Through The Motions: A Review of Episode 6 of ‘Luther’

Having disgraced himself in the eyes of his fellow soldiers, and in doing so undone all his previous heroism and also put his family at risk, Ajax announces that he will journey to the beach of Troy for solitude. It is at this point that Sophocles has the soldier speak of the capriciousness of alliances and identity:

‘I have learnt this-

hate an enemy knowing he may be a friend

love a friend knowing he may be an enemy.

Men are tricky things.’

(translation by Robert Cannon)

Not as tricky as endings, perhaps, judging by the final episode of the first (only?) series of Luther, the London-set detective drama broadcast on the BBC this summer. The more-than-two-millennia old play Ajax begins after an act of extreme violence, and presents the dissolution of a hero renowned for his concrete fortitude. Those Ajax relied upon for support – the goddess Athena – are revealed as at best uncaring towards him, while those he considered sworn enemies – the crafty Odysseus – go to great lengths to restore the shamed man’s honour. So too Luther’s own world is flipped upside down, a state of affairs perhaps intriguing but inevitably fumbled.

(Viewers still in need of catching-up using iPlayer be warned, to fully explicate the sweeping ridiculousness of this sixth episode of Luther it will be necessary to describe the plotting in detail up to and including the final minutes.)

For those who have stuck with the increasingly absurd series, the nadir was surely reached when Luther’s former best mate gunned down Luther’s ex-wife in a scene that could not have been more forced had the actors literally re-positioned themselves according to explicit floor-sketched markers. Perhaps this was intentional – an indication of the hand of fate, the inescapability of tragic circumstance. This is no weak spirit for a drama to mix with: the superlative American cop-show The Shield structured the entire final three seasons (of seven) around a claustrophobic vice of incident, connecting events pregnant with consequence stretching back to the pilot episode with offhand moments throughout the show to create a perfect storm of dread and finality.

The key is in that final word, and the satisfaction it brings. Resolutions can be the male and female protagonists at long last getting together. For our pop-nihilist mainstream though, better to have an arrest, a beating, or best still a murder. (The Shield, in its last episode, managed to trump all of these in its own inimitable way, and if you have not seen the show I urge you to seek it out). We all know the Greeks called it catharsis – the exhausting but welcome purgation of emotion. As those who have kept track of the mainstream response to the Robert Pattinson vehicle Remember Me will be aware, it is always appreciated if the conclusion of a drama is just that – a conclusive rendering of themes, storylines and characters that have been previously established, rather than random occurrences. Luther’s creator and writer Neil Cross goes to great lengths to stack the deck in his favour on this front, and the result – four principle characters converging in a bloody and faux-moralistic confrontation on an abandoned train platform – fails to satisfy on almost every level.

What are these levels? Firstly, and most obviously, there is characterisation. DCI Ian Reed began as just another cop in the office, and Luther’s “best mate”, but without warning or reason he becomes in the last episode and a half a desperate murderer. The extent to which he has covered up his crimes and tried to frame his friend is ludicrous; more damagingly, it undermines any involvement as once again realism is ditched in favour of Drama with a capital D. “But it’s just escapist entertainment” you might cry. However, Reed’s killing of Zoe, and subsequent arrangement of the scene (in minutes, it seems) to implicate Luther is the act of a man far more composed and calculating than the harried wobble that actor Steven Mackintosh grants the character. Escapism is fine; a gaping dissonance between the portrayal of a character and their actions is not. Beyond these accusations, the final scene itself commits further sins of capriciousness, as Reed begs Luther to kill him then, when the tables are turned, fights desperately to save himself. Perhaps a sense of the pitiable wretchedness of his personality would have saved such fluctuations, but as it was not on display we shall never know.

Secondly, and perhaps less noticeably awkward, is the staging itself. The logistics boggle the mind: Zoe’s civilian boyfriend Mark North has, unchallenged, stolen personal property from a police station (property itself left over from the previous episode, and in no serious way remarked upon or given dramatic significance) which implicates Reed. The detective then makes a phone call and asks for North, who is on foot, to be ‘tracked’. North’s position then appears on Reed’s sat-nav and a pursuit begins. Quite what technology is being employed here I do not know, but I suspect it is somewhat outside even the wildest dreams of the Met. North leads Reed to what appears to be an abandoned platform at Waterloo station, at which point there is much yelling, and even gunfire. No police arrive and no civilians interrupt, despite the clear indication that this is an easily accessible space.

Finally, and most offensive, is the deployment of Luther’s dead lover. Any respect for her character has already been shredded by the positioning of her murder as an instigator of Luther’s fugitive-status, rather than an event in its own right. In a move as narcissistic as the shows title, Zoe’s death functions solely as a way of changing Luther’s living conditions. Any hope that this will be rectified is swiftly banished when North, Zoe’s boyfriend who believes Luther to be her killer, is convinced otherwise offscreen! Never has a jump cut been applied so callously to cover up so calamitous a gulf in narrative logic. The final scene brings the final insult – Reed tries to incite Luther to violence by claiming to have slept with Zoe, using previously unheard sexual terms like ‘coming’ and ‘orgasm’. Zoe, originally depicted as a character with strength enough to depart from Luther’s sphere of influence, throughout the series begins sleeping with him again, dies because of a plot that in no way involves her, and is ultimately humiliated. (Humiliated twice over in point of fact: these sexual incitements are meaningful only because they attack Luther’s masculinity.)

In up-turning the world of Ajax, Sophocles might be making a statement (about the fallibility of alliance, the generosity of men, answers on a tweet-feed please), but crucially he is providing a basis for his play using reversal and irony, solid rhetorical traits. The play is assembled using dramatic elements that fit into a meaningful and satisfying formal scheme. The villain in Luther becomes another cop, while the murderess from episode one and the jealous new boyfriend of the ex-wife become allies.

These inversions are meaningless, though, when they fail to force Luther to see his world in a new light. In a show that has been unremittingly singular in its focus, it fails to provide a new insight for the character. Episode one began with a Luther who had let a bad person die and is now psychologically tortured for it. After six hours packed with incident, betrayal and death, Luther is in a situation similar enough to be conventional, but not exactly replicated enough to be understood as an echo, or theme. We end where we began in a tangled hierarchy which works better when there is an awareness of its deployment (as in the Bourne series, which begins and ends with the drowning protagonist). Neil Cross reverts to this device not to create meaning, but because he understands that it is the correct way for exciting stories to end.

I was perilously close to falling asleep during the last twenty minutes of the second episode of Luther. It was clear that the show was going to be content week-in-week-out to feature a swathe of destruction which only the bearish Luther could prevent, while in the background other characters remained shackled to their roles as prescribed more by scriptwriter templates than realism or psychological depth. Then, during a confrontation between them, the murderess Alice called Luther her friend, and – after initially resisting – Luther stated “well, one coffee doesn’t make us friends,” and they stroll off together.

Rather than embrace this staggering mutual need, the show relegated it, and Alice’s complete inefficacy in the last hour – when she should have come into her own as a temptress pulling Luther further down the path of self-justified violent action – was one of the final nails in Luther’s coffin (by my count, the most important contribution she made was making Luther a cup of tea).

In sacrificing logic, character and originality at the altar of the wilful need to entertain, the show undermined even its own minor pleasures. The resolution it offered was nothing more than stock – like gravy without a meal to go with it. Of all the things it was trying to prove – that the BBC can make primetime television as good as America, that lead Idris Elba is star enough to carry a show, etc. – Luther succeeded only in showing that drama without investment is so cheap as to not be worth bothering with.

The Pieces Matter: A Review of 'Luther' (BBC1) and Thoughts On Dramatic Structure

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.