Mindhunter, s2 (2019)

I raced through the first two seasons of Mindhunter in less than a week, which is pretty fast for me and a good context for any complaints I might have now. If nothing else the show is entertaining and compelling. I read the book it's based on some time ago when it was much newer, the 1995 true-crime by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker on the origins of criminal profiling, also called Mindhunter. Criminal profiling continues to be controversial, with mixed results. It's been long enough since I read the book that I can't speak to discrepancies very well. I don't remember any character like the hotshot young Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who seems to understand serial killers instinctively well. He's a little unnerving here and also has the usual array of exaggerated powers in our era of superheroes. I don't remember Charles Manson being interviewed in the book, and the Richard Speck we are presented with here is very different from a mid-'90s portrait I saw on one of those Bill Kurtis true-crime shows reporting that estrogen drugs were being smuggled into prisons and Speck was taking them. Across both seasons, Mindhunter teases us with brief scenes of the Kansas-based BTK killer. The obvious suggestion is that he is on his way to becoming an A plot. I thought that would be the second season but instead (even as the show kept teasing BTK) the Atlanta child murders of 1979 to 1981 take over. I do remember that being extensively discussed in the book. The first season of Mindhunter is largely concerned with getting the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit off the ground in the first place, through the work of FBI agents Ford and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) with academic psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv). As is often the case with extended TV dramas, Mindhunter is better when it sticks to the subject at hand and not so good when it wanders into the personal lives of its characters. At the same time some of these threads—notably the sense that Tench's adopted 9-year-old son is on the way to his own serial-killer psychosis—are the most compelling. But I think you can see the problem of improbable, convenient coincidence here. Carr is a lesbian in the closet, Ford—well, there's something wrong with Ford. I thought often of the show Dexter, which I've never seen much of but know features a serial killer doing excellent police work, because that's what we seem to have in Ford. Even when Mindhunter does stick to the subject at hand it feels a little puffed up, with Ford taking on and often psychologically breaking down the likes of Speck, Manson, Son of Sam, and other terrible killers with their own trading cards and fan base. But this show is done so well that I couldn't stop watching it, like I said. Reportedly most of the responsibility goes to David Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network), who gets an executive producer credit and directed a good many episodes. I hope there's a third season. No one is being very clear about it at the moment.

The Social Network (2010)

USA, 120 minutes

Director: David Fincher

Writers: Aaron Sorkin, Ben Mezrich

Photography: Jeff Cronenweth

Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross

Editors: Kirk Baxter, Angus Wall

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Rashida Jones, Aaron Sorkin

Speaking of nerd macho, sometimes I think The Social Network might have something to do with creating the Mark Zuckerberg we have come to know and loathe, the wound-up libertarian incel hero seething with grievance and resentment and here turned unfairly (and wrong-headedly) into a small figure we can pity. He may be brilliant and rich, but he can't get the chicks. No wonder he's pissed off. At the beginning of the picture a woman tells Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), "You're gonna go through life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." At the end of it another woman, unrelated, tells him, "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying to be." In between those two definitions, cowriter Aaron Sorkin seems to be suggesting, lies the truth. I'd feel a little hemmed in by popular perception too if I were Zuck.

What really had to hurt is that the movie is so darned good. Somehow I had forgotten that. You can't take your eyes off it. It's a dream collaboration between director David Fincher, Sorkin, and Eisenberg, powered by the fusillades of sparkling, cutting banter and confrontation that have made Sorkin famous. The Social Network is fast, barbed, hilarious, and utterly absorbing from its first minute. It lands punches over and over, not just on Zuckerberg. It has massive forward momentum, even though it's built out of biopic clichés, with a framing device of depositions in a law firm's tony conference room while pinballing flashbacks serve up the tech legendry raw in great meaty chunks. Bill Gates shows up at Harvard like Madonna french-kissing Britney Spears and all intentions are toward one goal: become a billionaire (because that's what's more "cool" than a millionaire).

The Game (1997)

USA, 129 minutes
Director: David Fincher
Writers: John D. Brancato, Michael Ferris
Photography: Harris Savides
Music: Howard Shore
Editor: James Haygood
Cast: Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, Anna Katarina, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Daniel Schorr, Spike Jonze

In the '90s, as director David Fincher worked on branching away from the music videos (notably with Madonna) that helped make him, he drifted a lot into tricksy and self-consciously "dark" projects—Fight Club, which I don't like, may be most famous, but Alien 3, Se7en, and The Game all fit the profile too. Though later, especially with Zodiac and The Social Network, Fincher found more useful ways to sublimate the impulse, much of that early work is burdened by relentless piling on with excess of excess.

That's true enough of The Game, which presents us a thriller wrapped around a puzzle box inside of a new-age bubble (which Todd Haynes had exploited far better in Safe). But the big concept of The Game remains irresistible: a company named Consumer Recreation Services sells a mysterious product known as "the game." Conrad Van Orton (Sean Penn) gives one to his brother Nicholas (Michael Douglas) for his birthday. The result is a pretty wild ride, especially the first time the movie is seen. Trying to be very careful with spoilers on this one.

Zodiac (2007)

USA, 157 minutes
Director: David Fincher
Writer: James Vanderbilt
Photography: Harris Savides
Music: David Shire
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards, Robert Downey Jr., Brian Cox, John Carroll Lynch, Chloë Sevigny, Candy Clark, Elias Koteas, Philip Baker Hall

A brooding meditation that is relentlessly fascinating, comfortably inhabiting its leisurely length of some nearly three hours, which go by like a blink. It explores the never-solved case of the Zodiac, a serial killer who operated out of northern California in the late '60s and early '70s and sent taunting notes and ciphers (only one of which was ever cracked) to San Francisco Bay Area police and the San Francisco Chronicle as he murdered his way to infamy before suddenly and mysteriously stopping. Perhaps needless to say, the case is strange and shocking, unusual for a number of reasons even in the serial killer genre (of true crime and film both)—not least because the self-proclaimed Zodiac stopped at all, which our understanding of serial killers shows they generally don't do, but also because he claimed his victims using different methods, alternating guns and knives, changing up locales and times of day and approaches to his victims. A cartoonist at the Chronicle (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) takes an interest in the case and ends up devoting years to following leads and investigating the long-term suspects that the police could never clear, which offers byzantine entries into strange California underworlds of paranoia and the sordid. The movie is essentially based on the book of the same name by the cartoonist, Robert Graysmith. Fincher, who has never much impressed me—I particularly detested Fight Club—has done a masterful job here, setting a nicely obsessive tone that inexorably and genially draws us into its orbit, and assembling a real all-star extravaganza along the way to do so. Besides Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo is terrific as the police detective charged with the case who becomes nearly as preoccupied as Graysmith with solving it, and Robert Downey Jr. turns in his usual fine performance as Paul Avery, an arrogant crime reporter at the Chronicle who also worked on the case for years. For those who like their mysteries resolved, Graysmith and Fincher make a strong case for who the killer was, and why he stopped. I like the theory, but it's just a theory. We really still don't know.