Based on a nonfiction book by a former special agent in the FBI, David Fincher’s new Netflix show Mindhunter is set in 1977, the early days of criminal profiling, when a team of agents used convicted serial killers as research subjects. Murderers were just rotting in their cells, why not make use of them before they die there? Get them to monologue on tape for scientific gain: develop a methodology, discover the formula for how a monster is made.

© Patrick Harbron/Netflix

When I started watching this show my mental notes were not gender-specific. It’s about why do “we” behave the way “we” do. There’s talk of Freud and the death drive, of Émile Durkheim and sociology, of what makes “us” do the things “we” do. How messed up “we” are psychologically at times of political turmoil, when all the rules change.

But Mindhunter is not about “us” at all: this is a show exclusively about the behaviours of men. We're watching FBI agents try to classify male killers based on their behaviours, and we're watching the largely passive women around these killers and FBI agents being affected by male behaviour — by ending up dead, or in the case of female colleagues or wives, being left to deal with the fall-out of things they have no control over, ie the behaviour of men.

© Patrick Harbron/Netflix

Mindhunter plays like an anatomy of misogyny and gives it labels. It asks the worst men why they treat women the way they do, and the motives for their murders are always at the extrapolated end of minor grievances. “Women were initially indifferent to me,” says the serial killer Ed Kemper, who killed ten women, including his overbearing mother, before having sex with her decapitated head. Every murderer is an unwanted, rejected, ignored, virginal loner who blames women for what he has become. They see themselves as the victims of women, rather than the other way round.

Which is fine, we’re here for serial killer stuff, and nothing we learn here is new. But it gets interesting when the behavioural lines between killer and agent become indistinguishable: we watch Bill (Holt McCallany) and Holden (Jonathan Groff) wrestle with their own feelings towards women, where personal failings play out as frustration directed at their wife and girlfriend. Holden begins to mimic the emotions and behaviours of the psychopaths he talks to; the ease with which he adopts misogynistic “locker-room talk” to coerce his subjects into speaking unnerves his colleagues. He absorbs their hate and takes it home to his girlfriend, demanding to know how many men she has slept with, and takes it badly when she refuses to answer. And while this profiling project is a new science, Holden lords the little he’s learned over local cops, becoming every smug man-child in his late twenties who hasn’t lived or achieved anything yet, who has something to prove, and now he thinks he’s proved it.

© Merrick Morton/Netflix

Mindhunter is a catalogue, literal and not, of masculinity, toxic and otherwise. It's an interesting time to watch when, in real life, the behaviour of men is being so scrutinised and publicised, where the patterns of repeat offenders are being cross-referenced. There has never been a more timely release date for a show about why men do the terrible things they do, or a better time to watch men work backwards, trying to figure each other out, saying what women already know. This show is more than just a catalogue of killers; it’s a catalogue of unremarkable men we have known. It’s not about crazy at all.

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