Why does the BBC think violence against women is sexy?
The most repulsive drama ever
broadcast on British TV concludes tonight. BBC2’s five-part study of a
serial killer, The Fall, starring Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson, has
featured graphic depictions of sexual murder, violent abuse,
necrophilia, stalking, pornography and masturbation.
BBC executives are defending the show and their decision to renew it for a second series: they claim it provides insight into the motives of a sadistic psychopath. By beckoning viewers to share the killer’s experiences, the programme-makers say, it challenges our preconceptions about evil.
Such weasel words are insulting and obscene. The Fall doesn’t challenge evil: it wallows in it. This series is an invitation to share an extended rape fantasy.
The BBC has made a serious error of judgement — their worst mistake yet in a succession of flawed dramas that present violence against women as either trivial or erotic.
The Politician’s Husband last month, another BBC2 drama shown just after the 9pm watershed, included a brutal portrayal of rape, featuring David Tennant and Emily Watson. The assault — part of a power struggle between a married couple — opened the second episode and happened with almost no warning.
Last year, the BBC dismissed protests at its anatomically detailed depiction of sadistic murder in Ripper Street, screened on Sunday nights. Women were garrotted, carved open, sexually mutilated — and the camera’s eye never flinched.
This visual catalogue of violence against women has even drawn criticism from that bible of the BBC, the Radio Times, and its level-headed chief TV critic Alison Graham. It was now an exception to the rule, she told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, to see a major drama in which a woman was not raped, bound and gagged, or laid out grey and naked on a mortuary slab.
‘This is the norm — it seems to be pretty much everywhere,’ she said.
But The Fall, by idealising the killer, has gone further than any previous drama. He is virile and artistic, muscular and tender. All women crave rough or anonymous sex: that’s how he sees the world — and we are urged to see it that way with him.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that The Fall is a perverted sexual fantasy. It’s about wish fulfilment. In this fantasy, the protagonist isn’t depraved, deluded or inadequate: he’s what women desire, and men desire to be.
Former male model Jamie Dornan plays the serial killer, Paul Spector. He’s athletic, with a superb torso that he flaunts several times an episode — especially whenever he changes into his commando-style catsuit that, apparently, leaves no fibres for the forensics teams to trace.
Even on Belfast’s hardest streets, around the Shankhill Road, he fears no man. He’s a cat-burglar with superhuman talents. He can walk past a woman in her own house and she won’t see him. Even his name hints at ghost-like powers: Spector.
His ferocious intellect is evident.
Colleagues where he works as a counsellor can’t cope with his mocking,
terse conversation. At home, he reads the philosopher Nietzsche and can
quote at length, to prove that petty moral rules do not apply to him.
And he’s a devoted father to two young children.
His trimmed beard slightly blurs his chiselled features, as if he’s afraid of looking too gorgeous.
Women throw themselves at him anyway. His wife, a nurse in a premature baby unit, thinks he’s a doting husband. Their babysitter, a 15-year-old Lolita, is desperately in love with him.
In the world of The Fall, that’s natural. It’s as if all beardy thirty-something blokes who listen to blues CDs are irresistible to troubled teens. This man is so hot that the grieving wife of a Loyalist ganglord who comes to him for bereavement counselling ends up falling into his arms. She can’t help herself.
These fantasy elements mimic the usual ingredients of an action thriller aimed at a male audience.
Ever since Ian Fleming invented James Bond, men have identified with the ice-calm alpha male loner: powerful, aloof, irresistible.
The Fall writer Allan Cubitt admitted at the weekend: ‘I find serial killers fascinating in some terrifying way.’
Writing in the Guardian, Cubitt added that Spector was ‘a victim himself of his own psychopathology’.
That seems to imply we should sympathise with his creation as he breaks into women’s houses, throttles them, poses their bodies and spends hours photographing them.
But the most disturbing element of the series is not the glorification of the killer, it’s the sexual violence and the way the women respond to it.
When Spector wrestles the babysitter to the floor and pins her down, she responds by offering her bruised wrists and pouting, ‘Kiss it better’.
The victims Spector chooses to stalk don’t seem to help themselves. One calls the police after coming home to discover an intruder has been through her undies drawer — but then she refuses to co-operate with the inquiry, sends the constables away, and later fails to replace all the locks.
Another posts videos on bondage websites, advertising for casual sex partners to dominate her.
In one cold, sickening scene tonight, the rapist’s wife begs him for impersonal sex. The Fall’s message is plain: that’s what all women want. Even the killer’s seven-year-old daughter wants to daub her face with make-up and dance like Beyonce for her Daddy.
The violence is saved for the final scenes each week, as if the pent-up misogyny must reach a literal climax. Last week’s episode ended in a nightmarish frenzy of rape, torture and bloody murder.
In most crime dramas, the detective can heal the evil by solving the mystery. However flawed and conflicted the sleuth is, good will prevail.
But The Fall contains no mystery, and detective superintendent Stella Gibson (Anderson) isn’t flawed, conflicted or anything else. She has no personality beyond methodical efficiency and a craving for emotionless sex.
When we first meet Gibson, she walks up to a detective at a crime scene and propositions him. ‘I’m staying at the Hilton, room 203,’ are her opening words to a man she’s never seen before.
Their sex scene is intercut with parallel images of the murderer’s latest conquest. Spector dumps her body across the bed; DSI Gibson slumps back in post-coital exhaustion.
The killer washes the corpse;
the anonymous policeman takes a shower. The killer photographs the body;
the policeman takes naked snaps of himself on his phone and texts them
to Gibson. With leaden emphasis, The Fall connects Spector’s exploits to
the detective’s. They mirror each other.
And as she learns more about the killer, she cannot hide her admiration. ‘He’s intelligent, even highly intelligent,’ she murmurs. The rape fantasy has become an ego trip.
All the talk in the police station is complimentary. This criminal has to be physically and mentally far stronger than most men. His break-ins are meticulous, his planning sophisticated. Above all, he kills because he feels more deeply than ordinary people. ‘It’s not that he’s devoid of emotion at all,’ Gibson muses. ‘Maybe it’s the reverse.’
In the most ridiculous scene of all, Gibson sets up a press conference. As if to illustrate the sexual hold that the killer exerts from a distance over all women, her blouse bursts open. Not just one button, but two or three, pop apart.
She sits there with her cleavage bare to the news cameras and is oblivious.
Because its morality is so skewed, it is impossible for The Fall to reach a satisfying conclusion. The show takes its name from a poem by TS Eliot, The Hollow Men. The murderer quotes it in his pornographic scrapbook:
‘Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.’
The conclusion of the poem is much better known, and viewers who watch tonight’s final part should be warned that it is all too apt: ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’
BBC executives are defending the show and their decision to renew it for a second series: they claim it provides insight into the motives of a sadistic psychopath. By beckoning viewers to share the killer’s experiences, the programme-makers say, it challenges our preconceptions about evil.
Such weasel words are insulting and obscene. The Fall doesn’t challenge evil: it wallows in it. This series is an invitation to share an extended rape fantasy.
The BBC has made a serious error of judgement — their worst mistake yet in a succession of flawed dramas that present violence against women as either trivial or erotic.
The Politician’s Husband last month, another BBC2 drama shown just after the 9pm watershed, included a brutal portrayal of rape, featuring David Tennant and Emily Watson. The assault — part of a power struggle between a married couple — opened the second episode and happened with almost no warning.
Last year, the BBC dismissed protests at its anatomically detailed depiction of sadistic murder in Ripper Street, screened on Sunday nights. Women were garrotted, carved open, sexually mutilated — and the camera’s eye never flinched.
This visual catalogue of violence against women has even drawn criticism from that bible of the BBC, the Radio Times, and its level-headed chief TV critic Alison Graham. It was now an exception to the rule, she told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, to see a major drama in which a woman was not raped, bound and gagged, or laid out grey and naked on a mortuary slab.
‘This is the norm — it seems to be pretty much everywhere,’ she said.
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But The Fall, by idealising the killer, has gone further than any previous drama. He is virile and artistic, muscular and tender. All women crave rough or anonymous sex: that’s how he sees the world — and we are urged to see it that way with him.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that The Fall is a perverted sexual fantasy. It’s about wish fulfilment. In this fantasy, the protagonist isn’t depraved, deluded or inadequate: he’s what women desire, and men desire to be.
Former male model Jamie Dornan plays the serial killer, Paul Spector. He’s athletic, with a superb torso that he flaunts several times an episode — especially whenever he changes into his commando-style catsuit that, apparently, leaves no fibres for the forensics teams to trace.
Even on Belfast’s hardest streets, around the Shankhill Road, he fears no man. He’s a cat-burglar with superhuman talents. He can walk past a woman in her own house and she won’t see him. Even his name hints at ghost-like powers: Spector.
The Fall has gone further than any previous
drama. Killer (Paul Spector) is virile and artistic. All women crave
rough or anonymous sex: that's how he sees the world - and we are urged
to see it that way with him
His trimmed beard slightly blurs his chiselled features, as if he’s afraid of looking too gorgeous.
Women throw themselves at him anyway. His wife, a nurse in a premature baby unit, thinks he’s a doting husband. Their babysitter, a 15-year-old Lolita, is desperately in love with him.
In the world of The Fall, that’s natural. It’s as if all beardy thirty-something blokes who listen to blues CDs are irresistible to troubled teens. This man is so hot that the grieving wife of a Loyalist ganglord who comes to him for bereavement counselling ends up falling into his arms. She can’t help herself.
These fantasy elements mimic the usual ingredients of an action thriller aimed at a male audience.
Ever since Ian Fleming invented James Bond, men have identified with the ice-calm alpha male loner: powerful, aloof, irresistible.
Killer: The most disturbing element of the
series is not the glorification of the killer, it's the sexual violence
and the way the women respond to it
Writing in the Guardian, Cubitt added that Spector was ‘a victim himself of his own psychopathology’.
That seems to imply we should sympathise with his creation as he breaks into women’s houses, throttles them, poses their bodies and spends hours photographing them.
But the most disturbing element of the series is not the glorification of the killer, it’s the sexual violence and the way the women respond to it.
When Spector wrestles the babysitter to the floor and pins her down, she responds by offering her bruised wrists and pouting, ‘Kiss it better’.
The victims Spector chooses to stalk don’t seem to help themselves. One calls the police after coming home to discover an intruder has been through her undies drawer — but then she refuses to co-operate with the inquiry, sends the constables away, and later fails to replace all the locks.
Another posts videos on bondage websites, advertising for casual sex partners to dominate her.
In one cold, sickening scene tonight, the rapist’s wife begs him for impersonal sex. The Fall’s message is plain: that’s what all women want. Even the killer’s seven-year-old daughter wants to daub her face with make-up and dance like Beyonce for her Daddy.
The violence is saved for the final scenes each week, as if the pent-up misogyny must reach a literal climax. Last week’s episode ended in a nightmarish frenzy of rape, torture and bloody murder.
In most crime dramas, the detective can heal the evil by solving the mystery. However flawed and conflicted the sleuth is, good will prevail.
But The Fall contains no mystery, and detective superintendent Stella Gibson (Anderson) isn’t flawed, conflicted or anything else. She has no personality beyond methodical efficiency and a craving for emotionless sex.
When we first meet Gibson, she walks up to a detective at a crime scene and propositions him. ‘I’m staying at the Hilton, room 203,’ are her opening words to a man she’s never seen before.
Their sex scene is intercut with parallel images of the murderer’s latest conquest. Spector dumps her body across the bed; DSI Gibson slumps back in post-coital exhaustion.
The Fall contains no mystery, and detective
superintendent Stella Gibson (Anderson, pictured) isn't flawed or
conflicted. She has no personality beyond methodical efficiency and a
craving for emotionless sex
And as she learns more about the killer, she cannot hide her admiration. ‘He’s intelligent, even highly intelligent,’ she murmurs. The rape fantasy has become an ego trip.
All the talk in the police station is complimentary. This criminal has to be physically and mentally far stronger than most men. His break-ins are meticulous, his planning sophisticated. Above all, he kills because he feels more deeply than ordinary people. ‘It’s not that he’s devoid of emotion at all,’ Gibson muses. ‘Maybe it’s the reverse.’
In the most ridiculous scene of all, Gibson sets up a press conference. As if to illustrate the sexual hold that the killer exerts from a distance over all women, her blouse bursts open. Not just one button, but two or three, pop apart.
She sits there with her cleavage bare to the news cameras and is oblivious.
Because its morality is so skewed, it is impossible for The Fall to reach a satisfying conclusion. The show takes its name from a poem by TS Eliot, The Hollow Men. The murderer quotes it in his pornographic scrapbook:
‘Between the idea
And the reality,
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.’
The conclusion of the poem is much better known, and viewers who watch tonight’s final part should be warned that it is all too apt: ‘This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’
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