Mindhunter

Why is popular culture so fascinated with serial killers? There are all kinds of reality television shows and their fictional counterparts dedicated to examining their perverse methodology. What compels these murderers to kill several people in all kinds of horrible ways? There are as many reasons why as there are serial killers as each one has their own unique motivation. Our fascination comes from the morbid speculation that one’s next-door neighbor may have a bunch of severed heads in their fridge. It’s rubbernecker syndrome – an interest in the gruesome details of the murders. It is also the relief in the knowledge that you’re still alive and safe and not the murder victim, that in some way you’ve cheated death.

In 1995, David Fincher directed Seven, one of the best films about serial killers. With the commercial and critical success of that film, he was careful not to get pigeonholed in the genre and didn’t return to it until Zodiac (2007), which was a very different take indeed. His fascination with serial killers continues with Mindhunter, a show created by Joe Penhall, based on the true crime book of the same name by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, that he is executive producing and directed four episodes for Netflix.

Set in 1977, the show focuses on the FBI’s nascent Behavioral Science Unit with two agents – Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) – fighting against internal resistance – their superior (Cotter Smith) thinks they’re wasting the Bureau’s time – and external ignorance – local law enforcement doesn’t understand what they’re doing. We meet Ford working as a hostage negotiator as he unsuccessfully tries to defuse a situation involving a man armed with a shotgun and holding a woman hostage.

After failing to calm the man down, which results in his death, Ford is ordered by his superior to continue teaching his hostage negotiator course at Quantico. It is here that we get the first inklings that Ford is different. He’d rather settle a hostage situation peacefully than through excessive force by reasoning with the criminal and the way to do this is figuring out what motivates them…but how?

After his latest class, Ford overhears a lecture in a nearby classroom. The instructor is talking about David Berkowitz (a.k.a. The Son of Sam) and offers up this observation: “You could say that the guy is crazy or that he’s pretending that he’s crazy but if we’re looking for a motive we can understand we suddenly find there is none. It’s a void. It’s a black hole.” He points out that in Hoover’s heyday, criminals like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson were easy to figure out because they did what they did for personal gain.

Someone like Berkowitz is completely different. “Where do we go when motive becomes elusive?” the instructor says. It is this line that hits Ford like a thunderbolt and serves as an epiphany. He and the instructor have a fascinating discussion that is really the show’s thesis: if the world no longer makes sense, then neither does crime. They both agree that they don’t know what to do about it, which Ford wonders, “But we’re supposed to, right?” to which the instructor replies, “Sure. But here’s the troubling thing – no one’s even asking the questions.” This is just one of many well-written, masterfully acted conversations depicted over the course of the ten episodes of Mindhunter. This scene also sets the tone: this is going to be a character-driven show that eschews traditional cop show heroics in favor of dialogue-heavy explorations into what motivates serial killers.

The first half of episode one focuses not just on Ford’s professional life but his personal one as he meets a witty, attractive woman named Debbie (Hannah Gross) at a rock concert that is just as smart as he is if not more so, much to his surprise. Their initial meet-cute turns into a first date where she takes him back to her place and gets him to take a bong hit in an effort to loosen him up. They even go see Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which he is so impressed with that he shows it to his class. Debbie isn’t afraid to call Ford on his bullshit and is willing to challenge his beliefs, which makes for an entertaining give and take between them in their scenes together. There’s a sexy and smart frisson between these two characters that is a lot of fun to watch. After sex one night, she playfully chastises his naïveté about sex, calling him a monk, chiding him, “How can you figure out the criminal mind if you can’t even figure out your girlfriend?” Good point.

Jonathan Groff plays an atypical FBI agent. He’s youthful and sensitive – hardly the Melvin Purvis type. He’s also very smart but lacks the street smarts to excel in the field as evident in the bungled hostage negotiation that kicks off the show. He needs more time in the field with an experienced veteran showing him the ropes. His boss arranges a meeting with Tench and the elder agent instantly reads the younger one. He asks Ford to tag along with him on the road, teaching FBI techniques to local law enforcement all over the country.

Initially, it appears that Fincher is treading on familiar turf with the Ford-Tench duo – the idealistic young agent butting heads with the older, more experienced agent. What Ford lacks in experience, he makes up for with intelligence and soon his enthusiasm for profiling serial killers is contagious enough to convince Tench and then their boss to interview them. Ford isn’t the brash, impulsive person that Mills was in Seven and Tench isn’t ready to give up on humanity like Somerset was in that earlier film.

Their first teaching gig does not go well. Ford gets too cerebral, his college training confuses most of the cops while Tench tries to keep things simple. Ford ends up pissing off a veteran detective who then asks them for advice on a grisly local murder case. They offer several theories but nothing concrete for the clearly frustrated detective, which only upsets him even more. And so it goes. Not every case can be solved but it is unusual for one of the protagonists to admit it so honestly. The episode ends with nothing resolved and tangible tension between Ford and Tench.

Setting Mindhunter in the late 1970s is an interesting choice. As Fincher has pointed out in interviews, it was the end of the J. Edgar Hoover era with the last vestiges of the stereotypical FBI agent idealized by Melvin Purvis and represented by Ford and Tench’s boss being replaced by people like Ford. Tench represents a bridge between the two eras. He still adheres to old school practices but is receptive to Ford’s new way of thinking and Holt McCallany does an excellent job of showing how his character deals with these contrasting schools of thought – the old vs. the new. Initially, Tench doesn’t reveal much about himself but over the course of the show he’s given moments, like a quiet scene in a bar with Ford in the fourth episode, where he reveals a very personal detail about his home life that is wonderfully conveyed by the actor who displays an impressive amount of vulnerability. A few minutes later, we are shown a glimpse of his home life in a heartbreakingly understated scene.

In order to understand the criminal mind better it makes sense that one should talk to criminals. Ford wants to interview Charles Manson but he’s unreachable – ever for the FBI – and so at one of their teaching gigs a cop says they should talk to Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton) a.k.a. the Co-Ed Killer, a man that decapitated 16 teenage girls and had sex with the corpses. He’s a dream interview – he loves to talk about himself. Fincher films Ford walking through the prison, down the halls among the inmates with the sounds of them leering and yelling at him. The look on his face is one of palpable unease.

The meeting with Kemper is a brilliant sequence that begins on a comical note as the killer insists Ford has an egg salad sandwich as if he were entertaining him in his living room. The serial killer initially comes off as an affable man. He’s eloquent and honest (“People who hunt other people for a vocation all we want to talk about is what it’s like.”) and is able to become unsettlingly threatening on a dime. Kemper recounts his normal childhood and how it ran parallel to another, more depraved life. He fascinates Ford, while Tench is convinced that he’s manipulating his partner, telling him what he wants to hear. On the second visit, Ford is a little too chummy with Kemper in an amusing bit where they actually banter back and forth. They delve into the man’s past and what motivated him, which he tells in a chilling monologue. Cameron Britton does an excellent job playing Kemper. He moves little, letting his eyes convey his feelings. Kemper is someone that plays things close to the vest, reading Ford and then telling a story of how he killed his mother in a creepy, matter-of-fact monotone.

Not surprisingly, the most compelling parts of Mindhunter are the interviews with the killers. As Fincher has said, these scenes are like little one act plays as these guys tell their stories. The show wisely doesn’t resort to flashbacks, which would be the obvious thing to do, and instead lets the actors playing these killers flex their acting chops, holding our attention with their ability to tell their characters’ depraved stories and make it compelling.

Meeting Kemper convinces Tench that there is value in talking to serial killers in order to understand what motivates them and he decides to stick up for Ford when their boss chews them out for interviewing the murderer without telling him. They’re threatened with suspension and it is this confrontation that bonds Ford and Tench. By the end of the second episode they’ve finally gelled as a team. They are finally on the same page.

As Mindhunter continues, Ford and Tench begin to diverge on how the work they do affects them. The latter is increasingly repulsed by the repellent nature of the killers they talk to, while the former finds himself getting deeper into the mindset of these men, running the risk of becoming like them, treading the same line that Will Graham does in Manhunter (1986). Mindhunter shows how these cases take their toll on the men that investigate them, most significantly, Tench who doesn’t tell his wife anything about his work and this causes noticeable tension between them. This is explored in a scene where she confronts him about it. As their work continues, Ford becomes more analytical and detached while Tench is more empathetic, especially when they interact with the killers and the local cops.

Are serial killers born or are they formed? This is a question that Ford and Tench wrestle with over the course of the ten episodes. It is why they are interviewing these men in the first place. Mindhunter does a superb job balancing the procedural aspects of Ford and Tench’s work with the impact it has on their personal lives in a way that gradually makes them rich and compelling characters over time. This is thoughtful, absorbing procedural that takes the time to delve not just into the work that these men do but their personal lives as well in a deeper way that Fincher was trying to do in Zodiac but was constrained by the limitations of feature filmmaking. The medium of television has allowed him to go as deep as he wants and this results in some of his best work.

Lady Beware

Burnt out from the debacle that was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (1984) and the commercial failure of Streets of Fire (1984), Diane Lane had gone from promising A-list actress to box office poison. Stinging from these two high profile flops and eager to escape the media spotlight, she took some time off to regroup and figure out what she wanted to do next. In 1987, she came roaring back with a vengeance with two films, one of which was Lady Beware, a modest B-movie thriller that was a labor of love for its director, Karen Arthur, but ran afoul of studio interference. While hardly a masterpiece, it is an intriguing cinematic detour in Lane’s filmography.

Katya Yarno (Diane Lane) is an aspiring window dresser who arrives in Pittsburgh and applies for a job at a big department store by persistently pursuing its owner Mr. Thayer (Edward Penn). She impresses him with her moxie as she flat-out tells him that his window displays “suck,” but it gets her foot in the door. She soon befriends fellow employees Lionel (Peter Nevargic) and Nan (Tyra Ferrell). Eager to impress, Katya works late and creates quite a provocative display on her first attempt, which gets the attention of Jack Price (Michael Woods), a hunky guy who begins stalking Katya, watching her while she bathes, and later, her sleeping, all from the vantage point of the fire escape on her building.

Meanwhile, Katya has a literally steamy dream of having sex with a muscular model while naked mannequins from her window display look on. Her fantasies fuel her work and despite the protestations of his prudish wife, Thayer is impressed by Katya’s work, giving her a six-month contract. In these early scenes, Lane does a nice job of conveying Katya’s youthful enthusiasm and ambition to make it in the big city, but with a hint of being something of a provocateur as her racy displays upset some and excite others. The use of actual locations in and around the city really creates a sense of place that is tangible and grounds things, which offsets its B-movie-ness a bit.

Soon, Katya is interviewed by Pittsburgh Magazine’s Mac Odell (Cotter Smith, saddled with the thankless nice guy role), who not only likes her window displays, but the young woman as well, much to the chagrin of stalker Jack. He soon ups the ante on his tactics, harassing her on the phone and even opening her mail. Michael Woods oozes sleaze as the creepy stalker fixated on Lane’s character. The fact that Jack has a wife and kid (even calling Katya while playing with his child) makes him even scarier. Director Karen Arthur does a pretty good job of showing Jack’s gradually unsettling voyeuristic tendencies and how they unnerve and upset Katya, preying on her insecurities. At times, Jack’s fixation is really upsetting (especially if you’ve ever been stalked), like when he breaks into Katya’s place and takes a bath in her tub, even using her toothbrush (ugh!). He confidently roams around her apartment like he owns the place and it’s not even 45 minutes in when you’re hoping that someone takes this sicko out.

Lane is certainly not afraid to show off her beautiful body during certain moments in the film, which only adds to the slightly sleazy B-movie thriller vibe, but is meant to reinforce Katya’s enticing tendencies. As the film progresses, she convincingly conveys the stress and fear Katya experiences once Jack’s obsessive behavior makes her life a living hell. She starts off as this confident young woman and over the course of the film, her world is shaken by Jack’s frightening tactics and this is shown in how it affects her work. However, Katya has an inner strength that she is able to tap into, which helps her deal with what’s happening.

After Karen Arthur released her second film, The Mafu Cage in 1978, she began work on Lady Beware. Over the next eight years, “it’s had 100 homes, 17 drafts and eight writers,” she said. The director wanted to make a movie about psychological rape, but found that at the Hollywood studios, “the purse holders are men.” When she shopped the project around, Arthur found that the studios wanted to make “a violent picture,” but she was “not interested in making a picture where a woman gets beat up. I wanted to show how a woman deals with this kind of insidious violence.” While trying to get financial backing, she made development deals in order to make a living, but she wasn’t actually directing any movies and tried her hand at television, winning an Emmy for an episode of Cagney & Lacey and became the first woman to direct an American mini-series – Crossings. She eventually secured financing with Scotti Bros. Entertainment, an American independent production company.

Filming was originally announced to start in October of 1984, but for some reason was pushed back two years. The film’s producers considered shooting in Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta, but executive producer Lawrence Mortoff had made a previous film in Pittsburgh and was familiar with the city. For the lead role, he considered Elizabeth McGovern and Lori Street before going with Diane Lane. After The Cotton Club, she was tired and took two years off in order “to get a perspective from a point of not having a career.” She had lost her love for acting and just wanted to experience life outside of moviemaking. Lane eventually rediscovered her desire to act and when she was ready come back to work was offered three films: The Big Town (1987), After the Rain, and Lady Beware.

Budgeted at $3 million, principal photography began on July 21, 1986 on location in Pittsburgh and ended around August 23, 1986. The production was hardly harmonious as local crew members clashed with the film’s associate producer and first assistant director Paula Marcus who was described as “overly aggressive and mean.” She was not well liked by the crew. Later on, one of the local actors who worked on the film claimed that the editors ruined it. Said thespian met Arthur a year later and she was still upset by the experience.

Lady Beware received mixed reviews. In his review for The New York Times, Walter Goodman criticized the film’s ending and felt that Arthur “seems to have given up trying to understand what is going on, for which you can’t blame her.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson wrote, “Lane does manage to convey some of the suffering inflicted by this sort of psychological rape. Lane’s reached a fascinating point as a performer – a place somewhere between being a woman and a girl – so that in some scenes she’s able to come across as strikingly mature and self-possessed and, in others, as a frightened child, small and vulnerable.” In his review for the Toronto Star, Geoff Pevere compared it to Fatal Attraction: “Although hampered by weak performances … poor sound dubbing and serious continuity troubles … Lady Beware bravely ventures much closer to the dark heart of sexual harassment than its vastly more popular and polished contemporary.”

Lady Beware raises the issue of the danger that women sometimes encounter when they come across as what is perceived by some as being too provocative and how a disturbing fixation can develop as a result – something that was not the intention of the woman. It can make the person feel like a victim as they live in constant fear for their life, not knowing when and where their stalker will surface. It’s all about being in control. By harassing Katya relentlessly, Jack makes her feel helpless and controls her through fear. Once she conquers that fear she is able to turn the tables on him.

Lady Beware is a potent reminder of the real danger stalkers pose and just how scary it is for the target of their obsession. Katya has supportive co-workers and a caring boyfriend, but none of them know how she feels and how it affects her, which Lane conveys quite well in a surprisingly nuanced performance that, at times, almost transcends the film’s thriller genre clichés. Of course, this is all conveyed under the auspices of a B-movie thriller with some of the genre’s lurid trappings, some clunky dialogue and scenery-chewing acting. This is glaringly apparent during the last 30 minutes as Lane succumbs to cringe-inducing histrionics that are meant to show Katya’s increasingly upset nature and how much she’s affected by what Jack’s doing to her by isolating herself from everyone as a form of protection, but it comes across as the actress going over the top in some really laughable moments that rob the film of its initial power. It is these moments that feel like the studio exerted its influence by applying more conventional genre trappings, but fortunately the film regains its composure somewhat during the climax.

SOURCES

Mills, Nancy. “Lady Beware Has Been This Director’s Legacy.” Los Angeles Times. May 29, 1986.

Scott, Vernon. “Diane Lane Ending Hiatus in Pittsburgh-Filmed Lady Beware.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. September 15, 1987.

Tiech, John. Pittsburgh Film History: On Set in the Steel City. The History Press: Charleston. 2012.