A cursory glance at the list of reducible units of narrative deduced by Vladimir Propp from an analysis of Russian folk tales reveals that his work remains relevant and is fruitfully applicable to the new BBC television drama Luther. It is as though the casting of Idris Elba in the title role was justification enough for the existence of this weekly serial, and anything else in the work drawn from somewhere other than stock cultural situations and dynamics would be an unwanted distraction.
Indeed, Elba is mostly effective as intense London detective John Luther. Walking with a distinctive bob, and grasping his forehead when in contemplation as though his mind moves almost too fast for him to articulate, he’s an engaging protagonist, even if he is a carbon replication of Vincent D’Onofrio’s near-autistic detective in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, who was himself a more disengaged Will Graham from Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Manhunter.
While Graham’s psychological insights and instability were enforced onto the mise-en-scene around him in that film, Luther is unaided by simplistically cast supporting actors and locations. A child kidnapper (not rapist, presumably for watershed broadcast reasons) is run down in a cavernous and abandoned industrial site. A potential killer resides in a thirtieth floor Barbican apartment. The estranged wife (a Humanitarian Lawyer, so lots of chance for character development there) works in city office with glass elevators.
More derivatively, Luther’s immediate superior brings him back to the force after a suspension following the near-death of a suspect that still haunts him. His new partner is a fresh-faced rookie who applied “three times a week in writing” to work with him. Someone higher up the chain of command worries that Luther is a loose canon who could sink the entire unit. I could go on.
Perhaps a more rewarding task, however, would be to question why such elements are once again being trotted out. Partly, it is the sincerest form of flattery: director Brian Kirk (clearly a recent film school graduate) mimics the visual language of Heat-period Michael Mann, while creator and writer Neil Cross plays the unexciting trick of imbuing characters with a vague knowledge of their structural purpose (dialogue such as “was that the speech?” and “let’s have that talk where I tell you such-and-such” abound). This latter device is welcome, but hardly fresh, and was inevitably better done by Steven Soderbergh in the Ocean’s films.
Familiarity, of course, is a warm blanket, and we must be reminded of the following exchange from that masterpiece of satire Futurama, when Leela attempts to make the television show Fry has written more dramatic:
Fry: Married? Jenny can’t get married.
Leela: Why not? It’s clever, it’s unexpected.
Fry: But that’s not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.
Fry is correct to some degree. A genuinely dramatic piece of detective entertainment will perfectly poise the audience on the edge of realisation, but also make them rely on the final push to come from the protagonist. I wrote briefly in my review of Iron Man 2 about the tendency of Hollywood blockbusters to actively discourage audience involvement by crafting denouements so obtuse that we can only shrug in bemusement at their solving. Luther goes too far the other way, for reasons that feel lazy. We all guess that the gun is in the dog long before this is revealed because, in a scene that sticks out like a sore thumb, the dog is the only thing seen being cremated. During a coffee break Luther realises that the person he is interrogating is the culprit of the crime; returning to the interrogation room the suspect is clearly in on the fact that he now knows. Dramatic tension remains, but resolutely at a singular level. Multi-dimensional interaction is deemed too difficult. Rather than the villain seducing Luther’s wife by impersonating a normal person who was molested by the detective, she instead attacks the woman and hisses threats.
Another reason for the wholesale embrace of cliché must be related to the BBC’s budget and public profile issues, and the corporation’s hope for a “sure thing”. It is an unfortunate surrendering to populism, especially considering Channel 4 are both incapable and uninterested in creating anything as interesting as their now-finished Prime Suspect.
I never felt stupid during Luther, nor scared (even though, in the ruthless Alice Morgan, the show attempts to emulate Millennium’s terrifying demon Lucy Butler). At my most charitable I saw a production which was certifying itself in the fundamentals, before hopefully edging into more interesting territory. Unfortunately, these fundamentals consisted entirely of the aforementioned Proppian narratemes: the ‘Absentation’ or broken family unit, the villain’s ‘Reconnaissance’ of the hero (aided by Google), and even the ‘Receipt of the Magical Agent’ in the form of the fragments of the murder weapon. Such obvious formalist elements, presented straight as structural components, leave no room for the airless and uncomfortable moments of real life, nor do they allow room for the exploration of a drama at more than one level. The power of the scene in which the protagonist kicks in a door when he hears his lover is sleeping with someone else comes not just from the aggression, but from the raw directness of it among the multi-layered complications that surround it in the lives lived around such moments. Violence shocks because it is direct and clear, a clarity which is lost without a comparison to the muddle of the everyday.
The runaway popularity both commercially and critically (initially, at any rate) of the U.S. show 24 testifies to the fact that people enjoy entertainment that is not only very basic, but revels in how basic it is by recycling the same information scene-by-scene. Luther might not be this bad, but it certainly does not want us to be left in the dark, either in terms of plot information or character motivation.
Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in 1984 that to understand, or “cognitive[ly] map” the emerging postmodern world of digital connectivity and apparent creeping social homogenisation “will involve the invention of remarkable new languages and forms.” When I first saw Michael Mann’s (sorry, him again) 2006 film Miami Vice I thought that the first twenty minutes of that film might just be an illustration of such a new language, as it presented a world of simultaneity, complexity and unstoppable motion without offering a clarification beyond its visual existence. I now suspect that I may have been wrong, that the mapping of the psychology of the twenty-first century will take place through the medium of shows such as Luther, storytelling that reassure us that everything is deducible, that we are able to keep up, and that the only tragedy that can befall us is dramatic, and so understandable, and even cathartic.
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