Wire in the Blood is not like other Cop Shows

[catsidhe]

In most cop/crime/forensic shows — CSI:wherever, Law & Order, Bones, Cold Case, etc, etc, etc — murder is a game of chess, murder is something that one side tries to get away with, and the other tries to catch them. The point is not the death, but the game.

The murderer is somehow cool. Sometimes simply by apposition to their opponents, sometimes because they are real rebels: they break the final taboo. They are unlucky bastards, poor shmucks who try to stave off the inevitable. They are romantic.

Wire in the Blood is not like that.

These murderers are not heroes, or antiheroes, or rebels, or romantics, or shlubs bucking against bad luck.

They are sick, sad, insane fucks, who kill because they are, fundamentally, broken, because they had to choose between changing who they are and being monsters, and decided that change was too hard. They don't kill because it's cool, or rebellious, or romantic, or because they could get away with it, or for the money, or out of mercy, or by accident, but because they couldn't not do it.

And while the concept is there in other shows, the broken insane murderer is a well-worn trope, the other shows, other movies — Se7en, Kiss The Girls, The Bone Collecter, Silence of the Lambs et seq. — all treat him (almost always ‘him’) as a different sort of monster: the Gothic monster, the romantic monster. He is Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, a Werewolf: he is what he is, and what he is is romantic. He is something else, other, alien to and in many ways superior to the rest of humanity, except for the demi-god sent to catch him (Frankenstein, Van Helsing, the Ronin with the silver bullet, Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Detective Logan). It is a game between two great powers.

In Wire in the Blood, the actual murderer is not the opponent of Dr Tony Hill: it is the murderer's insanity. The game is not the usual one of chess or poker, but of Solitaire, the Cryptic Crossword, Sudoku with interlocking grids of 144 symbols.

And, as I keep returning to, the murderer is not cool, or playing a game, or being a rebel.
He is doing what he must.
And he does not do so because he has decided to, but because he is broken, and would be, were he less dangerous, a sad pitiful creature. He is at the same time a monster, and a pathetic specimen.

It is not the concept per se which sets Wire in the Blood apart from its peers, it is the presentation. And that presentation is itself a powerful concept.


And now I'm going to bed.

Comments

[baronsnorri.livejournal.com]

Not to be overly pedantic (is that possible? Does pedantry require degrees of classification?), but "Wire in the Blood" is a psychiatrist show, based on some particularly gruesome murder scenarios.

I found the show interesting, often confronting--I doubt I'll feel the need to view it again.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

It is the confrontation, and the difference from the usual trope, which is what makes it worth watching, IMHO. (Although last weeks episode, with the cannibal torturing women to death, was turned off quite quickly by general consent.)

There is another Psychological Cop show to compare Wire in the Blood with: the American Criminal Minds. And the difference is instructive: while the point in both shows is to catch the murder by understanding his psychosis, in Criminal Minds there is still the frisson that the murderer is cool, even if only because it takes these paragons of ability, these demi-gods amongst men to catch him. The actual murders, IIRC, are not as much shown on screen, and the aftermath is much more like a video game: you have a Clue, which might have aggrieved family and so forth, but the physical object is just something to mine for evidence.

In Wire in the Blood, the corpse is explicitly what is left of a person. It is not a quick stab to the ribs, or a small gunshot hole in the temple, with nicely closed eyes; it is a person who we have often gotten to know in the preceding minutes, and they are staring at nothing, there is pain on their faces, what is left after being bashed to a pulp or drowned with a hose forced down their throats. There is not the comforting illusion that ‘maybe they didn't suffer’. (And while they sometimes drag out the concept of a lingering death in other shows, it is never quite as viscerally horrible.) Bones tries to get the “this was a person” thing out with their forensic artist, but that just comes across as fluffy twaddle. We are being told, not shown, the personhood, and the horror of their last moments.

The characters in Criminal Minds are smooth, competent, cool. They lend credence to their opponent by their attention. Dr Hill, on the other hand, while a genius psychologist, is bloody awful at being a person. He's gauche, socially awkward, he turns away his police partner without thinking, just when she needs his advice most (although to be fair, some of this is because he is just another guy muddling through, and it's not his fault she calls him at awkward times). His monomaniacal, borderline autistic behaviour, marks him as almost as broken as the people he helps find, but he has chosen to play to his strengths and try (often unsuccessfully) to mitigate his known faults.

Summary: Dr Hill is not cool. You might stand in awe of his skills as a psychologist, but at the same time, you flinch when he fumbles trivial social interactions. And unlike Zac in Bones, his social awkwardness is not part of his charm, it is not a foible offset by the rest of his team, it is not a quirk which he proudly owns: it is practically a disability at times. And this just goes to emphasise that those he hunts are not cool either.

That's the difference. Wire in the Blood does not valorise the murderer. (Thanks, bar_barra, for the word.) It shows it as, however shocking the execution, as fundamentally banal in origin, a sickness, not a philosophy.

Criminal Minds

[(Anonymous)]

Now Criminal Minds is something I can relate to. Maybe I need the sense of heroism in tv, to unwind and escape the "real world"? But what I have started paying close attention to in Criminal Minds is the use of quotations before and after the episode. For some reason it always grabs me; sometimes I write them down. It adds to the sense or superiority of the do-gooders, perhaps some sort of reflective justification.

The downside to CM is that it can be a bit too scripted, in that the story is often made in the same framework and can become predictable.

-- mpp

Murderers are not cool guys

[bar-barra.livejournal.com]

No indeed. Those Who Would Know are all united on one point. Crims are mostly sad, pathetic, dreeby little creeps who lead lives of such paralyzing tedium that they do it mostly to relieve the monotony. I have taught many crims. Or attempted with little success to do so. Without exception they were the antithesis of Hannibal Lecter. Who, I am advised, is nothing but a valorizing fantasy of the most perverted kind. There was a choice, however. There's always a choice. There's always someone telling you not to be that depressing loser over there in the corner, currently assisting the police with their inquiries.

It's simply that they don't listen. Sad but there it is, really.

[ravenseer.livejournal.com]

An absolutely stunning show, on so many levels.

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

And yet we're all superheroes on the inside (just like a certain diminutive cat who knows he's really the size of a lion.) Both crims and cops.

I've met crims - most of whom really are retarded dickheads, and I've worked with no small number of cops and prison guards - most of whom are just people doing jobs. But I believe that most of each have homonculi that more resemble Gothic Monsters, or Freedom Fighters, or Ned Kelly, or Deckard, or John McLane, or Gibbs. (The ones with better senses of humour might acknowledge more of a resemblance to either Arthur Daley or the legendary Bargarse...) It's no surprise that people see themselves this way, even the sub-optimally intelligent. We're all stars in our own movies, and we all justify and romanticise what we do.

The 'necessity' thing though... Now that's interesting. I am what I am because I can be no other..? And you are as you are as an inevitable response to me..? Now we're into the interesting philosophical and religious ground.

[taavi.livejournal.com]

The existence of such people (assuming they aren't just a fictional trope) does raise a problem for a just justice system - what do you do with them? If you have a reasonable belief that such a person is unreformable, do you lock them up til they die? Hang them? or let them go after a 20 year sentence, only to see another person murdered? All options have problems if one wants to be humane.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

I think that people that seriously broken do exist. Charles Manson comes to mind, inter alia.

It is indeed a vexed question... for those who let such things bother them. The good old US has a tendency to kill such people whatever their mental state. (Although...)

I just wish I had time to write a proper response. But as a start, there are two semi-orthogonal responses to this sort of thing: as a Crime and as a Sickness, the legal and the medical, and the two don't always play nicely together.

It's certainly not something for which you could have a "typical" response, though. Each case perforce must be on its own merits.