John Douglas.
John E. Douglas, a household name in the United States, would have been a must have been given words like "detective" and "contemporary Sherlock Holmes" if anything were to be preceded by the name of a former FBI agent. Believe me, he is really much more famous than Dr. Li Changyu.
Douglas was one of the first criminal profilers in the F.B.I.A., publishing more than a dozen books on criminal psychology, nearly all of which were number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Just as Chinese film and television workers continue to adapt the detective stories of Bao Gong, Di Renjie, Song Ci and others into movies and TV series. The "detective", born in 1945, also provided a steady stream of inspiration for Hollywood screenwriters.
The novel The Silence of the Lambs begins with Crawford.
In the "Hannibal" series of novels by Thomas Harris, Jack Crawford, an agent in the FBI's Behavioral Science Division, is based on Douglas. Dennis Farina played Crawford in the 1986 film Night of the Dead, Scott Green portrayed the role in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, and Harvey Keitel also played Crawford in the 2002 film Red Dragon. In the three seasons of the 2013-2015 TV series "Hannibal", Lawrence Fisherborn also played the same role.
Dennis Farina (top left), Scott Green (top right), Harvey Keitel (bottom left) and Lawrence Fisherborn (bottom right) have all played Crawford.
There is another character in the TV series "Hannibal" that is also based on Douglas's deeds, and according to the show's creator Brian Fuller, part of the character line played by FBI agent Will Graham in the first season is derived from Douglas.
Two important characters in the longevity American drama "Criminal Minds", FBI profilers Jason Kiden and David Ross, are based on Douglas.
Psychic Hunter Season 1 poster.
Such a legendary FBI agent, his personal experience has also aroused the interest of the American public. All 10 episodes of the first season of the TV series "Mindhunter", based on his work experience, have been released on Netflix at one time. In fact, the script of the play was first voted for HBO. Apparently, the latter missed a big cake, and since its launch on October 13, the show has received unanimous praise from critics and general audiences. And just in April this year, six months before the show went online, it has already obtained a booking agreement for the second season of Netflix.
Hollywood director David Finch is one of the producers of "Mind Hunter", and the picture shows him on the filming scene of the show.
Watching "Psychological Hunter" requires some psychological construction, because it exposes the dark side of human nature with cold, calm lens language. When I watched, there was always a question that haunted my mind, which of the play really happened and which were artistically processed.
Let me try to make things as clear as possible in a way that is not spoiled. However, in my opinion, many of the real cases in the play may have been known to many people, because these are really big cases in American history, and in the review of major cases such as the Discovery Channel, the audience may have more or less seen documentaries about these cases. As for the fictional part, it is mostly a reorganization of the case handled by Douglas.
So probably a big part of the reason why American audiences responded well to the show is that the show makes the audience sigh, "Oh, I know about that case." And that resonance may have weakened a lot outside the United States. But human nature is connected, and audiences outside the United States are equally shocked — are the serial killers still individuals?
Simply put, Douglas became a household name in the United States because he did a pioneering thing in the United States, sitting down face-to-face interviews with notorious criminals, trying to understand their motives, psychological changes before and after crimes, what the trigger points were, and most critically, how to build scientific models of these interviews for future criminal investigations and crime prevention.
Cover of the first edition of the Crime Classification Manual, which is a pocket book for easy carrying by law enforcement officers.
In fact, Douglas may not have wanted to be a socialite at first, and his first book, titled Crime Classification Manual, was published in collaboration with his FBI colleagues, whose primary purpose was to help FBI agents and officers at major police stations across the country better conduct criminal investigations. The manual is still a must-read for U.S. law enforcement training staff and has been updated in three editions to date.
But Douglas became a household name in the 1980s and 1990s, and one of the reasons for his rise to fame was his role in solving the "Ring Murders of Atlanta from 1979 to 1981", and his use of psychoanalysis to successfully locate the murderer made him a darling of the media. You know, in those days, the American public knew very little about criminal psychology, and Douglas's detective approach was probably no different from that of a psychic medium to the average person.
Books such as Thomas Harris's "Red Dragon" and "The Silence of the Lambs" were published and became bestsellers, and the films based on them also made Douglas famous at the Box Office in the United States. Although there has been little coverage of The Friendship between Harris and Douglas, one thing is certain, Harris was a crime line reporter before becoming a writer, so he was well aware of the role of the FBI's behavioral analysis division and his constant references in the media that Douglas was the Crawford.
On the occasion of the release of Mind Hunter, the 1995 issue of Psycho Detective was republished. This is the cover of the 2017 edition, which has stated that the Netflix platform is about to broadcast a TV series based on the book.
Douglas's 1995 co-authored Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, co-authored with Mark Olschak, eventually established him as the "contemporary Sherlock Holmes." The creative team of "Psychological Hunter" said that they were based on the book, but the TV series and the original book did not have a one-to-one correspondence.
There is a very paradoxical thing, douglas called "detective" seems inappropriate, of course, he did use psychoanalysis, side to write some of the possible gender, age, race and other information of the suspect in some major cases. But his main achievement is to look back at the cases that have occurred. In addition to Psycho Detective, his other masterpiece, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, is the result of his interviews with criminals in prisons around the world. In other words, when the case came into his hands, the case had already been solved.
So why is Douglas so high?
Again, as mentioned earlier, pioneering the introduction of criminal psychology into the field of criminal investigation. This is equivalent to the continuous development of forensic biochemical technologies such as DNA in recent years, which has allowed law enforcement personnel to make great progress in the collection of physical evidence. Douglas' behavioral analysis can help narrow down the scope of the investigation.
At the beginning of Mind Hunter, police officers across the United States are confused about one thing, why did those disgusting crimes happen, and what was the motive of the criminals? Is it possible to explain it with just one sentence of "they are crazy"?
Holden (right) with Bill. The picture shown in Holden's hand is one of the photos taken by the "high-heeled murderer" of the year on the victim.
In the play, Holden Ford, played by Jonathan Grove, is obviously born out of the role of Douglas, hoping to explore the criminal psychology of these people by visiting criminals. But he initially suffered many setbacks, the main one of which came from within the bureaucratic FBI. In the view of the FBI's top leaders, the main duty of the bureau's agents is to solve the case, not to interview the convicts who have already closed the case, because it may raise questions from the media and the public — why do they have to talk to these heinous criminals, is it to reduce their sentences?
At first, Holden wanted to interview Manson, the leader of the "Manson family" who stabbed the wife of the famous director Polanski 16 times, but the prison side could not let him go. So he retreated to another 1970s serial killer, Ed, who was also a terrifying murderer who killed several women, including his own mother, and heerily cut off the victim's head and molested him.
Serial murderer Ed (left) shows Holden why he had to cut off the victim's head from the root of the left ear to the root of the right ear, because the "ear to ear" in English is true. This line made Holden realize that Ed did not have the guilt of ordinary people.
It was from Ed that Holden established some of the initial models and theories of behavioral analysis. To my shock, Clement Britton, who plays Ed, is so much like the prototype.
Ed prototype. The actors who play the serial murderers in the play can be described as "god restored".
In short, Holden's research on Ed was endorsed by his colleague Bill Tenzi (based on FBI agent Robert Resler), and the two began to work together to interview a series of criminals such as Jerry Bruds, the "high-heeled murderer", Richard Spike, who murdered eight girls in Chicago, and others (please note that the criminal experiences of these criminals in the play are real).
Holden and Bill's efforts were finally recognized by the academic community, and psychologist Wendy (based on Dr. Anna Walbert Boggs) was also involved in the interview research.
But soon, Holden disagreed with his peers, believing that the results of the research could be immediately applied to practice (in the play, he helped the police in many places solve cases, and the circumstances of these cases were different from the real cases). But Wendy et al. believe that the first thing is to produce research results, because once this research is known to the outside world, it may bring endless trouble, at least one thing to pay attention to, if you let the criminals who have not yet been interviewed understand things, it may "contaminate the sample".
Psychologist Wendy gradually disagreed with Holden's work.
Watching Mind Hunter, it's easy for viewers to agree with Holden's perspective, because the social evaluation of criminal psychology in recent decades can easily lead the public to push back the view that holden was right at the time. But putting yourself in the shoes of the other characters in the play also shows that their fears at the time were not wrong.
For example, a few years ago, Professor Li Meijin caused great controversy on the Internet because of comments such as "crime of passion", but her wording did not exceed the expression of criminal psychology, which is a basic term. It can be seen that there is sometimes a deep misunderstanding between public sentiment and academic research. If you watch Mind Hunter, you probably will understand.