Supercops Part II: Mindhunter, Season Two // R. Travis Morton

Do we risk corruption by studying what we deem evil? R. Travis Morton continues his look at our engagement with true crime as part of our guest edited month “My Dark Places.”

Wendy Carr’s insight—and the overall case of The Atlanta Child Murders in season two—is perhaps what makes this new season of Mindhunter so compelling. In Fincher’s show we are confronted with the inheritor of Vidocq’s tradition, John Douglas, now perhaps armed with 20th century applications of statistics, a history of successful criminological activity, and a bevvy of new psychopathic conditions to draw upon for psychopathology.

In the first season, Holden becomes familiar with Kemper, considered by many to be among the most talkative of serial killers, noted for having spent much of his time befriending local police in his neighbourhood bar. He’s abnormal when compared to other serial murderers because he’s intelligent, articulate, self-aware, and enjoys talking about his crimes with investigators. In reality, Douglas became ill with encephalopathy from overworking himself on the Green Rivercase, but Fincher’s Mindhunter manifests this malady as a panic attack as a result of Kemper’s earnest attempts to bond with him through a hug.In my opinion, the first season of Mindhunter ended poorly because of that played-out old trope: in order to find the monster, one becomes it.

He empathizes with the psychopath, and in doing so, negates the self.

“Becoming the monster” is a damaging perception we have culturally about investigation and understanding, especially of the “deviant”mind. Pierre Bordieu’s notion of cultural habitus teaches us that we are given to a kind of cultural education that reaches far back into the bedrock of the lessons we are taught as children through socialization, extending to embrace phenomena around us as metaphor in our narrativizing our own life experience. This is why there is a kernel of the god-fearingChristian in the words of characters like Aslan, Optimus Prime, or indeed in the tantalizingly rational arguments of a literally diabolical. Thanos, for example. Habitus has a way of tinting everything we see, and the false premise from which this particular perception extends is based in part on the historical influence of investigators like Vidocq, with their feet in both worlds.

Understanding criminals does not inherently cause us to sympathize with them, however—in fact, most of us have very firm boundaries in that respect. It is one of the reasons why Douglas never experienced this state of emotional and mental breakdown that his fictional counterpart did. He just got sick from overwork. He was fed up and tired at the sheer enormity of The Green RiverCase, of nearly fifty women dead or missing. He was eerily clairvoyant, particularly as regards certain specific details in certain crimes, but he earned it with a steadfast career of incredible scientific and criminological observation and analysis.

His fictional counterpart, Holden, also has a level of fixation with a certain pursuits and difficulties with empathy and social interactions. His life is closed off, retreated, even Spartan, with his barely furnished apartment, TV dinners, and demonstrable lack of a personal life. To some extent, Holden’s depiction in season two is a departure from the first season, in which his peculiarities cause his relationship with his partner to deteriorate. His sometimes comedic awkwardness manifests as bemused detachment from social interaction.

The shift we see in his character between the first and second seasons, however, perhaps tempts the viewer at first to believe that to ‘understand, we must become,’, but the second season seems to depart from this trope and embrace a more realistic and practical reading of the Douglas-inspired Ford. To embrace this trope is to make the same mistake that is so frequently made by method actors who do more to incite scandal then they do enhance their performance, as opposed to those who simply work to make their performance as natural as possible by simply by reading their lines over and over again, as Sir Anthony Hopkins is said to do. Instead, the becoming monster trope is the crutch of the fearful and ignorant.

The age of Vidocq is the same in which the learned minds of the 18th and19th centuries began to deconstruct and rebuild their notions of accepted social practices, informed as they were by a longstanding and demonstrably corrupt influence of the hedonistic age of the papacy of the Catholic Church throughout the Renaissance era; a complex and perhaps incomplete perception that persists to this day in popular media such as Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code, TV shows such as The Borgias, and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series of games. This time period redirected our notions of crime and punishment away from a model of ‘sin and confession’ to evidence and pathology, though not quite separating our notions of ‘evil’ from either. The elitism with which the learned and powerful, as in the papacy, were shown to have exploited the relative ignorance of the third estate in the name of god was replaced with the arrogance of the learned scientists that acted inhumanely in coordination with hypotheses built to justify preconceived and prejudicial racism, sexism, and classism via phrenology or eugenics. This established mistrust is indistinctly connected in the minds of outsiders to the evil we continue to ascribe to the pathological, and our pattern-seeking instincts thus give them common, if oversimplified cause. Look no further than the widespread popularity of comic book movies today, in which the stables of available super villains forged across a half-century of writing are so often brilliant but possessed of a corrupted logic like Dr. Harleen Quinzel, Dr. Curt Connors, or rich and brilliant philanthropists such as Lex Luthor or Norman Osborne, to name but a few. These perceptions continue to this day as those brilliant few among us, like Douglas, are viewed with intense suspicion and dislike—a tendency Fincher uses regularly to establish dramatic tension among the regular cast.

Such is how we come to imagine that we risk becoming corrupted by what we take to be evil by studying it. More often we have demonstrated the capacity to apply scientific logic to improve our understanding, yet the tropic perception pervades. Take for example, the case of Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo. Rossmo, a pioneering Canadian criminologist specializing in geographic profiling who determined that there was a likely serial killer on the loose in Vancouver, went ignored due to departmental resentment, which allowed serial killer Robert Pickton to continue unimpeded for arguably several years longer than he ought to have.

If Vidocq demonstrates to us one of the ways in which criminality and criminology became intertwined in our popular imagination, Douglas should stand as a superlative example of the ways in which science can disentangle the two—something which the first season of Mindhunter pointedly failed to do, but the second did extremely well, allowing the fascinating story of the developing art of criminal psychopathology to stand alone without forcing it awkwardly into the framework of a morality play from the Middle Ages. While Kemper might remain fascinating for his self-reflective capacity—the kind we are ever-ready to apply to this class of fictionalized savants profiting from their straddling grasp of both the normal and the deviant—Kemper is not your average serial killer, like Douglas is not your average investigator. Both stand out as unique in each one of their own particular fields, however, this in no way means they are the same.

At the end of Mindhunter season two, Holden Ford is the one who prevails. Kemper, like the real life Kemper, is still stuck in a cage. It is so easy to revoke decency from those devoted to the their capabilities of dual understanding in their role as criminal profilers, but they are not who they study; much like we—as true crime enthusiasts—are nothing like the criminals we read about, either.

R. Travis Morton is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Waterloo. His research areas include game studies, linguistics, political theory, American literature, horror fiction, and folklore studies. His dissertation involves independent survival horror games, with a focus on Slender: The Awakening

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