My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Tuesday, September 1, 2020

A series in the shadow of Mindhunter that's worth watching in its own right: Manhunt

 The 2017 Netflix series Manhunt: Unabomber was overshadowed by the excellent series Mindhunter - both are about the FBI's early forays into using psychology and linguistics to identify criminals and criminal behavior (rather than the more conventions forensics of concrete evidence such as prints and artifacts). Mindhunter was probably the better series, but Manhunt has its strengths as well. Though it gets off to a rocky start with its over-emphasis on the traditionalists w/in the FBI bureaucracy, particularly one top agent who time and agent harangues and harasses the protagonist in the search to ID the Unabomber, that is Agent James Fitzgerald (the Sodroski-Clemente-Gittelson series is "based on true events," and apparently the central figure is a composite of traits and actions of many involved in linguistics), without remorse or letup - OK we get the point! That said, the series, unlike Mindhunter, focuses on the one case only and in doing so it's well-detailed and compelling. The 8-part series pits agent Fitzgerald, who is trying to ID the Unabomber by textual analysis of his manifestos and other communications, looking for language clues that are is clear and indelible and prints, against the traditionalists, who of course have pursued the wrong course over years and created a profile of the Unabomber that turns out to be way off the mark. As a personal drama - the long-suffering wife, the agent almost obsessive about "proving himself" by his work on this case, the secondary characters who blur into one another - the series is mediocre at best, but as a re-enactment of a major event in criminology and a frightening era in the U.S., the film is really good - in particular an episode that I would have thought almost impossible to bring off in which they build some sympathy for this lonely, sick man - in particular by re-creating his incredible mistreatment in the 1960s by a leading professor (Murray, psychology) at Harvard involved in experiments (on his students!) that can only be described as sadistic (this episode so odd that I had to check it out and found that it's quite accurate and truthful). 

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