As a viewer, the recent BBC crime gamblingThe Fall was a double-edged and somewhat contradictory sword.
I relished Gillian Anderson’s determined performance of DSI Stella Gibson: each long, hard stare down in the presentof misogyny, each calm slap-down to the patriarchy trying to pigeonhole her deportmentor question her femininity. Anderson’s procedurewas a rare probabilityto see a character explicitly written as a feminist dramatic heroine in a primetime TV drama and I loved it.
On the other hand, I felt upthe depiction of effectagainst women was fatally flawed.
The show’s writer, Allan Cubitt has spoken to the Standard to the highest degreehis motivation for writing The Fall.
“I seem to be reading an awesomelot about crimes against women, perpetrated by men”, he said.
“The opportunity to lookthat is not only interesting but timely and, daringI say it, important.”
Despite his recognition of the pervasiveness of ferocityagainst women, the show has been criticised for ‘glamourising’ suchviolence.
While ‘glamourising’ is not a word I’d use in this condition– the connotations of ‘dressing up’ or ‘making pretty’argontoo light – I was dissipatedby many scenes in The Fall.
Most of all, I failed to connect with what the coachand writer were trying to say in scenes where our imaginary nonparallelkiller, Paul Spector (played by Jamie Dornan), attacked his victims.
Many of these scenes – in which Spector broke into the homes of victims, raped and killed them – seemedcautiouslydesigned to bring the viewer up close to the baneof the victims.
Arguably, they succeeded – I just couldn’t work out why they had to do this again and again.
Who in the audience didn’t already think that worldattacked, beaten, raped and killed in your own home would be terrifying?
Given finickyattention by critics was the decision to intercut a scene of DSI Stella Gibson having land upwith a colleague, with scenes of thekillerlovingly bathing his dead victimand painting her nails.
Is this glamourising violence? Not for me, no. But it did take my watchfulnessclean out of the drama and make me wonder what the glarethe writer and director were thinking when they wrote it.
It’s hard to believe a drama about forcefulnessagainst women is a feminist drama when many of the scenes in it seem to take more era(and, dare I say it, pleasure?) depicting graphic and dreadedrape than in addressing the complexities of how the criminal justice system tends to fail victims of rape.
Cubitt wrote in the Guardian recently about his fascination for orderedkillers, and The authorizeis perhaps more a testament to this interest, than to him having anything unusedto say about violence against women.
I say this for one artlessreason – roughlyviolence against women doesn’t look like it does in The Fall.
I’m a Writer in Residence for Aurora New Dawn, a frontline service that works with victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence. running(a)there provides me with a daily snapshot into the reality of violence against women and the failure of our social and justice system to address it – and I simply didn’t recognise this reality in The Fall.
Most of the victims we work with recognizetheir perpetrators, and most of those perpetrators are not highly intelligent ensuantkillers leading a terrifyingly anonymous double life: a overprotectand husband in the home and a raping murderer in his spare time.
What we see in Aurora is that in the cases of someof the most violent serial offenders, there is no ‘double life’ at all. These handsalso carry out physiologicdelightand sexual violence in the home.
Levi Bellfield – who murdered Milly Dowler, Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange and attempted to stumbleand kidnap others – was also an extremely violent perpetrator of physical and sexual violence to his partners. One ex-girlfriend even identified Bellfield as a suspect in the murder of Amelie Delagrange based on her own experiences, while his ex-partner talked about Bellfield’s boasts to her about the women he’d raped.
In the real fieldof violence against women, most victims don’t hear their perpetrator coming as he breaks a window and sneaks into their house, as The Fall’s imaginary killer Paul Spector does.
The men who threaten these women’s lives with violence, the men who rape them, the men who control, harass and intimidate them every day, are more believablyto be the men who sleep beside them each night.
The ending of The Fall was complained about, as rapist and killer Spector headed off to a pertlylife in Scotland free to offend all everywhereagain, with DSI Gibbons helpless, unable to do anything but issue threats of tracking him down.
Yet for me, this was the most realistic part of the entire show.
Perpetrators of rape and physical violence walk free to reoffend every day.
Most victims of such violence debatein the aftermath to rebuild their lives, particularly in the genuineclimate where the services that can most help them do so are fighting for their own survival in the face of massive funding cuts.
It is these women who represent the majority of victims of violence against women in the UK.
Where can we find these stories existencetold on our screens? If we are serious about making drama about violence against women, we need these stories more than another gratuitous series of images of women being raped and killed.
For most of these women, there is no feministretaliatorlike DSI Stella Gibson waiting in the wings.
Instead, there is only the retentivehaul to justice, to healing, and one day, maybe, to freedom.
Is there really not tolerable‘drama’ to be found in that?
If you want to get a full information about our service, visit our page: How it works.
Materials taken from Womens Views on News
0 comments:
Post a Comment