The Comforts of Killing.
Detectives are back. Murder is fun again.
Crime never leaves our collective imagination for long but the way we explore it goes in and out of fashion. It’s 100 years since the first Golden Age of detective mystery fiction, the age of Christie, Sayers, Allingham et al which runs through the 1920s and ‘30s. Why did these imagined murders captivate a world recovering from the Great War and the Great Depression? This is also a world witnessing the birth of passenger flight, global telecommunications, mass media and the rise of totalitarianisms of both left and right. The surprising promise of Golden Age crime fiction is that everything is going to work out.
The classic crime stories present an idyll of harmonious modernity shaken by mortal violence. The detective brings justice and with it the hope that the delicate dream could be preserved. This is the lingering attraction of the genre. The dream protected. The hope that justice honestly delivered might enable society to return to tranquility.
It’s no surprise that this is the crime genre galloping back into fashion. I don’t want an overwrought blood spattered thriller about the perils of being drunk on the train home. I want Benoit Blanc dressed in pyjamas making Elon Musk look like the prick that he is. I want Saorise Ronan arching her eyebrow. Even the latest incarnation of Batman has turned into a gumshoe. Staring into the abyss we once again want someone smart to solve the problems, to show that problems can be solved, that there is a logical way to escape the maze. Disruptors be damned, society doesn’t have to collapse, tranquility can be restored.
But another, often overlapping, genre also captures our moment. Christie’s string of glamorous holiday murders including Murder In Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile and of course Murder On The Orient Express, lay the template for Glass Onion but also, in someway, The White Lotus. In these stories it’s not just the why or how of murder but the aspirational who and where that draws us in. But in detective fiction the glamorous get murdered and the wicked get punished. The comfort of Glass Onion is that the righteous characters triumph, not that the unrighteous have to struggle on beneath the light burden of their indolent wealth and craven stupidity. But whilst both seasons of The White Lotus are framed with murders, neither offers any real puzzle to solve. Rian Johnson lovingly draws on Christie but Mike White is a slapstick Hitchcock. For him the murders are a tension device, Hitchcock’s close up of the bomb hidden beneath the bench that enables the banality of someone else’s holiday to play like a thriller. Take away the crimes and something else is happening.
There have always been stories about those who live the high life and suffer as a result, from poor old Midas and his golden touch, to Gatsby and his gilded age. This genre is perhaps best described as “Aspirational Cynicism” but for ease I’ll call it Holiday Porn. The truly contemporary version of it first crystallised in Michael Winterbottom’s 2010 TV series “The Trip”. As a viewer we want to be at that dinner table, eating that food, drinking that wine, enjoying that banter and, as later series progressed, basking in that stunning location and five star accommodation. However the key element in the genre is a constantly rolling game of looking up whilst looking down. Just when it feels like our noses are being rubbed in it, we are reminded of the soul cost paid by Coogan and Brydon, or at least the versions of themselves that they play. Despite living the beautiful life their audience can only dream of, these are not content men.
This genre peaks in “Succession” a show that revels in the emptiness of the glamour of its elite characters. So embittered and broken are these modern day Titans that as they bicker on yachts, party with strangers in warehouses and weep in Italian villas it barely feels aspirational at all. But it is. With rumours of at least 2 more seasons to come the genius writing team are currently on TV’s highest wire. For now it’s great that the Roy family are not having a great time but should we eventually leave that story feeling sorry for them? Feeling glad that they have somehow saved us the burden of their wealth and influence? Murder mystery stories must comfort but satire must not.
The seesaw between pity and envy has never been more delicately balanced than now, with an audience who no longer have any cultural reason not to want the best of things. Taken together the two seasons of White Lotus present a surprisingly conservative world view. White, who is bi, leaves all his gay characters unhappy or dead. Doing this once feels like a liberation from worthiness. Twice though? Is there really no happy ever after here? Mocking the relentless, anxious, complexity of modern heterosexuality is fun but farce forces his characters to return to masculine dominant and feminine submissive roles; as if the real indulgence was pretending anything else was true.
Writers often agonise about whether their stories should conclude well or poorly for the characters. But the real choice is not between happy ending or sad but between comfort or challenge. Tragedy is often the failure of change, the comfort of the reactionary. Sometimes showing your characters can live happily ever after is more disquieting, more threatening to what your audience think they know. Perhaps there is some of this subversion in the way the second series of White Lotus can be read as a sun drenched advert for prostitution. Again though this is presented only as liberation to buy nicer stuff.
Holiday porn, aspirational cynicism, rests on a central tension. Am I glad I don’t live like these people or am I wishing that I did? Am I laughing at them or is the joke on me? TV drama is allergic to resolution so adores this genre’s need to keep this central tension active. But every tale has an end and sooner or later the authors of these most modern stories will have to decide if they’re giving their audience a pat on the back or a kick up the arse.
You have until the end of this week to get to the Bush Theatre to see Paradise Now, my favourite piece of new writing for the stage for some years. A sublime all female ensemble pitch head first into a surreal exploration of pyramid selling as a metaphor for how all culture has become influencer culture. It’s stunning.
This week also finally sees the release of my wife’s incredible book about grief You Are Not Alone. It’s both more personal and more philosophical than the podcast it grew from, but it’s just as essential for anyone with a gap where a person should be.