My Journey Inside the “Mind of a Serial Killer”

Illustration by Brandon Celi Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.A couple of weeks ago, while taking the train back home to Brooklyn from therapy on (where else?) the Upper West Side, I noticed a subway ad I’d never seen before. “MIND OF A SERIAL KILLER: THE EXPERIENCE,” it blared ominously, in tabloid-style all caps, over what appeared to be a black-and-white mug shot of a lank-haired, stubble-jawed man. Offering, helpfully, that the exhibition was only a “5 min walk from union sq.,” the ad went on to promise (or, maybe, threaten?), “True crime isn’t a podcast anymore. It’s an experience.” What was this, now?

I was familiar, of course, with so-called experience museums. Starting about a decade ago, it suddenly seemed like you couldn’t leave the house without stumbling into some sort of immersive exhibition, where instead of observing precious objects from a careful distance, like you’d do at any old museum, you could engage with the displays in an interactive way, with the added benefit of plenty of Instagram-ready photo ops. I’ve had some brushes with this kind of thing myself. I once dove into an enormous ball pit at something called the Color Factory (an “immersive art experience” in SoHo), and I often pass by the ever-bustling Museum of Ice Cream, also in SoHo, a tourist mainstay with an “iconic sprinkle pool” and a “banana jungle” (a “playful tribute to the classic banana split.”)

I’d also heard of Candytopia (“joy you can taste, touch, and share”) and the nature-focussed Arte Museum (“Feel waterfalls crash around you”). The beloved sitcom “Friends,” I knew, had its own dedicated experience in Gramercy, where you could lounge in a replica of Central Perk or kick back in La-Z-Boys just like Joey and Chandler’s; and, more recently, even the reality-competition game “Traitors” got in on the action, with the show’s Scotland castle setting recreated in a Williamsburg pop-up. I also remembered, with both fondness and queasiness, a much earlier precursor to all this: my tour, at eighteen, of the old Heineken brewery in Amsterdam (the name of the venue has since been changed to the Heineken Experience), where the interactive element—though it wasn’t referred to in those terms back then—consisted, at least for me, of getting blind drunk on the litres of freshly brewed Pilsner that my friends and I were served as part of our visit.