The American South is the perfect setting for… | Little White Lies

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The Amer­i­can South is the per­fect set­ting for Mind­hunter Sea­son 2

22 Aug 2019

Words by Madeleine Seidel

Three men in dark suits illuminated by blue, purple, and red lights.
Three men in dark suits illuminated by blue, purple, and red lights.
By focus­ing on the Atlanta Child Mur­ders, Netflix’s crime dra­ma taps into the com­plex social and polit­i­cal his­to­ry of the region.

When my moth­er moved to Atlanta in the late 1970s, the city was sup­posed to be the height of the so-called New South. Atlanta had just elect­ed their first black may­or, May­nard Jack­son, and was in the process of build­ing one of the world’s largest air­ports a few miles out­side of the greater metro area. For all of Atlanta and the New South’s shiny veneer, some­thing – and some­one – sin­is­ter lurked beneath the surface.

In 1979, any lin­ger­ing notion of Atlanta as a mod­ern utopia was shat­tered by a three-year ser­i­al killing spree that result­ed in the deaths of at least 25 black chil­dren and four young black men. Infor­ma­tion on the crimes was scarce for the first year, with Atlanta’s police depart­ment seem­ing­ly at a loss to solve the case.

Local law enforce­ment and gov­ern­ment offi­cials were accused of try­ing to down­play sus­pi­cions of con­nect­ed mur­ders so as not to scare off new busi­ness­es and res­i­dents, but the num­ber of vic­tims – the major­i­ty of whom shared sim­i­lar socioe­co­nom­ic back­grounds – kept grow­ing. The moth­ers of the mur­dered and miss­ing chil­dren were frus­trat­ed by the police’s mis­man­age­ment of the crimes, and when the eleventh miss­ing child made the­o­ries of the crimes being inter­con­nect­ed unde­ni­able, the FBI stepped in to con­sult on the case.

Eigh­teen more lives were tak­en before the Atlanta PD and the FBI even­tu­al­ly arrest­ed Wayne Williams – a black man not much old­er than his final four adult vic­tims – in what became known as the Atlanta Child Mur­ders. Williams was only for­mal­ly charged and found guilty of the mur­ders of two adults. To this day, the 27 tech­ni­cal­ly unsolved mur­ders are still con­test­ed, as Williams still main­tains his inno­cence four decades into his life sentence.

The lurid and unfin­ished nature of the Atlanta Child Mur­ders makes it an inter­est­ing choice of sub­ject for Joe Pen­hall and David Fincher’s Net­flix crime dra­ma Mind­hunter. From its series pre­mière in 2017, Mind­hunter has nev­er been a show to pro­vide sim­ple answers, espe­cial­ly in rela­tion to the myr­i­ad grue­some mur­ders the bureau pro­files. The show’s orig­i­nal premise focused on hot­shot fed­er­al agent Hold­en Ford (Jonathan Groff) and his col­leagues in the nascent Behav­ioral Sci­ences Unit as they inter­viewed mur­der­ers with mul­ti­ple vic­tims in an attempt to apply log­ic to the dark­est depths of human­i­ty, only to find that there isn’t a whole lot sep­a­rat­ing killers from upstand­ing mem­bers of society.

This sec­ond sea­son of Mind­hunter throws our pro­tag­o­nists into unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry by posi­tion­ing them as strangers with­in their own sto­ries. No longer able to rely on the clean, neat sys­tems cre­at­ed in the prison inter­view petri dish of first nine episodes, Ford and the BSU now have to deal with unfa­mil­iar envi­ron­ments which can’t be eas­i­ly mapped because they are out­siders. There is per­haps no place bet­ter suit­ed to explor­ing these char­ac­ters’ sense of dis­tance and dis­place­ment than Atlanta in 1980, right in the mid­dle of a heinous crime where the intri­ca­cies and pol­i­tics of the sit­u­a­tion are incom­mu­ni­ca­ble to any non-natives but crit­i­cal in solv­ing the case.

Two individuals, a man in a white shirt and tie, and a woman in a beige coat, standing near a floral display and a white cross.

The Amer­i­can South is a strange, com­plex place, with its mythol­o­gy, his­to­ry of vio­lence and the con­stant threat of Old Tes­ta­ment-style wrath mak­ing it rel­a­tive­ly inhos­pitable to inter­lop­ers. Hold­en and his col­league Agent Tench (Holt McCallany) seem­ing­ly have no con­nec­tion to the region and so have no way of under­stand­ing how the Atlanta Child Mur­ders fit into the South’s his­tor­i­cal and social fab­ric, how Atlanta’s res­i­dents saw the cen­turies of racism and recent white flight reflect­ed in the crimes. Only two decades removed from 1965’s Vot­ing Rights Amend­ment and just a few years after what is usu­al­ly rec­og­nized as the end of the cen­tral Civ­il Rights Move­ment, Atlanta was still not the glow­ing exam­ple of a new South­ern city that local gov­ern­ment want­ed it to be seen as – and still isn’t.

The hard fought suc­cess­es of the Civ­il Rights Move­ment allowed black peo­ple to have more influ­ence in local gov­ern­ment through vot­ing, but white Atlantans respond­ed to this change by leav­ing the city in favor of Atlanta’s mas­sive, sprawl­ing sub­urbs, cre­at­ing a void of wealth, jobs and resources in the city’s now over­whelm­ing­ly black down­town area. The city’s colos­sal inter­na­tion­al air­port cre­at­ed a near­ly instant eco­nom­ic boom, and busi­ness­es moved across the coun­try to the bustling sub­urbs, bring­ing pre­dom­i­nate­ly white work­ers and fam­i­lies, like my own, to places like Mari­et­ta and Dun­woody: only a few miles away from the city cen­ter but so dis­tant in every oth­er way.

This long-sim­mer­ing racial ten­sion was cen­tral to the Atlanta Child Mur­ders, as evi­denced in the ini­tial stages of Ford and Tench’s search for sus­pects. One of the ear­ly the­o­ries pre­sent­ed to Ford by local field agent Jim Bar­ney (Albert Jones) and the vic­tims’ mourn­ing moth­ers is that the Ku Klux Klan is behind the mur­ders. In both the show and in real life, there is a cer­tain amount of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that would make a Klans­man a like­ly sus­pect, even with­out fac­tor­ing in the Klan’s his­to­ry of tar­get­ing black boys and young men in lynch­ings; Klans­man Charles Sanders was even wire­tapped by Atlanta Police but was ulti­mate­ly dis­missed as a sus­pect after a series of lie detec­tor tests.

Ford quick­ly dis­miss­es this sus­pect because of his pre­vi­ous­ly con­coct­ed pro­file: the mur­der­er must be a black male in his mid-twen­ties to ear­ly-thir­ties. When his pro­file is met with sus­pi­cion by Bar­ney and the moth­ers, led by the for­mi­da­ble Camille Bell (June Car­ryl), Ford is con­fused. His lack of social aware­ness is a recur­ring theme of the show, but here his igno­rance serves to high­light the FBI’s lack of knowl­edge about the city and how cen­turies of racism are inter­con­nect­ed with the investigation.

Mindhunter’s tense final scene in Atlanta between Ford and Ms Bell reveals the depth of jus­ti­fied resent­ment the moth­ers have towards the inves­ti­ga­tion, believ­ing it was taint­ed from the start by Atlanta PD’s own racial bias and neglect. The moth­ers feel aban­doned by their city, and Ford leaves the South ques­tion­ing his own judg­ment and instincts more than ever before.

As Mind­hunter delves deep­er into messy, unsolved ser­i­al killings like the Atlanta Child Mur­ders, the char­ac­ters’ under­stand­ing of them­selves becomes increas­ing­ly strained. Tench is lost with­in his own fam­i­ly, blind­sided by his son’s shock­ing­ly vio­lent actions and his wife Nancy’s jus­ti­fied cold­ness. Ford is sec­ond-guess­ing his place in the bureau and his own body due to fre­quent pan­ic attacks. And as many of the sub­jects’ clear-mind­ed inter­views sug­gest, the ser­i­al killers are inter­lop­ers in our world, dis­turbed indi­vid­u­als who find them­selves in a soci­ety that rejects their ratio­nal­ized cru­el­ty in favor of moral code.

A once order­ly unit whose goal was to fit human deprav­i­ty into neat clas­si­fi­ca­tions is now faced with chal­lenges that refuse to go qui­et­ly or be resolved with sci­en­tif­ic method. Atlanta – its his­to­ry, pol­i­tics and soul – tests Ford, Tench and the team because they can only view the case as out­siders, reflect­ing the insta­bil­i­ty they show on screen over the course of the sea­son. The per­ceived lack of cer­tain­ty that per­me­ates this season’s cen­tral con­flicts, set­ting and char­ac­ters deliv­ers on the com­plex­i­ty and moral ques­tions Finch­er and the showrun­ners promised from the show’s very first episode.

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