Olivia and I watched the first half of Prime Suspect 4 last night. Those movies are riveting! It took much willpower not to watch the second half.
Funny how I didn’t think so when I first began to watch them, half-heartedly and never all the way through, when they were actually on TV in the 90s. I was in high school and college then, and I found so much about the movies disturbing and off-putting. Not just the fact that the crimes usually seemed to be sexual and deviant in nature – but also Jane Tennison’s personal life, the atmosphere at the office, how colorless most of the scenes were, even the accents. I guess I just couldn’t accept a view of England “from below.” Now I love all that stuff. I also remember thinking that there was a lot of animosity between Tennison and her male co-workers; now I like they way they treat her – business-like, usually respectful, sometimes straining against her authority, and solicitous on very rare occasions, like when a man that she’s interrogating all of a sudden jumps in her face and violates her personal space.
Even the sexual nature of the crimes…I haven’t minded that nearly as much in the two Prime Suspects I’ve watched recently (¬¬¬2 and 4). Have I just gotten more sinful and fallen further than ever from Philippians 4:8? Or am I more aware that there is evil and tragedy in the world, and open towards art (very broadly speaking) that attempts to portray that? I hope the latter.
To be honest, I think the sexual themes of both 2 and 4 do make the movies more interesting. With 2, for most of the movie the more interesting part to me was the ethnic tension between the black immigrant neighborhood in which a body had been found, and the mostly-white police force. But once it started to be revealed who the rapist/killer was, I found it very realistic and satisfying that he was a professional pornographer who derived sexual satisfaction from venting his rage on powerless victims.
And in 4, of which I’ve only seen half, I’d never seen anything like the videos from a pedophile rehab clinic in which the patient (who is also the prime suspect) describes how he goes about winning a 5-year-old girl’s trust and how beautiful their love is. What’s so scary is that he has no idea (on the surface) that he is a predator. And I think it’s really great that both Tennison and her main assistant, D. I. Tony Muddiman, are so motivated to solve the crime. You eventually find out, though, that both of them have a personal reason for caring so much, which in the case of Muddiman leads him to compromise his judgment and go to illegal lengths to break the alibi of the suspect, which indirectly leads to the latter taking his girlfriend and her kids hostage. The scene where Tennison, with whom he’d always had a good relationship, tells him “You’re finished!” and “You put them there!” is so sad.
I know nothing about actual police investigations, but I was noticing during the show that Tennison and Muddiman seemed a lot more motivated and personally invested to solve the crime than in other shows. I wonder if the filmmakers are trying to raise that possibility that the ones who care the most (and seem like heroes, in my book, at least until things go wrong) are the ones who can’t separate the case from their own personal tragedy and may end up making bad decisions that jeopardize the whole investigation and other people’s lives. The balance between caring too much, and letting yourself get so hard that you don’t care enough, seems nearly impossible to find.
