Mindhunter: Whose mind is actually being hunted?
Good psychological thrillers (I mean the ones that leave you with goosebumps and chill you to your bone) are hard to come by. So, I was relieved that Mindhunter did not fail in that regard. It has all the making of a bone-chilling TV show on serial killers. But, what’s more is that it comes with its own thrilling surprise reveal. I’m sure you believe that the Mindhunter of this show is Holden Ford, but what you won’t see coming in the last episode is that actually his mind is the one that is being hunted. Don’t believe me? Well, here is a thorough run down of how this show was actually making a subtle play on its title.
Being a psychological thriller about serial killers, you would expect a plethora of gruesome, violent scenes flooded with mutilated bodies. Yet, all this show gives is a series of indoor conversations between the two cops of this show and a chosen serial killer. What is the point of a show about serial killers if we don’t actually get to see the crime scene? All we are ever given are pictures of the bodies.
The lack of gore bothered me, because it was highly unexpected and uncharacteristic of a show such as Mindhunter. But, when I made it to the last episode, something-so-unsurprising-it-was-obvious was spoken by a peripheral character that it took me off guard. Holden and Wendy arrive at the Georgia District Attorney’s office where she tells them that their “work” is glossing over the victims and the real pain that is suffered. In just a few sentences she reveals the indecency and the actual horror of what Holden and his team are really proposing. Yes, a death penalty is extreme and fighting against is justified, but to defend a serial killer and refuse the victim’s family some closure is beyond overreaching. Holden thinks he is justified in asking the district attorney to have Gene serve his sentence in jail rather than in a death penalty. But as the district attorney puts it “You haven’t seen the bodies. You haven’t seen the horrible acts committed.” These are probably the most transparent lines of this show and they are spoken for the sake of the audience who, like me, are so immersed in Holden’s smooth tactics and easy going conversation style with the serial killers that they have forgotten what a serial killer does.
If you think about it, all the conversations Holden has with the serial killers are mildly horrific at first, but then lull into a creeping sense of comfort where it is no longer absurd and terrifying that Ed Kemper is demonstrating how to slit a throat in a matter-of-fact way. As if they were discussing how to bake a cake. When we first enter the show, we are wary just like Holden is with his first soiree into the world of serial killers. But once he gets comfortable and gets the hang of talking to them, so do we as viewers become fooled into believing that we are talking to a person who comes from a broken background instead of one who has mutilated and raped innocent girls. It’s hard to distinguish the line of reason from the line of insanity. At what point does the serial killer become irredeemable? Should we even care about them? Just some question to think about.
Holden is shown to be interested in their psychology, but his mind very slowly but easily gets caught up with the disfigured boundaries between sexual play and rape. This is very obviously seen in the scene where his girlfriend is role playing and he is unable to commit to her sexual game because he keeps thinking of how it is all game for the serial killer. We start to see the cracks appear in his own mind. He can’t separate his work self who in some form sympathizes with the serial killer from the private self who enjoys sex and does not see it as a means to control his broken life. This confabulation of both parts of his life is culminated in the last scene of the season where he willingly visits Ed Kemper at his hospital room to apparently have a conversation with him as if they were friends. Remember, this is a serial killer convicted for multiple rapes and murders. It took reaching this scene for me to realize how supremely screwed up Holden’s whole situation was and to realize that I as a viewer had got caught up in it. I was intrigued just like he was. Nevertheless, when Holden walks into Ed’s room, I don’t think he imagined he would be sweating and scared for his life in his presence. And that is the scary part, not that Holden thought he was almost going to be killed by a serial killer, but the fact that he was befriended and hugged by a serial killer. The season ends with him having an anxiety attack which is an extreme reaction to him escaping death by the hands of a serial killer. I think that anxiety attack is actually because Holden realized just how psychologically screwed up he has become for a serial killer like Ed Kemper to think they are friends. What kind of a person is he, if serial killers start to feel comfortable around him enough to hug him? That is what is messed up about this show: the fact that CIA officers investigating the minds of serial killers could become so enthralled by their subjects that they wouldn’t realize when the lines blurred between compassion and the horrific reality of their subject’s actions.
David Fincher intentionally chooses to exclude the gory crime scenes, so that we would feel immersed in the world of serial killers and eventually forget what they do. Indeed, Holden never sees the bodies in real life, only pictures. That is why it is easier for him to disassociate from the horrific nature of his work. Holden does many questionable things like speak things that brings him down to the level of the serial killer in order to extract information from them, but to what end? How many acts like these can be justified until it is just down-right immoral for Holden to be joking around with the serial killer and sexualizing a 14 year old victim even if it is for the purposes of justice. Where should the line be drawn? These are the questions we should be asking ourselves about people like Holden and even psychologists today who are forced to have conversations with psychopaths and sociopaths in order to retrieve valuable information that could help prevent future psychopathic minds from being formed. Yes, it is honorable work, but it comes with its own dangers specifically to the minds of the interviewer who can become psychologically disturbed by what the serial killers/psychopaths say.
It is clear from the gore-less format of this show that Fincher means for us to mull over what happens to the minds of those who believe themselves to be hunting other minds. For Fincher, the hunter (Holden) should be the hunted (investigated), because after all each of us in our own way is teetering between the threshold of reason and insanity. So, an investigation into the minds of serial killers is actually an exploration of our own psychology and how close we can come to thinking like a serial killer, eventually becoming one ourselves. This is the scary thought that Fincher leaves us with at the end of the season where Holden, like us, is left at the edge of insanity.
