Mindhunter, Alias Grace and the Gender of Violence
Header: Patrick Habron/Netflix; Insert: Sabrina Lantos/Netflix
Late in the first season of Mindhunter, special agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) speaks to a classroom of elementary school students about the early warning signs of “disturbing”—by which he means “deviant”—behavior, of the sort he’s studying in “sequence killers” for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. He might evince a dangerous fascination with fire, Ford says, referring to the hypothetical child; he might harm pets or other small animals. A girl catches on to Ford’s pronoun usage and raises her hand to ask a question:
“Are only boys disturbed?”
The answer, which Ford concedes is essentially “yes,” is at the crux of Netflix’s vexing new drama, from executive producer David Fincher and creator Joe Penhall. As Ford and his partner, Bill Tench (Holt McCallany), interview a series of monstrous figures in the late 1970s, and, in consultation with psychologist Dr. Wendy Carr (the superb Anna Torv), use the insights they glean to consult on a number of unsolved cases, Mindhunter circles the notion that violence itself is gendered, that the desire for dominance, power, control at the base of such heinous crimes reflects, through a darkened mirror, the pathologies of patriarchal culture writ large. (“How do you get to be president of the United States if you’re a sociopath?” Ford inquires of Nixon at one point. “The question is,” Carr replies, “how do you get to be president of the United States if you’re not?”) That Mindhunter carries the point only so far, becoming lost in a bramble of ill-considered subplots before turning, in the end, to the on-screen conventions of the criminal/profiler relationship, is perhaps its signal failure; its arc resembles that of a tough-minded investigator piecing together a complex case, only to fall short of securing a conviction. It’s as if the series fears its own implications, and so settles for prosecuting a more minor charge.
That fear is fair, I suppose, for the implications are terrifying. Mindhunter’s defining relationship is not between Ford and Tench, or Ford and Carr, or even Ford and his girlfriend, Debbie (Hannah Gross), but between Ford and his most memorable interlocutor, “the Co-ed Killer,” Edmund Kemper (the extraordinarily chilling, utterly captivating Cameron Britton). The season’s second episode, which is by far its strongest, focuses on their initial encounters, and the portrait it sketches of Kemper ties a knot in the stomach: During one exchange, the camera closes in on his gargantuan figure as he describes, with an unsettling blend of preternatural calm and primal hatred, his resentment of his mother, and of the “precious co-eds” she cared for as an administrative assistant on a college campus. The self-described “regular guy”—polite, educated, thoughtful, not to mention friendly with the local police—becomes, before our eyes, the remorseless murderer “living a vile, depraved, entirely parallel other life, filled with debased violence, mayhem and fear—and death”:
Women are born with this little hole between their legs, which every man on Earth just wants to stick something into. And they’re weaker than men, so they learn strategies. They deploy their minds, and their sex, and they intuitively learn to humiliate.
Here, Mindhunter draws a connection between Kemper’s modus operandi and the misogynistic language of “men’s rights” activists, of red-pillers and pick-up artists and domestic abusers, language that originated long before the dawn of the Internet or the reaction to second-wave feminism; as the sterling Canadian miniseries Alias Grace outlines, blaming women for their own mistreatment is as old as Scheherazade, or Genesis. Adapted by Sarah Polley from Margaret Atwood’s historical novel, and directed by Mary Harron with forthright shudders of psychological horror, the series’ structure is not so dissimilar from Mindhunter, though it’s far more tightly constructed. In Canada in 1859, “celebrated murderess” Grace Marks (the brilliant Sarah Gadon) submits to an interview with Dr. Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft), and their ongoing conversation unearths a pattern of violence and trauma most “disturbing,” to use Mindhunter’s term, for the fact that it’s not considered “deviant” at all. Beaten and molested by her father, leered at and manhandled by strangers and intimates, witness to the botched abortion and subsequent death of her one friend, fellow maid Mary Whitney (Rebecca Liddiard), abused by an asylum’s doctors and a prison’s guards, the series refuses to frame Grace’s experience as exceptional; its margins are populated by images of women whipped, accosted, castigated, tossed over, by blood-soaked sheets, morning sickness, furious invective, the stench of death. At one point, asking if her new employer, Thomas Kinnear (Paul Gross), has a reputation for harming the women in his employ, she receives a response from an aging housekeeper that says more about the gender of violence in a single line than Mindhunter does in 10 episodes—says more, in fact, than we should bear. “Nothing,” the woman remarks, “the world at large would call harm.”