As a teenage boy, I quite liked the nickname given to me by one of my teachers. It was a lot more inventive for Mr H to tag me "Slicer" than to have to my schoolmates resort to the staple of shortening a surname to one syllable, or adding 'y' to the end of it. It even had an enigmatic, slightly creepy feel to it (or so I thought at the time), which I imagined offered a degree of protection at a time when boys sometimes seek to dominate their peers, either psychologically or physically, to establish their place in the world. Think "Nightmare on Elm Street," tho' it came later. Don't get me wrong, ask any of my peers - they weren't about to mistake me for Freddy Krueger - but it was definitely a better nickname than some others' in the year (Twinkle Toes springs to mind).
Back in the 80's, Freddy was a serial killer, seemingly devoid of positive characteristics. Fast forward to 2013, and we have a more complicated type of serial killer - in the BBC TV series The Fall, starring Gillian Anderson (X-Files) and Jamie Dornan (Once Upon A Time, and member of now-disbanded folk band "Sons of Jim"):
Northern Ireland-born Jamie attended the same school where I acquired my nickname, and I'm curious what one Jamie might have been given there. His band name derived from the fact that both guys' dads were (unsurprisingly) called Jim. I have had the privilege (Northern Ireland being the small place that it is) of knowing both their dads a little in one capacity or another.
The Fall, which debuted in May and had international release more recently on Netflix, is reportedly BBC 2's highest rated drama launch in 8 years. It's set and filmed in 'post-Troubles' Belfast.
As my kids were away for a couple of days, I watched it with my wife over the last 2 nights. (Frequent strong language, drugs, sex and violent crime are central to the plot).
It may share some similarities with Prime Suspect, but you needn't fear any whodunnit secrets being given away in this post, cos the killer is identified from the outset.
It's more a 'whydunnit,' and an interesting exploration of what separates goodies from baddies, or whether in fact they can be truly separated. Why I say that the villain (Paul Spector, played by Dornan) is more complicated than Freddy Krueger is that, whilst committing the most horrible, premeditated and perverted crimes, he also lives a life which is quite functional in other ways, 'good' even - he holds down a responsible and empathetic job, he is husband to a neonatal intensive care nurse, and a warm father who makes his kids' packed lunches and tucks them into bed at night.
I have seen some reviews of the drama which, whilst praising the intensity of the plot and action, criticised the "side-plot" of corrupt police involved in drugs and prostitution. The criticism was that it distracted from the main story-line and threatened to break the flow/intensity. I have to disagree completely. I think the reviewers in these cases have missed that this is just as central to the ideas explored. (I think the clue is in the title). Furthermore, whilst not engaging in illicit acts, the killer's nemesis Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson (played by Anderson) is clearly no angel herself. The action switches repeatedly, and deliberately, back and forward between what she's engaged in and what Spector is doing. They're both presented as hunters. I think they're actually hunter-gatherers. He gathers trophies and fodder for his addiction; she gathers evidence and information (and leaves a few clues behind her too of her own misdemeanours, which a colleague has to mop up). I confess that I have no inside information as to what the title is supposed to mean, but it's hard to miss the JudaeoChristian notion of The Fall. I think a writer who quotes Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra) elsewhere in the plot is unlikely to have missed the Biblical connection of the title.
The Fall is a doctrinal concept, derived from the famous 'eating the forbidden fruit' passage in early Genesis, and some New Testament references to it. (The Genesis passage doesn't actually call it The Fall). Some Christians see it as a literal historical event involving the first 2 humans; others understand it as descriptive metaphor for the 'human condition' and the 'brokenness' of the world, which require fixing. Either way, there is a sense that everything is tainted, and not the way it's supposed to be, and that human selfishness and self-reliance are a recurring moral problem. As enlarged upon in the New Testament, no-one is blame-free, no-one is truly good; nor are we in a position to judge the misdemeanours of others.
Or, if Bob's broken voice gets in the way, here's another bluesy version for you:
Back to the programme, and the disturbing combination of warmth & empathy with cold-blooded murder in the person of Paul Spector. How could he exhibit both? Det Superintendent Gibson attempts to answer the question with the idea of "doubling" - that he compartmentalises his life, in much the same way as the forensic pathologist in the drama dissects corpses and then goes home, puts her children to bed and kisses their bruises better. In relation to this idea of doubling, or compartmentalisation, Gibson actually suggests 'you do it, I do it, the killer does it.'
In one of their singles, Fairytale, Sons of Jim sang "Where do you wander on this dark night?" Paul Spector's son asked him the same question in The Fall - "Daddy, where have you been?"
Much as The Fall explores what's going on in the mind of the murderer, it's interesting to consider (as my wife vocalised while we were watching it) what kind of place a writer's mind inhabits as he writes this kind of fiction. Today I discovered that The Fall's creator Allan Cubitt actually tried to answer that question:
"I clearly found it in some way illuminating about human nature, and the world, and myself.... that darkness is probably part of my character in some kind of way.... The programme suggests that we're all on a kind of continuum, .... that there's a continuity between my extreme behaviours and other people's extreme behaviours, and some people are pushed of course way down the continuum to a very extreme place, but I don't believe they're aberrations or monsters exactly. I think the seeds of that kind of behaviour are present in people."
That's quite an old-fashioned notion, really, and pretty much vindicates my hypothesis about the screenplay - the idea that we're all tainted, that we all have a dark side that threatens to control us. Whilst some are more extreme than others in what they do, none is immune. A Northern Irish punk band from my teenage years had a minor hit in the alternative charts with a song on the same theme:
"The result of rebellion causing societal ills
it pounds and beats to death like a pneumatic drill
but they treat it very lightly and excuse it at will
don't realise it's cancer, don't reeelize, sin kills.
It eats at my body and corrupts my brain
It affects like poison running through my veins
It penetrates all, all it touches it stains..."
Yeah, I know. It's a term that's deeply uncool. But, in a society where even the Police have corrupt elements, what are we to do? Be on our guard, I guess; be slow to judge whilst quick to act to protect the vulnerable, while we wait for a time "when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption..."
"There are many of us... there is only one of him. You'd think that gives us the advantage, but it doesn't. He moves around, on his own, in darkness...
The devil, quite literally ladies and gentlemen, is in the detail..."
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