Mindhunter

This week I watched the first episode of Mindhunter. This show takes place in the late 1970’s and it follows a young FBI agent, Holden Ford. He works in the hostage negotiation department and teaches classes about it to students in the agency. He struggles with keeping the attention of his students, as they don’t find value in what he has to say. After Holden personally encounters a hostage situation where a man takes off his clothes and claims that he is invisible, his interest is sparked. He wants to learn more about human behavior, specifically deviancy. Holden believes that this is something that is extremely important to be able to better understand the criminal motive, but the people around him don’t feel the same way.

The main overarching theme of the first episode is why do we behave the way we do? This is the question that Ford is on a quest to find the answer to the entire episode. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are now faced with the possibility of never understanding a criminal’s motive. It’s no longer out of lust or greed but now seems entirely random. Ford desires to dive further into criminal psychology to find the answers he is looking for. He is repetitively disregarded by fellow agents and other law enforcement agencies. Ford is far ahead of his time, and everyone around him believes there are many more important things to be focusing on. Towards the end of the episode he travels to Fairfield, Iowa to speak to their local police department about serial killers and their motives. He speaks about Charles Manson, and rationalizes that maybe Manson did what he did because of his abusive childhood, or the amount of time he was institutionalized. The audience is in complete dismay that he would even suggest that there was a rational reason for Manson’s killings. Many of the local officers speak up and say that they believe that crazy people are just crazy and that Charles Manson was just “born that way.”

In the last few moments, Bill, Ford’s coworker that he traveled to Iowa with says, “Let me tell you something about abhorrent behavior, Ford. It’s f**king abhorrent. If we understood it, we’d be abhorrent, too.” This quote is jarring and begs so many questions. It completely encases the theme of this entire episode, Ford’s journey to understand human behavior. This brought me to the question of, do we even completely understand deviance today? First off, how do we define deviance? Yes, we have a dictionary definition of deviance, but there is not a concrete way to label something as deviant behavior. It is more of a socially defined construct, rather than a concrete label. We make up what is “deviant” and what is not.  Just because you deviate from a norm or break a law does that make you a horrible person? Politicians and big business’ break the law every day and we do nothing about it. Yes, the criminals in this show have done some terrible things, don’t get me wrong, but some of them are misunderstood. I don’t believe anyone is born with a predisposition to kill another human being. Often times they do not know how to check their aggression and how to express feelings, because of past trauma and a troubled childhood. This show is very interesting, and I think I will continue to watch it to figure out how we stumbled upon methods of criminal behavior and profiling.