Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren

The young Helen Mirren as Marlene Dietrich

Dear friends and readers,

It’s not uncommon of me to do something at least ten years after everyone else, but twenty may be pushing it. At any rate, I finally watched Prime Suspect, Series 1 last week. It held me absorbed straight through no matter how late I put it on — a sign of its powerful content. The first series is strongly feminist. It reminded me of Gwyneth Hughes’ and Anne Pivcevic’s Five Full Days, a male genre re-seen, refueled to become a woman’s story with an interest in nuances, psychology, sentiment.

A murder victim has been raped violently, every orifice filled with sperm says the autopsy man. Mirren is Jane Tennison, a woman detective who is continually not getting the central jobs. The way the men go about it, they do “nab” a man who had been going with the girl but listen to his misogynistic talk and add to it. Mirren living with a man who has left his wife and desperately trying to make a lovely meal quickly with chocolate for his son and gets chocolate all over her blouse. She is trying to juggle two different existences.

Mirren photographed in the usual tough guy smoking looking out at world

The power of the first episode derives as much from all the men attempting to stop Jane Tennison from doing her job as from the job itself. There is far more space and time given to that or equivalent to the unfolding of the case. Especially the male sidekick of the detective who keels over and dies of a heart attack — which is what gives Tennison her opportunity.

I’m wondering if there is a sexual desire for John Shefford (John Forgeham), a detective who dies, by his male sidekick, DS Bill Otley (Tom Bell). Indeed I suspect we are to see homoeroticism here. There is much crossing of sexual borders. Fred Rawlins (Tom Wilkinson) whom Tennison lives with is struggling to get jobs himself — not doing super-well in the way men are supposed to do. His ex-wife is pregnant by someone else. We see him going to bed and Jane staying up late with her work.

Jane up and her partner, Peter Rawlins to bed

The case too is opening up a conversation (I gather no one in public media really ever got near) about sexual experience for women. The detective when we first see him is given a little book by a fellow subordinate: we are to glimpse in this this detective’s own sex life on the side; the reason he suspects George Marlowe as murderer (played by John Bowe, who later was the later Poldark) is they are two of a kind. They pick up women and pay prostitutes. The examination of the prostitutes’ friends is accompanied by derisive attitudes of the males in the cop shop; the very wanting to close the case and blame Marlowe would have been a real botch-up. First of all, the young woman murdered was not a prostitute (at least not known to be one) as the regular male detective wanted to suppose. The event would have been covered up by this false story. Bad woman (=prostitute) murdered, so who cares.

No, she was a rich man’s daughter (her clothes and shoes showed this to Tennison immediately) whose body is found in this poor lodging house where women can quietly sell sex — as they have done for eons of years. The written explicit first evidence I know of is in Chaucer; I’ve found such patterns recorded implicitly in 19th century novelists like Trollope — Miss Mackenzie where a 35 year old maiden lady takes a flat in a poorer lodging house.

So why was she so brutally murdered? And it is horrifying what was done to her body; she may have been strung up before killing. She was super-raped, with every orifice showing semen says the pathologist (played by Brian Pringle who was Monk in the Pallisers). The father gets intensely excited, Tennison is not to upset him by her questions.

The first episode interested me too because several (several) featured actors of the Pallisers was in it as an older man: Bryan Pringle (Mr Monk in the 1970s Pallisers) comes to mind. Pringle and other of the male stars of Pallisers played authority figures there as Police officers in other dramas: Philip Latham who swaggers very nicely even in Pallisers on occasion. I noticed a man who played a doctor in a 1970s Poldark turned up as a doctor in House of Cards.

I bring this up because there has to be a limitation of radical apprehension when the same people play the same types across genres and eras and authors and film-makers. Helen Mirren does often play the tough woman outside but inside deeply feeling and thoughtful, the outlier (so to speak); and strong as steel (as in Gosford park only breaking down at the very end, and the murderess it turns out, or one of them, a mother forced to abandon her baby many years ago she is now protecting him come to murder his awful father).

I try to note these re-appearances of specific actors and typologies for they fascinate me. It’s like a masquerade ever permeating but every coming up with sameness.

Fran suggested on WWTTA that LaPlante’s novels are weak. I should think one explanation might be the difference in genre. Novels are for private self reading and offer experience social large worlds won’t tolerate easily; movies most often reinforce the social external norms at least outwardly

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Episode 2. Again, we see Helen Mirren at work, this time with Peter giving her coffee. It is so very good — and discovered that the writers of the articles on the series that I did read are accurate: we see intense tensions between her work and obligations to family life. In fact Jane chooses (gasp!) to do her work first and come be with her family second and then she can’t dismiss from her mind her work.

But the program is not unfair as we see the men not with their families but indulging themselves in violent sports (they go to boxing) and drinking and carousing and neglecting theirs too. The point is not made as explicitly, except that the hero detective Mirren replaced is now revealed as himself having been the lover of the prostitute who was brutally murdered and having himself tried to hide evidence.

The overt theme emerging is also violence against women. So, side note: Ralph Fiennes as a very young man, superb as the distraught boyfriend of the rich girl who was killed and livid at any suggestion she could have had sex with anyone but him (Episode 1). No he has no idea how she could have come to be in the bedsit of a prostitute and he finds Ms Tennison “disgusting” in her insinuations and behavior. As with Foyle’s War many years later there are superb actors given roles in each separate episode.

Episode 3. While the reviews and essays I’ve sent to Women Writers through the Ages at Yahoo are all good, they do tend to stay on a level of high generality, but as Blake said, to generalize is to be an idiot, and it is in the details that the reality lies.

I was impressed in this third episode by Helen Mirren going herself to investigate and doing something none of the males do: making friends with the two prostitutes to some extent, visiting them, going out with them, drinking with them — with a comic sharp moment of her being mistaken for a prostitute. By doing this she unearths another murder done in the same horrible way as the two she’s investigating; she learns a lot she could not in any other way.

This is a common motif of modern women’s books and films. Madame Max uncovers important information which helps exonerate Phineas Finn by talking with Emilius’s landlady. Further, Jane Tennison then puts together the apparent truth the officer who died had been having affairs with these prostitutes and women who were murdered and she suspects him. This horrifies her boss and the deputy who has himself been covering up for Sheffield (is his name). I was disappointed that it seemed this was quickly shown not to be true, but was when the last (fictional) time a highly respected officer was presented as himself the rapist and murderer whose teams covers up for him.

The film does show Jane’s relationship breaking up. I thought this done too quickly; in parts 1 and 2 they seemed to have this fine relationship with her so good to his son. It may be the film shows how unfair the man is to demand she come home in early time to make a dinner and blames her unfairly but it seems they wanted to present the idea she had to choose between a happy private life with a man and a career. She could not both celebrate a parent’s birthday and keep up with her job because it took an obsessive interest in her mind to achieve victory.

Last I wish she were not the only women with a “hardened sidekick” type to be at the center of the film. She solidifies the idea of the exception to the rule, and she is white. Indeed all of them are but one minor office male seen briefly. This may reflect reality but probably not today — one hopes not though the recent riots did not encourage the idea that black and minority people are given any positions of authority anywhere.

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A portrait shot found on line of Mirren as Jane Tennison: her face is caught very well by the camera, all its flexibility and depth

I finished the first story (all four episodes) and have some general observations. In the end I was disappointed by the first story. The ending does matter, and as my study showed me, this film fit a conventional presentation of male violence and rape. In some scenes Marlowe loves his mother dearly; we see him cater to her, sing songs from musicals with her. He is humanized, but at the close he is suddenly he is presented as crazy, so out of the norm as to be half unconscious, a wild Sade like monster. The reality is rape is common, and so too really mean violence, and is not outside the norm at all. Maybe not the scenario depicted here (with a full dungeon with weapons) but not that far. To make the man a monster is to absolve the society especially as by the end the other men are rooting totally for Jane and as as sickened as she. This summer we have seen that men (and “their” women) justify and root for bully rapists, police who are sadistic.

Beyond that Mirren played the part of a woman who takes on male characteristics. This is the way she thrives. It may be that’s the way to do it today, but it again reinforces aggression, competition, hardness. Her female sidekick is last seen whooping it up at the bar with the boys. Both of course exceptions.

So the effect badly weakened what went before: it’s the Thelma and Louise ending. In this case justice done, all celebrating. How many people have looked at me with glee and spite and cited the ending of that movie: see, that is what happens when women go off on their own.

What went before though (3/4s and more of the film) is not to be discounted since it is unusual — Lean said don’t look at the ending of his films — we are made to see male violence, the many many dead prostitutes which had the first guy in charge not had an heart attack would have gone unsolved and the serial killer left to carry on. We see that man was having affairs with the prostitutes, and covering up. We see how hard it was for Jane to get and then hold onto the position.

As interesting as Shefford potentially was Zoe Wanamaker as George Marlow, the murderer’s common law wife.  At the close she suddenly admits she lets this man do some of this vile stuff to her — not so far as to murder and destroy — but to tie her up and play mean tricks. She protected him all along; she goes with him where he goes. Why not give us an inside portrait of her? The two prostitutes Mirren becomes friendly with and who show her this is just two cases out of many. Their lives. They are treated with a kind of respect. But I’d like to have seen much more.

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1980s: Helen Mirren as Cleopatra appealing to Michael Gambon as Antony (Shakespeare’s great tragedy)

TV films are, as we know, often despised automatically: one of the values of Helen Mirren, A Celebration, Prime Suspect, ed Amy Rennert is its defense of TV work – and how it shows that great British actors move easily between TV, the live legitimate serious stage and movies. Rennert argues that TV costume dramas, those mini-series (and when they are done – rarely today — single films) are that they give a lot of time and space to close-up nuanced intimate acting in the way commercial films rarely do and symbolic theater can preclude. And here lies one of Mirren’s strengths.

Helen Mirren: A Celebration also includes stills from Mirren and Gambon in Peter Greenaways’ powerful The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: it seems to me now to reveal the underbelly terrifying life of the woman who lives with the brute male thug criminal type (such as Mirren plays against Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday).

I’ve thought about the film adaptations of Sarah Walters’s novels, several by women teams, say Night Watch (with Claire Foy and Anne Maxwell Martin in featured roles). Walters’s book conveys the reality of alienation people feel in wartime as opposed to the usual jollying-up stories of all-togetherness while the film offers much more reassurance at key points. I’d love to see how the film treats this modern matter from a woman’s point of view, how women experienced WW2 instead of featuring the male experience (as so many films do) — I imagine much much less heroically, much more sceptically and nuanced by the context of private life fully seen the way Five Full Days does a murder mystery.

To conclude, this police film drama advances notions of social justice; we see the characters have oppressors and victims inside all of them. It’s a progressive film: it draws insights from the marginalized: the prostitutes, Marlowe’s common law wife; it locates experiences within larger social contexts; and there is a vision of collective hope and empowerment at the end when all do work together. The film by having Mirren at the center is a challenge to present social arrangements and organizations.

I’ll watch Series or Season 2 soon.

Ellen