Jack Graham

This is actually the third and final part of a series of posts I began in 2012… which is pushing it, even for me. Here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 2. You don’t need to read them to understand what is below. While we’re talking about belated entries… I am planning some more Tricky Dicky and (unexpectedly) more Minnesota Normal. Be patient, my darlings. I finished Forward, to the Past! didn’t I?

The two televised Doctor Who stories which depict the First World War both approach it, as it were, from an angle, rather than head-on.  In ‘The War Games’ (1969), we see characters who are ordinary soldiers (both British and German) who’ve been abducted from the front in 1914-18, brainwashed, and placed in a simulacrum of the war, where they are commanded by alien impostors masquerading as representatives of the military top brass of both sides.  ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ (2007) is set in England in 1913, just before the outbreak of the war, with ‘flashforwards’ to No Man’s Land during the coming conflict, and an epilogue set at a Remembrance Day ceremony many years afterwards.   An important secondary character called Tim Latimer is shown as a pupil at a public school before the war, a soldier during the war, and an elderly veteran after it.

The two stories are both highly regarded by fans – in many ways rightly so.  Both set themselves the task of ‘saying something’ about war.  The later story is more openly concerned with examining historical, political and moral issues, though it strives to find a balanced and non-partisan position.  The strategy of the writer, Paul Cornell, seems to have been to present the issues in a dramatic rather than a didactic way, by allowing various viewpoints to arise through the personalities of the characters.  The earlier story is more coy about its historical and political concerns, being seemingly content to present itself as an adventure story with a straightforward moral.  However, it also happens to be a slyly-radical, late-sixties, anti-imperialist parable. To understand how this happened, you only have to glance at the dates. It was written and produced in the aftermath of ‘68, the biggest global explosion of protest and insurgence in the latter-half of the twentieth century, a lot of which was focused on the Vietnam War. There is no straightforward, mechanistic, deterministic relationship between politics out in the real world and the politics of Doctor Who stories (or indeed any other stories) but there are certainly relations of influence. But I won’t belabour this point as it is a pretty fundamental assumption underlying both my own ‘work’ and Phil’s entire Eruditorum project, and a point that I suspect most readers of this site are already happy to accept, at least as a marker. (The question of exactly how the relation works is one over which a great deal of ink… and even some blood… has been spilt, and far cleverer people than I have weighed in on it and been unable to reach satisfying conclusions, so we’re not likely to clear it up here and now.)…

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Matt Fraction posted this on Tumblr yesterday on the subject of Fargo, the 1996 Coen Brothers movie about a kidnapping in Minnesota, and the subsequent investigation by a heavily-pregnant police sheriff Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). He (quite rightly, in my opinion) defends the film and the filmmakers from the charges of being ‘arch’ and ‘mocking’. In reaction, here are some thoughts of my own.

(If you haven’t seen Fargo, go see it, because the following piece – like Matt Fraction’s – contains spoilers. And also because it’s a really good film that everyone should see.)

Formally, the film works in the same way as an episode of Columbo, i.e. it is one of those police procedurals in which we, the audience, see every detail of the crime, and know ‘whodunnit’ before the detective, and get to watch the detective figure it out. But whereas Columbo is a classical detective in other respects – he’s near-supernaturally insightful, always one jump ahead – Marge Gunderson is hardly a detective at all. Or rather, she’s a detective in a way that is far more like real life. She’s never one jump ahead. She amasses evidence and she follows it. She doesn’t display any leaps of insight. She doesn’t really deduce anything. There is a famous bit where she corrects another officer’s mistake (the “I’m not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work there Lou” bit) but it isn’t played to emphasize her special abilities. On the contrary, it emphasizes her basic competence over the routine incompetence of one of her colleagues. In other respects, she doesn’t distinguish herself. At first, she makes nothing of Jerry Lundergaard’s attempts to fabricate licence plates, despite being left alone with – and noticing – the pad on which he’s doing it. And why should she? She has no context that would make any reasonable person see it was significant. The usual leap of imagination of the detective is a contrivance. It’s actually the writer feeding insights to the detective at strategic moments in order to make the plot work. She sees the framed photo of Mrs Lundergaard in Jerry’s office and there is no standard cop-eureka moment when, as she stares at the photo, she suddenly puts things together. Why should there be? She doesn’t know Mrs Lundergaard is missing yet. She catches Grimsrud not because she tracks him down but because she happens to drive past his hideout and recognise the ‘tan Ciera’ parked outside.

The film resolutely resists depicting Marge as special in any way. She isn’t particularly clever, insightful, glamorous or charismatic. Indeed, by conventional standards (by which I mean standard conventional depictions, which the movie flouts and undermines) she looks the opposite of all these things. Extraordinarily unextraordinary, she is simply competent at her job, fond of her husband, polite to her colleagues, etc. Moreover, she is vulnerable to the frailties of the flesh in ways that we real people know full well (even if we don’t all know what it’s like to be pregnant) but to which movie people routinely display superhuman indifference.…

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