warren oates wrote:But if you look at it like that feihong aren't you really just calling into question the entirety of crime fiction always and everywhere? Of course we're seeing the lurid side of life, because that's the nature and basis of the genre. You could always watch something like Treme if you want to see different images of the state. But don't watch David Simon's other show, a crime show called The Wire, expecting to see anything but the gloomiest aspects of life in Bodymore Murderland.
There's definitely a sense in a a lot of crime fiction of the setting being a sort of existential sump--from "M" to "Batman," the sense of the city as a nihilistic state of mind is a pervasive idea. But I would argue that the cityspace in "The Wire" is much less an interior mindscape reflecting the characters own malaise than it is a kind of crucible of civic action. "The Wire" is a show where people are constantly taking individual, sometimes radical action in order to improve futures for communities and people. These experiments often work in unorthodox ways--like Bunny Colvin's Hamsterdam--only to be mired in bureaucratic authority, graft, corruption, etc. But the attempts spring up again and again. The atmosphere that exists in a show like "The Wire" is electric with the possibility or radical action, and the players in that drama are constantly risking their lives and futures to try and galvanize that potential. In that sense, the background of a show like "The Wire" is more closer to what we see in the noir pictures less infused with European existentialist dread--closer to pictures like "Call Northside 777," or "The Crimson Kimono"--pictures where the city is not an enclosing entity, trapping people in a fate, but rather a crucible of dynamic action, where attention and interest can discover possibility and sound out potential. These pictures end with a very tough sense of wrong being viable, but without the fatalism of the more expressionist-influenced noir movies. We feel that the characters at the end of these films have potential, to change their lives. In "M," we feel more that this place in which we all live is a kind of prison, where the fates conspire to trap and isolate and identify individuals apart from the norm. No character in "The Wire" is beyond our understanding--even the psychopath, Marlowe, has a comprehensive psychology which gets ultimately exposed. In much of the more nihilistic noir--influenced more strongly by European expressionism--there are people whose motives are beyond what we understand. Beckert in "M" is beyond us--beyond his own understanding. And "True Detective" is filled with characters whose motives we have no ability to access.
"True Detective" so far is much more in the nihilistic space carved out by pictures like "M." The city in "M" is segmented in ways that define people's lives--and to a large extent, the characters in "True Detective" seem likewise trapped in their spaces. Or the characters change--slowly, over long periods of time--but retain their most wayward aspects. But the atmosphere of Louisiana backwoods attitudes is thick like sludge over the show (while Cohle's anti-establishment tirades go so far over-the-top as to provide an equally extreme alternative). The women in the story do seem constrained to the roles of mute watchers (of TV, of men's misdeeds) and sexual objects, but the men are likewise restricted to myopic Southern "good 'ol boys" filled with unexamined prejudices and nonconformists so radical as to be thoroughly criminal in their basic identities (satanist meth-cookers, racist biker outlaws, and one detective who quotes Kierkegaard to anyone who'll listen and who could very well be a serial killer). And the space these people navigate seems to be a Lousiana of the mind--withered and decaying, with the remnants of industry and civilization being reclaimed back into the wilderness. The setting is gray all of the time--to reflect the heavy pressure under which our characters live, the difficulty inherent in simply existing in this space--the spaces filmed are either broad and deserted (to isolate the characters as lost seekers) or tight and restricted (like the lockups where the detectives question suspects, the homes full of television, guilt and shame, and the police station full of hovering, critical voyeurs). Each setting is thick with oppressive atmosphere, and every scene of supposedly "normal" life in the region is turned into an incident of repressive values keeping people constrained (the early scene in which the Harts try to convince their daughter that it's "wrong" to draw pictures of sexual intercourse, or the way Marty is able to dodge his former girlfriend's plea for respect by ducking into an elevator full of professional men). It seems to me part of a pervasively pessimistic attitude which the show presents--the idea that these figures are trapped and pressurized within their environment. So I think that we don't see positive views of women in the show for the reason that none of the comprehensive viewpoints that the show takes on are positive--we're not really in Louisiana per se, but rather, a Louisiana that lives inside of characters, dominating them. It's a hellhole because our characters can't see a way in that setting to put their lives right.
That's definitely part and parcel of the genre in which the show operates. I'm not really complaining about it; it just seems a little misplaced to me to mount a critique of the show's treatment of women, when the show's treatment of everyone is so pessimistic. The women in the show don't have stronger characters because the men who are at the center of the show are mired in chauvinist thinking. We see the women in the show as much as our detectives see them, and in the same way the detectives see them. If the way they see the women is more exploitative than understanding, isn't that true to the people we're dealing with, and the general perspective of the show (whose premise centers around a particularly unknowable part of human nature)?
