With regards to dramatic quality, Mindhunter is practically schizophrenic. The personal drama of the agents and their interactions are afforded little more that the basic dialogue of a network police procedural: overheated exposition and incoherent indignation substituting for actual character. They do a decent job of paralleling the personal drama with aspects of the psychos in the cases they investigate. They could delve deeper into that to benefit the series, but otherwise the workaday dialogue is the stuff of ear cringe. And the horrendous portrayal of righteous irrationality of black people in Atlanta at that time is worthy of a cable news network.
The shining lights are the portrayals of the killers themselves -- Edmund Kemper, Son of Sam, Manson, Wayne Williams, etc. Being asked to portray a serial killer, especially one for whom there is video documentation to research, has to be a gift beyond compare for a dedicated actor. And the actors they find just gobble the scenes, seemingly mesmerizing the regular cast as well as the audience. Here are side-by-sides of the the real killers with their portrayals: Kemper and Manson. You can just tell those actors are completely in the zone. It's a very cool payoff for the lukewarm bulk.
Quick aside: In real life Kemper has made a name for himself as a reader of audio books. We live in a truly bizarre timeline.
Unless you are squeamish, or just generally trying to insulate yourself from the Sick Sad World that's portrayed in the various media. Mindhunter is a decent watch. Now, me being me, I will digress.
Let's take a shot at recapping the phases of crime in America that have caught popular attention. I suppose early on, the 1920s-ish there were the bank robbers -- Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillenger, etc. Then, with prohibition and through the sixties with drugs, organized crime got all the attention -- Capone through Gotti. As crimes go these make a certain sense. They are about money. Directly taking it in the case of bank robbing, gaining it by fulfilling a forbidden need in the case of organized crime.
As the sixties faded into the seventies, things got weird and worse. Crimes that fascinated were no longer about money. Bombings and domestic terrorism were what the '70s was all about. According to Time: "In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day." Follow cable news and you would think the U.S. is swamped in violence when in fact there is less than ever. That Time article is an instructive read. As it points out, we all just took it in stride back then; it barely registered on my young psyche. Can you imagine what would happen if we had a stretch of five bombings a day now? The National Guard would be on every corner, children would be confined to their houses, Twitter servers would meltdown, the New York Times would blame the legacy of slavery, Fox News would look on the bright side. The past is a foreign country, my friends. In any event, these sorts of crimes that are labelled domestic terrorism are vanishingly rare, perhaps as a result of 9/11.
Late '70s and into the '80s it was all about serial killers. Mindhunter portrays the fascination of the public, noting how everyone wants to hear lurid stories of the grisly killers from the detectives. As you might assume the number of serial killers rose with attention. According to Slate: "There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the '70s, and 200 in the '80s. In the '90s, the number of cases dropped to 141. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murderers." That strikes me as a under-investigated phenomenon. What changed that caused bombings and serial killing to fall out of favor? Is it just fashion? Maybe momentum builds in the public mind so more and more people who are on the cusp of committing one of these crimes tips over and gives in to the urge. Then as fashion fades and the crime becomes less noteworthy they fall back to a normal level. That would be a fascinating research topic for a soft scientist.
These days the hot crime is mass shootings, although it is surprisingly hard to find consistent statistics on them. Some of it is a matter of definition. In this research article if you scan about halfway down, there is a table highlighting the different ways of counting mass shootings and stats for the year 2015. If you define a mass shooting as any single instance where 4 or more people were killed the numbers are astonishing -- in the mid 300s. To read that you'd think you should wear body armor at all times. The key here is the definition. If you take gang, drug, and organized crime out of the count -- which are things most folks aren't involved in -- the number drops to around 65. Still pretty sizable. But then, if you eliminate family and domestic shooting -- because most people aren't involved in murderously psychotic families -- you are down to 7. These are the ones who get all the attention. The guys who shoot bystanders indiscriminately over some perceived rejection or slight or conspiracy. Nut cases, in short. These are the crime of fascination in the current times. You would expect them to be on the increase. It certainly feels like they are from the news headlines, but what does the data say?
In that same article there is a graph at the bottom. The count of Mass Public Shootings (which is the kind we are interested in) seems to hover around 4 or 5 per year between 1999 and 2013. There may be a slight uptick toward the end, but it's negligible. This is not what we'd expect for the hot crime of the moment. What about the last few years?
According to this Mother Jones article:
- 2014 - 4
- 2015 - 7
- 2016 - 6
- 2017 - 11
- 2018 - 12
- 2019 - 7 (so far)
One wonders where FBI profiling will go in the future since we are all in love with genetic causes for behavior these days. A future Mindhunter might be about the traditional profilers versus DNA readers as a Moneyball-style conflict.
And now I've digressed this topic to death. But yeah, Mindhunter is worth a look.
