99‘IT’S BORDERLINE NONSENSICAL. BUT IT’S ALSO VINTAGE WEIRD BECK, REARING HIS HEAD FOR OUR WEIRD TIMES.’—PAGE 107TELEVISIONWith
Mindhunter,
Fincher
perfects
the art of
darkness
By Daniel D’AddarioGroff plays an FBI agent trying to understand his enemies as much as catch them“YOU KEEP LOOKING AT ME LIKE A
specimen,” the massive man tells his
visitor with a note of displeasure.
Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton),
a gently spoken but imposing figure,
may have wisdom to impart, but he’s
nobody’s lab experiment. His is a vivid,
racing mind. And his visitor (Jonathan
Groff) is there to find out how exactly
that mind conceived of and carried out
a killing spree.
In Netflix’s superior new drama
Mindhunter, human minds are the
staging ground for inhuman acts. Groff
plays Holden Ford, a 29-year-old FBI
agent with ambitions far beyond his
station. Ford’s interest in criminals
has less to do with bringing them to
justice than with understanding why
they do what they do and how their
patterns might be spotted elsewhere.That’s what brings him to Kemper, a
killer who gave himself up because, as
he says, he “despaired of never being
caught.” He was simply too good at
getting away with murder.
It’s 1979, and the FBI is operating
at cross-purposes. The agency is at
once reckoning with the legacy of its
late chief J. Edgar Hoover and trying
to find its way in a world that seems
defined by new evils. Murder sprees by
Charles Manson’s California “family”
and David Berkowitz, New York City’s
Son of Sam, haven’t just captured
the public’s imagination. They seem
illustrative, within the FBI, of a sort of
malignant evil that can only be fought
be redoubling commitments to old
methods. It’s one thing when Ford
teaches future hostage negotiators
to make perpetrators “feel heard”—PATRICK HARBRON—NETFLIX