THE NOTICE
On paper, there is everything, or at least the essential: FBI agents, serial-killers, sordid crimes. Mindhunter could have been, should have been, a police series in the classic sense of the word, of those that link the findings of corpse in gore staging and investigations carried out. In reality, it is not so. And Season 2 of the series, released August 16 on the Netflix platform, confirms it once again.
A series too realistic to be epic ...
The setting is set in the 1970s, when America is confronting a wave of ultra-violent crimes. The behavioral sciences unit of the FBI then launched an experiment: try to draw profiles of types of criminals, which we will soon call "serial-killers", to stop them as soon as possible. This is the birth of profiling, this precise method intended to understand the schemas, the modes of operation of the murderers. By choosing this specific subject, and basing the entire series on real facts and characters, David Fincher and Joe Penhall, producers and, for the first, part-time director of the series, made the radical choice of to propose something other than a police story.
The two main characters, agents Ford and Tench, are not investigators strictly speaking. Traveling through America, from prison to prison, they talk to criminals, record their exchanges and, with a psychologist, deduce the typical profiles of the murderer. A work of ant but not really ground, not enough telegenic in theory: Mindhunter shows above all two men in suit and tie armed with a tape recorder that lend themselves to long scenes of dialogue behind bars. All the talent of David Fincher, who proved especially with Zodiac that he liked investigations without real resolution, lies in the cutting and editing of these sequences, which reach an unbearable level of tension simply with verbal exchanges.
... and who avoids any morbid fascination
This constant search for realism is also seen in the cast: all actors cast to embody the serial-killers among the most famous in the United States, from David Berkowitz, the "son of Sam", to the fearsome Ed Kemper, "the Ogre de Santa Cruz "to the 10 terrifying assassinations, look so bluffing to those they embody. For the little anecdote, Damon Herriman, who plays the role of Charles Manson in Mindhunter, also holds in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . Beyond the casting, the investment of some to stick to reality has been enormous. Holt McCallany, who plays Agent Bill Tench, peered at the work of the real FBI profilers. And he even went to jail to visit serial killers in person.
The pitfall could have been that of the morbid fascination for bloodthirsty killers. It is not so. David Fincher has too much passion for his subject to let him drift. While Agent Ford is in fact an often unhealthy curiosity for the murderers he questions, he is often called to order by his sidekick Tench. And season 2 operates a rebalancing rather welcome, a large place being given to the victims. Above all, interviews with serial-killers are increasingly an opportunity to question what separates people from both sides of the table. To show to what extent the difference between those who take the act and the others and tenuous. The scene of the interrogation of Charles Manson is, in this respect, edifying. "This anger you feel, Agent Tench, is just the anger you feel towards yourself," the guru says. "I'm tired of being your scapegoat, being your reflection, I'm just what you want me to be."
Mindhunter then comes to question the responsibility of society and "good" in the existence of the margin and the "evil". Here again, the character of Charles Manson will give FBI agents and the spectator grease to grind: "These murders have arrived in your world, not in mine.These people you call" the Family ", it's children you did not want, you discarded them like rubbish, so I picked them up on the side of the road, these faithful are your children, you train them, I did not teach them anything. I just helped them get up, it's my fault that your kids are doing what they're doing, your own kids you're neglecting? "