Following a previous article on movie villains, Liam Trim wonders whether BBC dramas Blackout and Line of Duty actually needed any bad guys at all…
Spoiler warning: the following article contains spoilers from The Dark Knight Rises and the recent BBC drama series Blackout and Line of Duty.
Earlier this year I wrote a feature for Flickering Myth, to coincide with the release of Marvel’s Avengers Assemble (The Avengers across the pond), bemoaning the tired familiarity of evil schemes concocted by villains at the cinema. My basic point was that too many films were being let down by disappointing bad guys. A large proportion of the films we see at our local multiplexes are reliant upon a quality adversary to drive the plot forward and make us care about the heroes of the piece. I also wondered whether it was difficult to create truly modern villains because the world is now a better place, or because we are increasingly reluctant to confront the problems of twenty-first century society.
Watching a couple of recent television dramas from the BBC has prompted me to reassess and alter my previous conclusion however. I would now argue that many stories do not require villains at all. Original dramas like BBC Two’s Line of Duty prove that even narratives populated with characters who are either cops or criminals need not have a traditional, ultimate nemesis. And BBC One’s Blackout also showed that trying to shoe horn in a grand villainous conspiracy towards the end of a story can feel forced and diminish dramatic tension, rather than enhance it.
Let’s start with Blackout then. This was the story of Christopher Eccleston’s Daniel Demoys, a hopeless drunk council worker doing dodgy deals at night that he can’t remember the next day. Oh and having an affair with a woman who dresses up like something from Sin City, which again he can’t quite recall. Oh and murdering people. He eventually finds the mental note he made for himself about that particular boozy cock up.
Joking aside, this was an ambitious project which deserved plaudits for its scope and willingness to keep the audience guessing. In the first episode Eccleston carries us through a drunk’s amnesiac moments and then the horrible realisation that he is tearing his family apart with a series of similar, but convincing, self loathing and depressed facial expressions. The remaining two episodes head off on a completely different path though. Demoys takes a bullet for a witness in an important trial in a moment of rare clarity, brought on by being at rock bottom. This sacrifice catapults him from an all time low to an ultimate high, as a public campaign gets going to encourage Demoys to run for mayor.
Sections of the press crucified Blackout, unfairly in my view. They chose to attack details of the plot, such as the fact that no English cities, except London, have a mayor as yet, and they certainly do not wield the sort of power hinted at here. This was an irrelevant criticism. Blackout is not a documentary, but a fictional drama. Some of its themes were very British, as contracts for bin collecting and citizen run co-operatives dominated the latter stages of the plot. But others, which gave the drama its scale, were ripped straight from the pages of American comic books. The director Bill Gallagher has freely admitted this influence in interviews about the look of the show. There is nothing wrong with creating a heightened, fantasy version of reality, in an imaginary, rainy city (which is basically Manchester with shots of other Northern cities thrown in).
In creating such an environment, Blackout’s creators succeeded in making some perceptive and topical political points. However by the end the canvas was too cluttered to have any impact. Various plot lines had disappointing or baffling destinations. Myanna Buring’s character in particular made little sense and was simply intended to reinforce the destructive nature of Demoys’ alcoholism. Addiction, and some good men’s susceptibility to it, was the real villain in Blackout, which is why a late plotline to establish a menacing corporation as the proper baddies felt so forced. The entire final episode became a damp rag rather than the fiery conclusion promised at the end of episode two. Daniel Demoys lost all resonance as a character, despite his heroic demise, because of an implausible and rushed conspiracy. Too much was squeezed in to such a short series.
The same could be said of Line of Duty. In just five episodes creator Jed Mercurio unravelled a complex plot that his American counterparts would get at least twelve, if not twenty-two, instalments to explore. Generally though Line of Duty kept a far tighter focus than Blackout and therefore ended up with fewer flaws. Sure several episodes repeatedly made the point that the police had too much paper work and too many health and safety regulations to follow, in a clumsy, heavy handed fashion. Sure the conclusion, like Blackout’s, felt a little rushed. But overall this was high quality drama, laced with intelligent themes and cracking dialogue.
Line of Duty was predominantly told from the perspective of DS Steve Arnott’s path to redemption after a botched raid results in a death. Arnott is played by Martin Compston who is better known for playing criminals than cops (was his casting a deliberate ploy to keep us on our toes perhaps?). However the real heart of the story is DCI Tony Gates, played by Lennie James. James gives an astonishing performance as a high flying “detective of the year” under investigation by an anti-corruption unit.
The first couple of episodes, when the series is firmly in subtle slow burn mode, are easily the most absorbing. This is because Gates appears to be under investigation for doing very little wrong. He is accused of “laddering”, which is apparently a practice whereby officers charge suspects with more offences than they are guilty of; to make their own personal track records look good. This might well be somewhat unprofessional, but on the surface Gates still appears to be catching his city’s most dangerous criminals and putting them behind bars for as long as possible. The anti-corruption unit continues to pursue Gates, installing a mole in his squad full of bullies, but we still only see him being a bit of an old school copper, nothing more sinister.
Eventually Gates is exposed as an adulterer to the audience, despite being a doting father to his two small girls. His connections to an old flame suck him in to a world of criminality, not long after anti-corruption began investigating him. It all seems like pretty bad luck for a guy who was initially guilty only of ambition, thinking with his trousers and loving his daughters to bits. He deserves to be remembered as one of the great characters of the year for being a rounded human being first and a piece in the jigsaw of the plot second. The transformation of his cocky confidence into clever desperation and then despair is gripping.
Line of Duty asks questions about the dividing lines between right and wrong in the modern world. And it really does feel modern. It sometimes goes too far and loses subtlety, but it often examined the culture of a police force shaped and driven by government targets with tremendous insight. It also inspected traditional ideas about characters living double lives through a twenty-first century lens. This is why it is such a shame that all of these good points are diluted by a caricature of a villain, with an angry Scottish accent, entering the plot to blackmail Gates and tempt him further into the criminal underworld. This bad guy even comes complete with his own set of stereotypical yobs and goons, including a young boy acting as courier on his BMX. This recurring image is laughable enough on its own.
But it is even more disappointing to find that the climax to the entire series, shown in this week’s episode, involves a showdown between Gates and this golf playing, closet criminal mastermind. I’m sure Jed Mercurio will argue that the show needed an exterior criminal force, outside the police force, in order for it to work. I don’t disagree with this; a cop show needs criminals, even if they are only in the background of the narrative. I do think that the inner demons of Arnott and Gates should have been more central to Line of Duty’s climactic scenes though. The face to face encounter with the unnamed Scottish brute wasn’t necessary. It distracted from what this drama was really about; the few wrong steps that can lead to ordinary human beings slipping down into failure and immorality.
Television dramas then, even those that seem to focus on the dynamic between good and evil, do not always need a big bad villain. The same is true for certain kinds of film of course. Then again, there are also always going to be movies that require a villain as part of the formula. Superhero films and comic book adaptations need villains.
Clearly the most talked about villain right now is Tom Hardy’s Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. There was a lot of speculation about his voice, his costume and whether or not his performance would come close to Heath Ledger’s as The Joker. I’d argue that Hardy disappeared into the part, just as Ledger did. When you looked up at Bane’s imposing frame on the screen, there was no trace of Hardy, only of his character. In my opinion, Bane didn’t live up to the high standards set by The Joker because of his evil scheme.
It might be blasphemous to pick fault with Christopher Nolan’s epic conclusion right now, but I’m sure the intelligent and talented filmmaker could have created a better threat to Gotham than its nuclear destruction. If you prefer The Joker to Bane, don’t blame Tom Hardy. Blame the script. Even Nolan, who weaved such intricate plots in The Prestige and Inception, and built such menace in The Dark Knight, has fallen back on some very familiar narrative devices with The Dark Knight Rises. For that reason I stand by my earlier claim that the bad guys are running short on ideas. But after watching Line of Duty and Blackout I’d also argue that in some cases the way to deal with this is to cut them out of the picture altogether. Concentrate on blurring the lines of morality and making your characters, good or bad, believable human beings.
