Jonathan Groff: "Mindhunter"

 It took me a long while to get to "Mindhunter," because I prefer procedurals. I get nervous if something is billed as experimental. And "Mindhunter" has problems; it has one of the most tedious "opening credits" sequences I know of. It features a gay actor whose gayness seems almost palpable--yet no one speculates about the related character being possibly "in the closet." (Knowing David Fincher, I'm sure that the casting of a gay actor, Jonathan Groff, in an apparently "heterosexual" role is part of a bigger strategy. The strategy is unclear to me for now.)

But there are things I like very much. One genre of old movie--"let's put on a show"--dramatizes the conflicts within a group of creative people as we move from "table read" to opening night. That's essentially what "Mindhunter" is. It's the story of a creative act. Three oddballs decide that they are going to rewrite the rules of murder investigation. Problems ensue. We are watching the problems.

In the late 1970s, the idea of a serial killer is still somewhat nebulous. Old-fashioned cops want to believe that most, if not all, murders are about either sex or money. The mindhunters have new, conflicting thoughts. Could serial killing be linked with mental illness? What is mental illness? If you talk to someone who has lost his mind, how can you get an honest account of recent history? (Given that a main tool in forming a personal narrative is a working mind, and a serial killer may be, by definition, someone who has *lost* his or her mind...) How do we account for evil?

The title "Mindhunter" is multifaceted. Bill Tench is a hunter of minds--criminal minds. But Bill is also a hunter who operates by means of his *own* mind. (This is a mind that is in peril--we see Bill struggling to hold onto his marbles, his marriage, his ability to live a "coherent" life.) Finally, we in the audience have to "mind" the hunter--our own minds are put to use in an effort to question and empathize with (and sometimes judge) Bill's choices.

People occasionally have doubts about the idea of mental illness. A rather glib podcast about Columbine suggests that Eric Harris was *not* a psychopath. ("There is no such thing as a psychopath. The idea is a convenient fiction--a way of distancing an odd person from the rest of humanity. A way of dehumanizing an odd and troubling person.") A theorist researching schizophrenia famously put the term mental illness in scare quotes--again and again, until his *own* wife died via suicide. After the suicide, the scare quotes disappeared.

"Mindhunter" is a confrontational, unsettling show that asks what makes us human. It is ambitious and generally well-produced.

P.S. An additional understanding of the term hunter. Of course, Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, Ed Gein--these people, too, are hunters.