Netflix’s serial killer drama Mindhunter, home to Hannibal Lecter, Dexter and Norman Bates, isn’t just a showcase for murder and gore. It is a genre best described in the age-old Nietzsche quote: when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

As an audience, we watch these shows to find shock and awe. But we also watch to reinforce our own normalcy. Mindhunter season 2 has no intention of allowing the viewer comfort – neither within themselves nor with the world around them.

The series, based in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, concerns the real-life FBI Behavioral Science Unit tasked with interviewing and studying the then new phenomena of serial killing. The second season showcases such figures as the Son of Sam, Charles Manson, and the lurking BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill). Ultimately, the season focuses on the Atlanta Child Murders, a case that resulted in the murders and disappearances of 28 primarily African American children. Here, the season shifts its focus from the dirty deeds of the killers to the dirty deeds within our own society and its institutions such as the FBI.

During the 1970s, the FBI was a predominantly white organization. Its agents were the stereotypical defender of justice: the white American male. This is an image it was trying to shake.

Their blunders in spying on and blackmailing Civil Rights leaders, particularly Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. MLK, in the 60s left a bad taste in the public’s mouth — a fact that is repeated throughout the season as BSU agents search for a killer in the Atlanta case. As the show concerns itself with the darkness in humankind, it also explores the darkness in mankind’s institutions.

This isn’t exactly new in the serial killer drama. In Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs (and Thomas Harris’ novel), the FBI is shown through the perspective of agent Clarice Starling. She is subjected to the male gaze which is the act of depicting women from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer. This is shown by Demme through intense close-up, POV shots.

These shots contain disgust, suspicion and lust. These uncomfortable shots, though, aren’t exclusively from serial killers, but also from the male law enforcement surrounding Starling. The audience is subjected to the probing feeling of the male gaze as the only woman in the room.

Mindhunter builds on Lambs by adding a lens to the situation. In the fifth episode, the BSU agents are invited to a party by their new director. They’re there not for fun but to sell their findings and intrigue politicians and fellow agents. One agent, Wendy Carr, finds herself in Starling’s place when she is harassed by both her director and a man he introduced to her. This man starts with pleasantries but quickly moves to uncomfortably firm advances. Later, when she expresses this interaction with a fellow BSU agent, he laughs it off.

The scene then moves to one of the male agents regaling the party with war stories from the field. The episode director, Andrew Dominik, works to make viewers uncomfortable. He seemingly packs the frame full of white men, all staring at the camera. This framing left me focusing less on the agents’ stories and more on those listening. I understood then how it must feel to be a non-white person in a room full of white people. I understood then that this is what it feels like to be subject to the white gaze and made to feel as an other. In this, Mindhunter is adding a racial lens to where Lambs left off.

The FBI at that time was a white supremacist’s dream: old, rich, white and powerful. Both scenes — one in an empty hallway and the other in a crowded country club — establish the subtle darkness of sexism and racism that festered in justice institutions. And still do.

When the BSU agents suspect the killer is African American and not someone affiliated with the KKK, the viewer is stuck at a crossroads. Even once they find the suspected killer, it is hinted that the real killer may be protected by politics and privilege.

Mindhunter, as the newest edition in the serial killer genre, showcases evil. Both the unexpected evil of violent fantasies and the commonplace evil of prejudice. Evil which harms ourselves and our institutions whether in 1980 or 2019.

True Dabill can be reached at dabi7280@stthomas.edu.