**Spoilers ahead**
First, to clarify, Anna Torv is not Carrie Coon. The actress is perhaps best known for her role on the cult fave “Fringe,” but now she’s earning new attention for her terrific turn on David Fincher‘s excellent serial killer Netflix series, “Mindhunter.”
Torv plays the role of Wendy Carr, an academic who eventually works for the FBI alongside young, genius hotshot Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), and his veteran partner Bill Tench (Holt McCallany). All three characters get some backstory — Holden’s relationship to Debbie; Bill’s tough home life, and his guilt about his uncommunicative adopted son — with Anna arriving at the FBI, newly single after breaking up with her girlfriend. She takes an apartment, and starts feeding a stray cat who appears just outside the window of the laundry room….until one day, it doesn’t come back for the food she leaves out.
READ MORE: ‘Mindhunter’ Season 2 Story Revealed
It’s a seemingly disposable little narrative arc, so what’s the deal with that storyline? According to Torv, even her first guess missed the mark. Here’s what the actress told TV Line:
“I always take things a little too [introspectively], so when I first read it in the script I was like, ‘Oh my God, wow, this is actually interesting.’ I thought, ‘This little kitten is representative of all these faceless [victims] and we only notice the ones that are dead because they have families that are looking for them. And then here’s this little abandoned cat that no one is going to care about. And if that was a person, it’d be the same thing.’ That’s what I first thought when I read it, but that’s just because I’m crazy,” Torv adds with a hearty laugh. “I was making it so deep when probably she’s just, you know, feeding a cat.”
The actress later ran her theory by Mindhunter exec producer David Fincher, who quickly informed her, ‘Oh… no, that’s not it,’” she guffaws. Fincher then explained to her that the cryptic series of scenes were, at least in part, suggesting to the audience that perhaps “there was a kid in the building who’s going around killing cats. And it’s a birth of a new sociopath that we don’t quite know about. Because that’s how it starts — with [inflicting harm on] animals.”
That certainly makes a bit more sense, especially given Holden’s visit to a classroom in an earlier episode, where he tells kids to look out for classmates who might be “mean” to animals. In fairness to Torv though, that cat stuff was a bit opaque, especially in a series that’s very, very heavy on explanatory dialogue (which is not a knock, it’s just the nature of how it’s constructed).
Thoughts? Let us know in the comments section.
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I wouldn’t exactly call five seasons “short-lived” for a genre show on a broadcast network
I thought it would be even more creepy if that wasn’t really a cat she was feeding but someone “playing” a cat.
How is five seasons short lived?
Anna Torv is amazing
Hannah?
I thought it was interesting that the first time her character went down there, she was vulnerable and you got the sense that something bad was going to happen. Eventually, she became more comfortable with coming down and feeding the cat, and each time she looked a little bit more in control. This could be read several ways. The normalization of going downstairs to feed a cat you can’t see could be commentary on normalizing how we view these types of people. The cat appeared to be living in a dark, secluded area that one could almost call a prison (if not for the fact that it wasn’t trapped), so this could be commentary on how other characters in the series kept going back to certain prisoners and “feeding” them. In that way, it could also be a way of showing that the she and her partner are not as different as she would have you believe.
As much as I love Fincher, I think it’s important to remember that authorial intent is not the end-all be-all in terms of critical analysis. One can easily make a case for another reading of someone else’s work, and their argument can easily be just as convincing and legitimate as that which the author claims to have intended.