Review: Mindhunter Season 2 Grapples with Identity and the Power of Words

The show’s second season reveals the intricate intersections between personal and political neuroses.

Mindhunter
Photo: Netflix

The first season of Mindhunter distinguished itself from other crime shows by offering an origin story, dramatizing how the F.B.I. forged its Behavioral Science Unit. At its most resonant, the season reminded audiences that institutions and corresponding notions of reality have to be invented and manipulated, and creator Joe Penhall and co-executive producer David Fincher rhymed this social invention with one of a more personal sort. The F.B.I. agents pioneering criminal profiling, Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), had to fine-tune their personalities in order to realize their vision, particularly when interviewing the captured killers who gave the men insight. The B.S.U.’s resident psychiatrist, Wendy Carr (Anna Torv), also engaged in role-play, hiding her homosexuality from a traditionally reactionary arm of the American government.

Season one was driven, then, by unreleased tension, especially as the killers offered extreme and distorted windows into repressed desires that are more common than Tench would prefer to admit. It was, in the tradition of Fincher’s Zodiac, an epic and neurotic procedural that, in the vein of the director’s The Social Network, understood the power of words, especially as Ford and Tench gradually fashioned an iconic term: “serial killer.”

Mindhunter’s second season doesn’t have the same benefit of novelty as the first, as the B.S.U. is now established, if still fledgling. Correspondingly, we have a better idea of how the unit works, and Ford, Tench, and Carr’s dynamic has solidified to suggest relationships that are reminiscent of other crime series. Ford is the wild card, a man who uses his lack of social grace to forge a kinship with others even more profoundly alienated from society. Tench is the old-school G man, who often uses his credibility—professional as well as masculine—to keep Ford’s superiors from reining him in. Also seeking to rein Ford and Tench in is Carr, who naïvely believes that the men can glean more insight from the killers by sticking to a script.

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Penhall, Fincher, and the show’s high-profile guest directors, Andrew Dominik and Carl Franklin, challenge these relationships by splintering them. Ford and Tench’s volatile buddy routine, one of the primary pleasures of Mindhunter’s first season, is largely absent here, as the men are chasing their own respective obsessions. The first three episodes of the season, directed by Fincher, are piercing essays on isolation and sadness. Fincher, who has a reputation as an exacting formalist in the key of Kubrick, favors sculptural compositions that invest even routine actions with elements of menace and poignancy. When Ford flies to Atlanta, Fincher dollies in on his seat from the front of the plane, fashioning a diagonal image that emphasizes the tightness and the anonymous discomfort of the vehicle. This scene lasts only a few seconds, and for many directors it would be a routine transition shot, but Fincher uses it to affirm Ford’s torment as well as the general grind of endless travel.

In the second episode, Fincher fashions the finest moment of the entire season, which rivals the best sequences of his films, when Ford and Tench interview Kevin Bright (Andrew Yackel), a survivor of the BTK Killer. Kevin is framed in a ghostly silhouette in the back of a car, while the F.B.I. men sit in front, and as he describes the atrocities he witnessed, Fincher emphasizes the sound of a train passing by on the bridge overhead, suggesting Kevin’s painful transition into the past. Characteristically of Mindhunter, a moment that crime shows tend to take for granted—the interviewing of a witness—is itself turned into a set piece, which dramatizes a victim’s distress and the immensity of Ford and Tench’s quest to quantify madness. Notably it’s Tench, rather than Ford, who proves to be the empathetic talker this time.

Narratively, Ford’s alienation is expressed via a startling gambit, as he’s essentially reduced to a supporting character in the second season. In its first, Mindhunter was driven by his sense of discovery, by his yearning to see his own disaffection in mad men. By contrast, Ford still seems somewhat reduced here by his climactic meeting with Ed Kemper (Cameron Britton) in last season’s finale, and he’s fragile, even more egotistical than usual, and distracted, searching for something. And so season two is hung, emotionally, on Tench’s shoulders.

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McCallany gives a beautiful and moving performance, informing Tench with a vulnerability and decency that many characters—so taken with his profession, big frame, square jaw, and crew cut—happen to overlook. (Carr’s new girlfriend, Kat, played by Lauren Glazier, smugly refers to Tench as “General Patton.”) More than ever, Mindhunter is obsessed with the systemic discrimination of law enforcement, yet it doesn’t turn its law enforcers into racist, sexist caricatures—slobbering monsters ready for our distanced disdain. Tench is a likeable character who also casually sees homosexuality as deviancy, which periodically limits his scope, as a law man and a man in general, and which also challenges our own empathetic tendencies and idea of who we should find likeable. Tench inadvertently hurts Carr with certain comments, especially when she gets in the field herself and uses her experience with an older woman (played in the first season by Lena Olin) to bond with an incarcerated young man who helped an elder lure, torture, and rape other children. The show dares to rhyme Tench, straight man incarnate, with Carr, as they’re both consigned to play stereotypes.

Tench faces a wrenching familial crisis this season, and few notice his pain, which he wears in his tight shoulders. Nancy (Stacey Roca), so devoted to their unraveling adopted son, Brian (Zachary Scott Ross), neglects her husband’s escalating misery as well as Brian’s potential devolution into a predator. (Nancy isn’t as well-drawn as Tench, and she borders on becoming the cliché of the cop’s nagging housewife.) Meanwhile, Carr must play the intellectual, the gatherer and sorter, though she yearns to return to the field again and shows a flair for improvisation that rivals Ford himself. The irony of Carr outing herself in an interview with a killer is considerable, as she uses a realm of role-play as a confessional, throwing the killer a crumb of authentic human feeling only to walk it back later with her professional peers.

The lengthy interviews that Ford, Tench, and Carr conduct are more exactingly rendered and theatrical this season, which features a who’s-who of killers, including David Berkowitz (Oliver Cooper), William “Junior” Pierce (Michael Filipowich), Tex Watson (Christopher Backus), and Charles Manson (Damon Herriman), each of whom have special vanities that must be satisfied. Berkowitz admits that calling himself the “Son of Sam”—that a dog ordered him to murder his victims—was a con when Holden flatters his shrewdness. Pierce opens up to another F.B.I. agent, Jim Barney (Albert Jones), when the investigator gives him candy, which he pops into his mouth with memorably childish, nearly dainty relish. Manson, played with ferocious gravity by Herriman, disarms Tench when his anti-capitalist, everyone-is-violent-but-me shtick happens to stir Tench’s guilt over Brian. These sequences are dramatic in the moment but collectively suggest the emotional wear and tear of Ford and Tench’s profession, as they experience behavioral extremis over and over with results of questionable value.

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Mindhunter is still exhilaratingly occupied with detail, which becomes particularly evident in the season’s main arc, where Tench, Ford, and Barney help local law enforcement investigate the Atlanta child murders, in which dozens of children of color were killed from 1979 to 1981. This investigation involves the navigation of multiple planes of government and law enforcement with many agendas, and these negotiations come to drive the show nearly as much as the hunt for the killer. Some of the victims’ families believe the K.K.K. to be involved, but local politicians, many of whom are people of color, don’t want to blow a potential social powder keg, though they also don’t wish to commit political suicide by abiding Ford’s conviction that the killer is a black man. This is the sort of Catch-22 with which Mindhunter is obsessed, and such difficulties are intensified by bureaucratic minutiae. In a prolonged and amusing moment, Ford is notified of all the departments he must contact simply to distribute flyers. Most of these episodes are directed by Franklin, who has a subtler visual palette than Fincher and who evinces a powerful delicacy with racial tensions that’s reminiscent of his most acclaimed works of Southern noir, One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress.

Mindhunter’s second season is both epic and intimate in its sprawl, collapsing dozens of famous crime stories together, revealing the intricate intersections between personal and political neuroses. Tench and Carr’s senses of repression are rhymed with that of Barney, a black man who’s implicitly charged with keeping the peace between the Atlanta politicians, the mothers of the murdered and missing children, and the F.B.I. at Quantico. According to the series, as the B.S.U. expands, it moves away from its primary, idealistic promise to become vulnerable to both the necessary as well as the petty limitations of any public service body. The BTK Killer (Sonny Valicenti), who still haunts the series in the episode prologues, wouldn’t be caught for decades, and 22 of the unsolved cases in the Atlanta child murders were hastily closed in order to keep Atlanta’s political tensions at a simmer, the latter of which Mindhunter acknowledges in a finale that’s every bit as deliberately and poignantly unsatisfying as Zodiac’s. This series is so stirring for showing how murder mysteries reflect every element of society, and are therefore on certain levels almost inherently unsolvable. To understand an element of human nature is to know how truly little one knows.

Score: 
 Cast: Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, Anna Torv, Stacey Roca, Michael Cerveris, Joe Tuttle, Cameron Britton, Sonny Valicenti, Zachary Scott Ross, Christopher Grove, Regi Davis, Christopher Livingston, Crystal Lee Brown, Siovhan Christensen, Sierra Aylina McClain, Brent Sexton  Network: Netflix

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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