I can't watch the news. Oh, I can see most of it, headlines on the net & any article I think I can stand to read. But the talk-show analysis I have not been able to stand, not since the day after Robert Mueller’s Congressional testimony — the ghoulish, triumphant ways the press, even the non-trumpian parts of it, characterized what they saw as his failures. Which were, of course, their own. I pitied his obvious, unexpected, frailty.
And so I have watched other things.
Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.
I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.
So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.
Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.
After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,
The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.
At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.
Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.
Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.
Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.
I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.
In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.
In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.
And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.
That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.
If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.
And so I have watched other things.
Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.
I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.
So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.
Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.
After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,
The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.
At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.
Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.
Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.
Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.
I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.
In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.
In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.
And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.
That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.
If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.
