Mindhunter is an american Netflix TV show. It was created in 2017 by Joe Penhall, who drew his inspiration from two books : Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, by John E. Douglas, and The Killer Across the Table, by Mark Olshaker. This show takes place in Quantico, USA, in 1977, and it relates the story of two FBI agents, Bill Tench and Holden Ford, who work on criminal psychology and profiling. According to the RGPD (the General Data Protection Regulation), profiling consists in « processing data and use them in order to assess some aspects of a person, analyze or predict her interests, her behaviour and her attributes. »
Bill Tench and Holden Ford are characters inspired by people who were real FBI members, John Douglas and Robert Ressler. These agents took an interest in murderers because they wanted to grasp their personnality and acquire essential knowledge to solve criminal cases. Mindhunter’s producer relied on their work to make the show : in fact, Bill Tench and Holden Ford’s aim is to create a procedure to conduct interviews with forty american violent criminals (like Edmund Kemper, Jerry Brudos, Charles Manson, Richard Speck, etc) and to interpret their words. By this way, they will be able to understand their behaviour, their way of thinking and the crime’s motive. In order to do this, they decide to flood the Behavioral Sciences Department of Quantico with Wendy Carr, a doctor in psychology and a university lecturer. This woman takes part to the work of the two agents and helps them to create a questionnaire for the interviews. She wants to collect informations about the previous family history, mood, feelings, thought patterns of the forty american killers in order to compare themselves. The three workmates try to find similarities et differences between murderers to establish a classification depending on the method used (“organized/disorganized”, “high intelligence/low intelligence”, etc).
This team is the first to introduce the term of « serial killer », which refers to people who committed murders at least three times, with no apparent motive and who show a typical behaviour. Holden, Bill and Wendy also bring in their study the notion of « stress factors » or triggering factors, which push killers to act. These elements are linked to our urges and to our environment : as Bill and Holden say in the show, according to Freud, we all have in our psyche a death and a life drives, which are connected to our needs and desires. In the case of murderers, their death drive affects their behavior to the point where they can act out. This study led by John Douglas and Robert Ressler in real life, was decisive for the world of criminology : it made it possible the early detection of high-risk behaviours and so the resolution of criminal cases.
In my opinion, Mindhunter is interesting from a psychological point of view : indeed, we learn how some psychological interviews methods have been established in the context of criminal cases. The series also gives us information on killer classification and criminology in general. I have always been passionate about movies and horror series, and by the murderers, so this series suits me perfectly! The scenes are well filmed, the acting is good, and people playing the murderers are the spitting image of the real ones! Attention to sensitive souls : many raw elements are mentioned during interviews, you must have a strong stomach! I recommend this series to all lovers of seedy and bloody stories, but also to people who would like to learn more about criminology.
Glad to have shared this series with you, see you soon !
Words I learnt
To draw one’s inspiration from : s’inspirer de
To grasp : saisir, comprendre
To relate : relater, raconter
To flood : investir les lieux
Drive/urge : pulsion
Psyche : psychisme
Spitting image : trait pour trait
To have a strong stomach : avoir le cœur bien accroché
Seedy : glauque
Nina Dousse – M2 PPCECC – 2019-2020