What do they actually learn from these serial killers?
It's interesting stuff but I can't really remember anything that they learned from all these conversations with these killers.
shareMothers, upbringing...
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MovieChat Forums > Mindhunter (2017) Discussion > What do they actually learn from these s...
Not enough to catch them early in their careers
shareThey learned that whenever a city starts finding gay headless hookers killed in a ritualistic way, they need to start looking for a white guy in his 30's with mommy issues.
shareThis was so true. I loved how the writers had no problem with the wild presumptions and stereotypes about single white men being psychopaths and sociopaths. Then, the moment one of the murderers was tangentially connected to cross dressing we had to get a 15 minute soliloquy from Dr. Carr about how trans behavior is not anything to be concerned about and is completely normal and any hetero male who questions it must be struggling with his own sexuality. Netflix can’t get through a movie or a series with out shoehorning their liberal bona fides into a script.
shareTrue. Even though a shocking percentage of serial killers are homosexual, the show went out of its way to immediately dismiss that as any sort of a causal factor, and dismiss it even as a part of the profile being developed.
But yes, apparently single white males with shitty jobs are likely all murderers.
That's not true and the crossdressing of BTK was clearly just a tool BTK needed to not give in to his obsessions during his cooling-off periods. Not because he was trans. He was getting off on torturing and killing helpless.
shareThat's complete bullshit. The series actually tells us relatively little about killers.
The FBI isn't interested in the killers. The most valuable info to them is about the victims, what made them a target, what made them vulnerable etc. From that you can narrow down where and how their killer came at them. What type of killer, organised or disorganised etc. But what kind of life the killer has is practically irrelevant except for their mobility, i.e. their ability to get around to their crimes.
Why they did what they did so they can learn what kind of person commits those crimes to help catch future murderers.
shareThe main thing that they learned is that many serial killers achieve psycho-sexual pleasure from the act of killing itself, even if no actual sex is involved. They also learned that most of these men have absent fathers and over-bearing, abusive mothers. They also learned that these guys usually have predictive habits of dissecting/torturing dolls and later animals in their childhoods. There's lots more, but the short answer is that they learned a LOT.
You've got to remember that in the 70's, nobody knew anything about serial killers. That wasn't even a term before the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI coined it. They are the only reason why we have any sort of a profile and pattern of behavior to look out for, at all.