As Helen Mirren pointed out recently: our TV screens are full of the bodies of dead young women. Is it exploitation, or does it just reflect reality? And whats the alternative?
I was raving to friends over pizza on Sunday night how obsessed I am with murder mysteries these days, a seasonal pastime that revved into a runaway one Christmas vacation in my parents' living room in Australia. Over pie, I was going on and on about how delicious these shows are and how, upon returning back to the tundra of NYC I launched into The Fall with Gillian Anderson and spent a good two nights sucked right into Anderson's flawless strawberry cheeks as she investigated a live serial murder case pitting an upstanding family man against young professional women in their beds: murders laced with sexual deviance, domestic compulsion and erotic obsession.
So many of these shows hinge on the imagery and details of little girls who die gruesomely.
Young women. Sexual deviance. Bleak bleak bleak and yet give me more. But this time, episode after episode, series after series, an overwhelmingly popular plot formula was making me squirm more than usual: so many of these shows hinge on the imagery and details of little girls who die gruesomely. Little girls and young women who die in ways that we should not be entertained by; in brutal, often sadistic ways that make life for the family and survivors virtually impossible.
Seems I wasn't alone in my torment. Helen Mirren-Helen Mirren!-was thinking similarly. I do get terribly upset, Mirren said at the BAFTA awards last week when asked about a recent rant by David Hare about the ridiculous body count in movies and on television these days. She went on to skewer: Most of those bodies are young women.
Mirren and Hare were objecting to, it seems, not so much the plotlines but the visual imagery of all these bodies. The Fall opens with juxtaposed scenes of Anderson getting domestic and scenes of a gorgeous brunette lawyer gulping wine in a bustling bar and gabbing with her flirty coworker about love and sex. All the while, the murderer choreographs his stage in someone the brunette's? lovely home. Anderson's warmth-free, unflinching detective bullies her way on to the taskforce, insisting that another woman is about to get it and we watch, bonding with that next target who is eventually suffocated (at best) in front of us, writhing and gasping in her own clean sheets.
What's so jarring and haunting about many of these sophisticated TV series is that we're not expecting it most of the time.
The imagery is a touch cleaner (indeed, the killer is pathologically meticulous) than that of Rosie Larsen, found dead in a political campaign vehicle in a bleak Seattle forest, throughout the first season of The Killing, which I went on to next, catching up on the murdered-women fest on Netflix, Amazon Prime and all through the cablesphere these days. Over episodes, photographs of the teenage Rosies's broken mutilated fingernails and drained body flash between scenes and then lay before us on the coroner's table.
It's not anything we haven't seen on CSI, in which sadistic imagery is dished up on sterile metal gurneys and on petrie dishes. Dead bodies have been essential symbolism and dramatic fodder for decades of film and television. Mirren herself was the dogged detective pragmatically facing horrific crime scenes in the brilliant nineties British TV police thriller, Prime Suspect in which psychotic, grisly murder is what the wedding scene is to romcom. (She was also in the scandalously graphic and banned movie, Caligula).
But if you put all these together into one long season, or long season after long season of deeply mesmerizing viewing .oooof. And David Hare and Mirren suggest the body count has gotten higher. Hare made an example of The Bridge, in which bodies of men and women show up on desert roadsides and cold urban settings sometimes more than one to an episode. And now with True Detective, an untouchable, poignant, quotable, meditative, genuine psycho drama, we've got another naked, rotting female, circled by the camera, her shapely buttocks sketched in close up by Matthew McConaughey's weirdo genius murder cop, her blonde hair singed in the Louisiana sun to orange as it splays across her arms tied to a dry tree.
It seems that images of good looking women, of flushed cheeks at the height of health (or burdened cheeks in the throes of the hooker life), are becoming synonymous with the images of those same cheeks and bone structure shredded, scarred, crawling with a lone sinister cockroach or being swarmed by quietly buzzing flies. Little girls in cotton dresses running into the sunlight and the virtuous sounds of giggles and singing in playgrounds are synonymous with the image of a shovel unpacking the shallow grave from which a little girl's dead hand juts out.
Yet it's not only the images. I was pushed to the edge when Downton Abbey introduced the (spoiler alert) rape plot this season. There was Matthew's death previously, which was gratuitously heartbreaking as well as picturesque his wide, lifeless eyes divided by the blood trickle from his brain ripping us from voyeuristic bliss. Then this season, Anna is dragged by the hair into a servant's room and the curdling sound of her shrieks are drowned by the live opera performance that the rest of the house is blissing out to upstairs. I'm done, I thought. I'm done. It was late; I'd allowed myself one more episode. Sleepless and traumatized, I couldn't take it. Dead bodies are one thing. Rape the sound, the threat, the blatant dramatization is just as bad. (Worse?)
It happens in Bates Motel as well a rough, raw scene in the kitchen with Vera Farmiga attacked from behind, the camera on her face as the boorish assailant'
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As Helen Mirren pointed out recently: our TV screens are full of the bodies of dead young women. Is it exploitation, or does it just reflect reality? And whats the alternative? 
