers, and they can’t all be for mere study. The Mindhunter and true crime genres are well aware of their target audience and they know the tantalizing pull of a truly disturbed individual, one that is condemned to be beyond the moral laws of existence.
This fascination can also be seen in our history. Since ancient times, our society has been grappling with the ideas of crime, punishment, and discipline. Philosophical and psychological inquiries of the self have proved to reveal that morality has been inculcated into us to the point that we cannot consider ourselves and the societal expectations we perform within to be without its direct influence. Freud’s psychoanalytic approach has talked of the id, ego, and superego as approaches to pruning desires and cultivating an acceptable image of oneself in society. But we have always, as a society, gravitated towards crime. The repetitive cultural return stands proven when we look at the symbiotic relationships purported by the popular media, with the popularity of mini-dramas, and documentary-style TV shows featuring figures such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, and the collective, which thrives on the sensationalism fed to them in all media styles.
While acting as a transgressive figure functioning outside of the moral government of societal laws, the serial killer figure means to serve quite conservative ends. Joseph Grixti argues that the cultural construction of serial killers reinforces a reactionary sentiment, positioning these criminals as monsters who ‘repeatedly emerge as the exceptions that make the rule’; they are ‘the chinks and cracks in the fabric’ that ‘remind us of the structural soundness of the fabric itself’. The depictions in the genre are controlled by the image of the white male figure whose violent outbursts are inflicted on the female subject, thus feeding an existing form of discipline and the social control of women under the guise of fear and terror. Thus, the media re-establishes the existing narrative of policing women’s bodies under the dominant figure of the unreliable male terror (as seen in tropes such as the final girl in the horror genre).
It has been suggested that the extent to which serial murder captures our imagination as a culture, both in the “real life” present (as a news story, for example) and as a true crime or fictional film, suggests an attempt towards fulfilling an unmet need. Annalee Newitz says that stories about serial killers come to us as commodities, safely framed as entertainment. Even as audiences learn about the profound violence to which alienated labor can lead, they are alienated from their discovery. All that’s left for us to do is consume these stories—again and again and again.
Mindhunter engages with the familiar tropes of its genre, such as the socio-cultural considerations of the serial killer as a traumatized person, monster, enigmatic artist, innately monstrous, and a possessor of knowledge that we are hungry for, to name a few. Christopher Bollas’s psychoanalytic perspective contends that the act of murder reverses the power dynamic of the killer’s historical victimization, and by killing his victims, he seeks to transcend his narrative. Thus, there is a crystallization of stereotypes in the figure of the serial killer in popular media. And our culture, time and again, returns to these figures, a compulsion that has only been strengthened by the capitalist exploitation of media, an exploitation that relies on a rapt audience willing to revisit the sites of trauma. The recent boom in media surrounding the serial killer genre, like Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story on Netflix is part of this very process of media exploitation. Streaming platforms function by regurgitating the same old formula into a new setting and internet users seem willing to engage with this loss of consciousness that comes with the binging culture. This emergence of an industry culture on the web, aided by social media, has commodified virtually every waking second of our lives, including the leisure time we spend scrolling our phones or binge-watching our comfort shows. The culture of exploitation thus becomes pervasive, controlling almost all aspects of our daily lives without us being aware of or wary of it, contributing further to a larger unbothered mass consciousness.