I am definitely late to the game on this one having just finished the BBC, British-Irish series The Fall this week! I knew that I wanted to talk about the series but I was at a loss of what exactly to talk about until I saw the ratings for the show. The three series tense thriller had people falling over themselves to binge watch the first series back in 2013, but by its finale in 2016, reactions to it had shifted. The recent addition of the show on Netflix UK has had many people obsessed (and thoroughly creeped out), bingeing it within a few days, myself included, a change of tune from 2016. So, what happened?
Let’s start with the show itself. Following Superintendent Stella Gibson (played by Gillian Anderson), a Met officer being loaned out to the Irish Police in Belfast, Gibson ties together a string of murders to a single killer. However, the series is not your typical whodunnit of the crime thriller world, but rather, in the words of Angie Errigo, a ‘whydunnit’. From the beginning, we are aware that handsome family man, Peter Spector (played by Jamie Dornan), is the killer everyone is looking for. The ‘why’ and ‘how’ becomes the driving force of the first series. Moreover, the impeccable acting from Anderson saw the presence of an incredibly strong female character, with one article from The Atlantic going so far as to call it ‘the most feminist show on television’. But the big question that remains is whether that was enough to establish the show as noteworthy when most of television is flooded with a plethora of crime series and documentaries.
The episode titles are mostly taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem that traces the biblical story of Adam, Eve and Satan, widely analysed as being a metaphor of a fall from grace and the line between obedience and temptation. However, unlike Paradise Lost, this fall from grace is done almost seductively. A popular criticism of the show during its initial release is that sin and crime were portrayed as sexy, exciting and aesthetic, with one Independent article saying: ‘Here the murder of women is a stylish business, as lovingly choreographed and as tastefully lit as any love scene. Abuse is presented, without any crudely explicit detail, as an intense sexual experience, at the excitingly taboo end of things.’
However, unlike Paradise Lost, this fall from grace is done almost seductively.
Show creator, Allan Cubbit, argued that people raising concerns about the issue of women in peril in the show are ‘asking the wrong fundamental question’, going on to say that it hard for anyone to ‘argue that it would be somehow more palatable if the victims were young gay men or small boys’. While’s he’s not wrong, it would most definitely not be more palatable, and he also completely dismissed the point that the chosen women who were the victims of an incredibly depraved man were women. Moreover, professional, successful women. The concern is the fundamental point: why is the trope of women in jeopardy, or damsels in distress, still the main trope in crime dramas? And why is it somehow ‘cinematically’ acceptable to present detailed scenes of their dehumanisation and humiliation and then go on to claim that those who are concerned are missing the point, going so far as to claim that those who think it is misogynistic have not watched it closely enough?
Does anyone else think that is an aggressive form of defence?
While Cubbit has argued time and time again that his intention behind creating The Fall was to illuminate the poor representation of women victims in television crime dramas, the macabre fascination of serial killers that is shared by so many people around the world (us included having written many posts like this one looking at the psychopath in You) may have overshadowed that as the series went on. Indeed, I was disappointed to find that there was no mention of why Spector specifically went after professionally successful women after the first season. Rather as the series goes on, it is brought more to bare on Spector’s own history of emotional trauma and physical and sexual abuse, establishing him to what Cubbit describes as, ‘a victim . . . of his own psychopathology’.
Indeed, it seems that the most significant saving grace for the show was the character of Stella Gibson. Strong, silent, more than a little broody, she was exactly the kind of male detective one is used to seeing in these crime dramas, except she was equal parts feminine and sensual. And as a result, she is constantly facing various forms of double-standards and sexism from her male colleagues, proving, once again, that successful women are expected to sacrifice their sexuality to be accepted by their male colleagues. The first season was a brilliant portrayal of this tension as Gibson proved herself to be more capable than many of her colleagues and actively took other women under her wing, supporting and training them to succeed in a man’s world.
However, as has been the reoccurring pattern, the following seasons did not do this feminist theme justice, and instead threatened what it had built in the initial season. Where season 1 established Gibson’s sensuality unapologetically, the overzealous close ups of her in her silk and lace underwear that look like they were filmed for a Dior commercial raises questions about the use of women’s bodies to bring intrigue to the show. One article from The Guardian claimed, ‘it’s precisely this veil of classiness, this veneer of BBC2 sophistication, that brings on the sophistry’. Worse, there are numerous suggestions, subtle and blatant, of a sexual tension between Gibson and Spector. Just because it is classy does not necessarily mean that it is good or appropriate. The final season did nothing to assuage this very blurry morality, where the nursing staff at the hospital Spector is at are charmed by him, regardless of knowing that he is a brutal killer of women.
It seems that the most significant saving grace for the show was the character of Stella Gibson.
And yet, knowing all of this, I still thoroughly enjoyed watching the series. Maybe it is because we have become so desensitised to women being seduced by men even when it is so clearly problematic that we do not even question it anymore. A whydunnit is interesting enough, the fascination of clearly deranged minds clear in society, but did we really need three whole seasons to focus on why one man hated women so much that he could not control his pathological urge to murder them all? And maybe, that is the real issue; not only that we continue to see women as victims to depraved men and yet these men are given backgrounds and excuses that humanise them while women are consistently dehumanised and degraded, but that we accept it as effective cinematic tropes. Food for thought.
~S~
