Difficult protagonists
By coincidence, I am group-watching season 2 of The Wire and the short-series detective show Luther at the same time. (No spoilers beyond season 2, please.) Both of them star Idris Elba, of course, ten years apart and in different countries with different accents, and while Luther is a fairly conventional difficult-protagonist-detective show in the vein of Prime Suspect, The Wire is a decentralized narrative of systems theory.
Still, we spent considerable brain cells asking ourselves how Stringer Bell would do as a police detective. The answer is: he'd be aces, all discerning deliberation and pitiless inquiry. (Subsequently it was decided that he should run the NSA, or similar.) Interestingly, none of us wondered how Luther would do as a drug kingpin. I have a feeling he wouldn't last very long.
And then Terriers, which I like despite having imprinted Donal Logue (Hank Dallworth) as that greasy, obnoxious cab-driver character he played on MTV 20 years ago. (For the record, Hank has meticulously washed and trimmed locks.) Hank is also difficult, not moody or interpersonally tense, but he's kind of a shmuck and kind of an asshole. He's a recovering alcoholic and not a very good detective; presumably from the title we're meant to see him and his partner Brit as more endowed with endurance than any other particular virtue.
I look at Hank over the course of the season so far and I appreciate his pathetic interventions, how he steps in even though half the time he makes things worse but can't stop himself. He's that guy in the story Leo McGarry used to tell, the one who when you're down at the bottom of the well, he jumps in with you rather than go for help. He isn't wise and he isn't even able to be nice a lot of the time, but the stories the show tells are stories about interventions: although he says he makes his detective money photographing unfaithful spouses, that's not something we ever see him do. When there's an unfaithful spouse in the picture, there's Hank playing awkward, incompetent therapist.
I am, as you can see, primed to read these difficult people differently from one another: both their types of difficulty and the context of that difficulty in the story. I don't think I've ever seen a British short series detective drama in which the protagonist had an ordinary, happy family life: have you? It's always solitary weirdoes and curt divorcees and people who tap-dance on the edge of unlikable, or downright reprehensible.
This also conveniently describes the new Beeb Sherlock Holmes, a ghostly, arrogant nerd with a risk-fetish. I never much liked Holmes on the page -- I found his author high-handed and fussy and emptily clever -- and so it's not a surprise I don't much like him on the screen either. Generally speaking, arrogant nerds are hard to like anyway, and arrogant nerds who are never taken down a peg even moreso. One wants the ordinary lumpen fools to be right sometimes, and to say, No, you don't know everything, come on down here into the hole and see how it looks from this perspective.
The cruellest revenge I can think of to inflict on someone like Holmes is to ask him to solve the crimes chronicled on The Wire. The individual whodunnit is as nothing to the systems and structures of a struggling city's underbelly.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/19976.html. Comment wherever you like.
Still, we spent considerable brain cells asking ourselves how Stringer Bell would do as a police detective. The answer is: he'd be aces, all discerning deliberation and pitiless inquiry. (Subsequently it was decided that he should run the NSA, or similar.) Interestingly, none of us wondered how Luther would do as a drug kingpin. I have a feeling he wouldn't last very long.
And then Terriers, which I like despite having imprinted Donal Logue (Hank Dallworth) as that greasy, obnoxious cab-driver character he played on MTV 20 years ago. (For the record, Hank has meticulously washed and trimmed locks.) Hank is also difficult, not moody or interpersonally tense, but he's kind of a shmuck and kind of an asshole. He's a recovering alcoholic and not a very good detective; presumably from the title we're meant to see him and his partner Brit as more endowed with endurance than any other particular virtue.
I look at Hank over the course of the season so far and I appreciate his pathetic interventions, how he steps in even though half the time he makes things worse but can't stop himself. He's that guy in the story Leo McGarry used to tell, the one who when you're down at the bottom of the well, he jumps in with you rather than go for help. He isn't wise and he isn't even able to be nice a lot of the time, but the stories the show tells are stories about interventions: although he says he makes his detective money photographing unfaithful spouses, that's not something we ever see him do. When there's an unfaithful spouse in the picture, there's Hank playing awkward, incompetent therapist.
I am, as you can see, primed to read these difficult people differently from one another: both their types of difficulty and the context of that difficulty in the story. I don't think I've ever seen a British short series detective drama in which the protagonist had an ordinary, happy family life: have you? It's always solitary weirdoes and curt divorcees and people who tap-dance on the edge of unlikable, or downright reprehensible.
This also conveniently describes the new Beeb Sherlock Holmes, a ghostly, arrogant nerd with a risk-fetish. I never much liked Holmes on the page -- I found his author high-handed and fussy and emptily clever -- and so it's not a surprise I don't much like him on the screen either. Generally speaking, arrogant nerds are hard to like anyway, and arrogant nerds who are never taken down a peg even moreso. One wants the ordinary lumpen fools to be right sometimes, and to say, No, you don't know everything, come on down here into the hole and see how it looks from this perspective.
The cruellest revenge I can think of to inflict on someone like Holmes is to ask him to solve the crimes chronicled on The Wire. The individual whodunnit is as nothing to the systems and structures of a struggling city's underbelly.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/19976.html. Comment wherever you like.