Profiling through Language: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Interrogation and Power in Netflix's Mindhunter

Abstract

This study examined the use of language to construct and contest power relations in interrogation dialogues in Netflix's Mindhunter (2017–2019). The series dramatises the early FBI efforts at criminal profiling, where interrogation scenes with convicted serial killers highlight the role of discourse in negotiating authority, resistance, and identity. This study employed a qualitative CDA framework drawing on Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional model and Van Dijk's (2006) framework of power in discourse. Selected scenes with Ed Kemper, Jerry Brudos, and Richard Speck were analysed for speech acts, turn-taking patterns, modality, and lexical strategies. The findings revealed that FBI agents frequently employ directives and controlling discourse to assert dominance. At the same time, the killer subjected resistance through question reversal, lexical elevation, narrative expansion, strategic rupture, and nihilistic minimisation, sometimes decisively destabilising institutional power. This indicated that criminal profiling is not a one-sided process but a discursively co-constructed practice. The study contributed to discourse studies, forensic linguistics, and media analysis by revealing how dramatised interrogations imitate and reproduce broader cultural understandings of crime, authority, and the epistemology of investigative language.