Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
ARE
ALL DETECTIVE SHOWS ABOUT ANGST AND SEX?
Let me tell you
what I regard as a really satisfying detective story.
Sherlock Holmes
receives a visitor who has a problem. Simply by interviewing the visitor,
Sherlock Holmes adduces much of what the problem really is. Accompanied by the
redoubtable (and not stupid) Dr Watson, Sherlock Holmes visits the scene of the
crime and investigates. He may face some opposition and some dangers along the
way. If this is one of the four Sherlock Holmes novels (as opposed to the
dozens of short stories), then there might be quite a few dangers along the
way, but they will all prove to be connected with the perpetrator of the crime.
In the end, Sherlock Holmes resolves all mystery and the criminal is brought to
justice, perhaps to the embarrassment of Inspector Lestrade, who thought he
could solve the crime by more orthodox techniques.
You see the
pattern here, don’t you? Mystery. Investigation. Resolution. A perfectly
satisfying detective story.
And here is
another paradigm of the perfectly satisfying detective story.
The Surete bring
to the notice of Inspector Jules Maigret a string of crimes that are happening
in Paris (well…usually; because there are some Maigret stories set elsewhere.)
Following a few leads, Maigret heads for an apartment block where the victims
of the crime live. Of course he begins by interrogating the concierge. Then he
interrogates at great length everybody in the household where the crime
occurred. It is his subordinates (Janvier, Lucas and others) who do much of the
legwork, checking out alibis, giving chase to suspects and so forth. Maigret’s
main method is the long, intense and penetrating interview, which gradually
wears suspects down and winkles out motives and kinks in people. It is by these
means that he unmasks the criminal. Usually the crime is motivated by some sad
family dysfunction.
Again, a
perfectly satisfying detective story. Problem. Investigation. Solution.
I could refer to
other tales in which this paradigm holds good. Father Brown detecting by
intuition and recognition of suspects’ obsessions. Nero Wolfe sitting in his
chair at home and thinking hard while his pal Archie Goodwin does the legwork.
And so on and so on.
Believe me, in
bringing all this to your attention. I am not denying the real attractions of
the related – but separate – genre of the “thriller”, where there may be some
detection, but the main impulse is to keep the action rolling (from Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler to the present). Nor am I attempting to promote a
retro view of detective stories, where one admires only what the TV profession
in Britain unflatteringly call the “cosies” – the comfy detective stories,
usually set in rural setting, featuring Hetty Winthrop or derived from Agatha
Christie.
What I am
preaching against, however, is the current tendency in detective stories to
turn away from the reliable pattern of “crime-detection-solution” by
overloading the tale with side issues involving the psychological or family
problems of the detective him- or her-self. We are now, I believe, seeing too
many detective shows, which are psychodramas rather than true detection. In the
process, their stories are frequently padded out with incredible
improbabilities, and the essential detection is lost.
In this case for
the prosecution, I bring to your attention four shows concerning detection, all
of which we have watched in their entirety on Netflix.
I list them here
from best to worst.
First there is the quite likeable series Shetland, set on the Shetland Islands of
Scotland (though publicity tells me it is mainly filmed on the mainland of
Scotland), based on novels by Anne Cleeves and starring Douglas Henshall as police
detective Jimmy Perez. Three series were aired in Britain between 2013 and 2016
and a new series is in the making. The mysteries set up in Shetland are good ones, and the solutions are usually logical, so I
am in no way decrying the series. But it does have some of the obligatory angst
which “serious” detective shows now seem to require. Jimmy Perez is a widower
who has sad conversations with his adult daughter and obviously misses
satisfying female company. This fact does not hold up the detection process too
much, thank goodness, but it does mean that every so often there is a sequence
in which Jimmy Perez does little but sit in his room feeling sorry for himself.
Still, the psychodrama tendency is generally kept in check in Shetland.
A bit worse is
the English-language re-make of the original Swedish-language series Wallander. The remake, now concluded,
originally aired on British TV between 2008 and 2015. Kenneth Branagh is the
grumpy, unshaven and often drunk Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander. Like Shetland, the series often has country
settings, though of course in this case in the Swedish countryside. But depressive
Kurt Wallander is separated from his wife, with a slightly alienated daughter
and with an Alzheimic father played by David Warner. Cue, alas, far too many
shots of Kenneth Branagh staring into the middle distance to express angst or
alienation or depression or whatever your bag is. Too often, these side issues
overwhelm the mystery and its resolution, which should be at the heart of the
story. They are – let’s be frank about this – padding.
I’ve already
dealt on this blog with a much worse piece of psychobabble padding in a
detective show, the Belfast-set detective series The Fall (see my post WhichIs the Psychopath?). This draggy, over-stretched series had
Gillian Anderson as an English detective on the trail of a serial murderer with
weird sexual tastes. The cop herself is addicted to sex and sees it as her
privilege to bed young police constables who are her subordinates. The series
is filled with long, loving shots of murdered women; and with unconvincing
dialogue in which the detective asserts her right as a free woman to indulge
any sexual pleasures she pleases. I had the Schadenfreude of noting that the
series gradually lost its audience when it was first broadcast in Britain and
was the subject of a scathing review in the Guardian.
More to the point, I noted that the sex stuff was really padding which
stretched out what should have been a three- or four-episode story to eleven
wearisome, slow-moving episodes.
I thought The Fall was the pits for this sort of
thing. Then I saw the even worse Marcella
(broadcast in Britain in 2016). Created by the Swede who created the much
superior series The Bridge, Marcella has police detective Marcella
Backland (Anna Friel) tracking a serial killer (or serial killers) who is (are)
somehow associated with evil hard-faced bitch Sinead Cusack’s London property
development company. The twist is that Marcella Backland’s estranged husband (black
actor Nicholas Pinnock) is an employee of the said company, although he himself
is not a suspect. There are so many improbabilities in this series that it is
laughable. Something traumatic has happened to detective Marcella Backland in
the past, and she every so often has blackouts from which she recovers, not
remembering what she has just done. She often tussles with her estranged
husband over access to their children. There is another woman now in her
estranged husband’s wife, but that doesn’t prevent a scene in which he comes
back to her and bonks her out of sympathy for her angst. One might begin by
questioning why the police would allow somebody with ties to the suspect
company and its suspect employees to be part of this investigation in the first
place. Even more serious, one might ask how likely it is that such an overtly
unbalanced, mentally-ill, amnesiac person would be practising as a detective
anyway. Ah yes, but then it all allows for all the psycho-drama angst of
Marcella suffering her condition, which neatly pads out a simple mystery and
might allow some viewers to believe they have been watching an adult drama.
I’m aware that
wearisomely-long detective stories are no new thing (doubtless you are aware of
the long Victorian detection novels of Wilkie Collins). But the padding-out of
detective stories in their TV incarnations has now become a positive plague.
And it is especially noisome in that they so often produce the impression that
a detective is not complete without being neurotic, depressive, mentally
unbalanced, profoundly unhappy or obsessed with sex.
I’m amazed that
most of them can do any detecting at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment