The Movie Within Mindhunter Is More Important Than You Think

In the premiere episode of Netflix's new drama, Mindhunter, FBI special agent Holden Ford takes his would-be girlfriend, Debbie, to a screening of Dog Day Afternoon, an Oscar-winning 1975 film based on a true story and starring Al Pacino as a bank robber who takes hostages in a desperate move to try to exit the intense situation in which he finds himself. While we cannot find any evidence that this is some kind of particularly important event in the life of John E. Douglas (the FBI profiler on whom Ford is based) — and in fact Debbie does not seem to be based on Douglas's real-life wife, Pamela — the choice of the film is probably not a coincidence.

On the surface, there's an obvious connection between Ford's work as a hostage negotiator and the scene from Dog Day Afternoon chosen to be seen on screen while Ford and Debbie are at the movies. It's the scene where Pacino speaks with Charles Durning's Sgt. Moretti, the hostage negotiator, that culminates in Pacino's famous shouting of "Attica! Attica! Attica!," a reference to the 1971 Attica Prison riot over inmates' rights that involved 42 staff hostages.

There is also the comment Ford makes about feeling sorry for the criminals in the movie, to which Debbie replies that he has empathy. Ford's empathy is on display throughout season one, to the point where it's often hard to tell if his empathy is a ploy to gain murderers' trust or if he truly is empathizing with the killers he is interviewing.

Finally, much is made throughout the first season of Mindhunter about classifying "deviant" behavior. Holden mentions it as he and Debbie are leaving the theater, saying in reference to the dialogue in the film, "When I first started at the Academy, they would send women out of the room if there was any of that talk. They called it 'deviant terminology.'"

Ford is referring to the fact that Sonny, Pacino's bank robber in the movie, is involved with a pretransition transgender woman, played by Chris Sarandon, and one of the reasons Sonny robs a bank is to help pay for her sex reassignment surgery. Ford is having a little trouble wrapping his head around the intricacies of Sonny's sexual orientation, but he likes how "real" the dialogue is — which might be a meta comment made about the dialogue in Mindhunter.

As the show moves through the season, we see Ford asking the FBI to take words off of its "deviant" list like "fellatio" and "cunnilingus," then later he is told by a principal what words he cannot use when addressing schoolchildren, like "mutilation." All of these scenes happen around Ford and his partner Bill Tench's interviews with incarcerated serial killers, where the killers detail their "deviant" behavior, some of which the agents have trouble with, like Jerry Brudos's shoe fetish.

It all speaks to what is considered "deviant," the standards of which vary from person to person, organization to organization. But the movie as a whole is an interesting study in how criminals, victims, and law enforcement interact, which is a huge theme within Mindhunter. Late film critic Roger Ebert probably summed it up best in his original review for Dog Day Afternoon, to which he gave 3.5 stars.

"Criminals become celebrities because their crimes provide fodder for the media," Ebert wrote. "Many of the fashionable new crimes — hijacking, taking hostages — are committed primarily as publicity stunts. And a complex relationship grows up among the criminals, their victims, the police and the press."