The Fall and Out

Recently I watched the last two episodes of series one of The Fall and read the last 50 pages of Natsuo Kirino’s Out on the same night, before I went to bed, and predictably stayed wide awake. If in Out the male sadist, torturer and killer of women is identifiable by his pathology, not in some overt way but just in the way he is, so much so that both men and women feel afraid or out of sorts when in his presence, then in The Fall the exact opposite is true—the serial killer of women is practically nondescript, ordinary and regular, a loving father and husband. Along with the many “nice guys who rape” articles that proliferate the internet, or maybe not so much articles as incessant chatter on Twitter and Tumblr,  I wonder what it is about this cultural moment that needs to depict the violent man who rapes and kills women as an Ordinary Guy, a Nice Guy even, and what this means. What does it mean when the trend is to focus on the pathological misogyny of ordinary guys? When you look at The Fall, and maybe in some way it’s an answer that’s too big for this question, is that this male character is ordinary in the sense that he’s white and almost inoffensively middle-class, and played by an actor who previously made a living off the images of his beautiful face and beautiful body. In The Fall, however, Jamie Dornan’s attractiveness is made non-descript, almost—yes, inoffensive—nothing of his face and body here is reminiscent of the well-oiled god that Eva Mendes wore as a second skin in the Calvin Klein ads. I mean, it’s the kind of beauty that isn’t terrifying, until it is. In scenes in The Fall we see Dornan’s body, or rather the body of his character, Paul Spector, shaped and transformed into a kind of weapon, how he works out and runs and builds his upper body strength, and what is posited as the current ideal—the long, lean, well-muscled male—is next seen tying women up to their beds and strangling them to death.

How unsettling it is, when you google Jamie Dornan, because you haven’t seen him in anything before, only to realise that you have seen him in those ads with Eva Mendes. And to scrutinise those ads differently, now, to see how both bodies are oiled and glimmering, shining in media-approved perfection, how he holds her wrists down and what’s meant to be erotic play, meant to titillate, takes on a whole new meaning once you realise it’s the same face and body that you’re meant to believe is a serial killer on a TV show, and it all comes full circle, these images of sex and violence and bodies on display; something that’s always lurking beneath these highly stylised images of heterosexual sex or potential sex is the spectre of male violence—

And then keep in mind also that what makes Paul Spector a loving father and husband is exactly what he does without his family’s knowledge—kill women. Being able to kill women without his family’s knowledge—obviously—is what makes him a good father and husband; if he wasn’t killing women would he be like one of the other characters in the show, a working class husband from the wrong side of Belfast who beats and rapes his wife but who doesn’t kill women? So is The Fall trying to tell us that misogyny must have an outlet, and this is how it works?

I’m not sure. It’s a TV show.  Maybe The Fall just wants to entertain us.

What’s also important to consider is that even though he is a working father, Paul Spector has the space and time to become a serial killer. Try to imagine a working mother and wife having the time and space to become a serial killer, and you cannot, imagination fails you, WHEN WILL SHE HAVE THE TIME, you think—and you realise the work of the serial killer, in The Fall, is literally made possible by the reproductive labour of the women in his life: his wife (who is also a nurse, a professional caregiver), and the teenage babysitter (who also has a crush on him). So when Paul has spent a whole night killing and is exhausted, forgets to feed the kids breakfast, the wife, returning from a night shift, also exhausted, will feed the kids. Being a parasite, sucking the life out of women, doesn’t exactly rejuvenate Paul, and this comes as a surprise, he has all the time in the world to stalk his prey on the internet, write and draw gruesome things in his journal, quote Nietzsche—but poor guy, being a killer is also exhausting.

I started watching The Fall because GILLIAN ANDERSON AND ARCHIE PANJABI IN A SHOW, TOGETHER. Then I was troubled by this Nice-White-Inoffensive-Middle-Class-Guy-as-Women-Killer trope, because I’m not sure what this trope is doing, what work is it doing, that it wants to present a dangerous violent psychopath as ordinary. Does it want to warn women that all nice guys are potentially harmful? That the harmful guys might also appear nice? That misogyny is banal and it kills? Or is it about how nice-looking white men who may or may not have come from bourgeois propriety but who definitely aspire to it are also kind of bad? Really bad, even? Imagine that. What does this say to women, except to always be afraid and be on guard? So when Gillian Anderson’s character, Stella Gibson, asks Archie Panjabi’s character, Tanya Smith, what she will tell her daughters in order to keep them safe, Smith answers, “Not to talk to strange men,” and Gibson goes, “Strange men?” (as in, presumably, what does that even mean?) and Smith amends her answer: “Not to talk to men.”

Tthere it is: if even someone who walks, talks, and looks like Paul Spector is a killer, then be wary of all men.

So the relief of Natsuo Kirino’s Out is that the killer, Satake, who orgasms while raping a woman he’s simultaneously stabbing, a man who confesses to feeling closest to a woman when he can share her pain, and get inside her, literally, when he sticks his fingers into her wounds—all told in Kirino’s spare, unvarnished prose—a man who achieves pleasure that he cannot even put into words at the precise moment a women is about to die, is presented as not a nice guy, or an ordinary guy, but a marked man, his violence inscribed onto his body and words and mannerisms, so that some women are drawn to his sad eyes and charisma while others are repelled and want only to stay away … there’s some relief there, to know that a violent killer bears some signs of being not-ordinary.

I’m not saying that my sense of relief about this is right, or good; in fact I know it’s dangerous, because killers and rapists don’t come with a warning.

But what about the women who are drawn to Satake? Who don’t heed some form of instinctual warning about his sad eyes that seem to mask something else? There’s no pat answer to these questions in Out and this is what drives me crazy, because when it comes to crimes like these I want someone to hold my hand and fix things and tell me that everything will be all right, somehow, in the end.

Satake meets his match in a woman, Masako, who has never killed anyone before but who has butchered dead human bodies (I would tell you more but this is the plot of the whole novel). The ending in Out is not redemptive, whatever that means, but it does allow possibility for a continued existence for the female character. She’s not snuffed out, or silenced, or reintegrated back into the dominant narrative. At least, not when we leave her at the end of the book.

In the finale of series one of The Fall, when Stella and Paul confront each other, not face-to-face but through the phone, Stella tells Paul some things are rarely uttered in films or movies, like “What you’re doing is plain old misogyny”. Time stops, for a little bit, when she says that, because when was the last time you heard that word on TV, from a woman to a man. And there is something there to the way Stella robs the serial killer’s actions of its mystique and pseudo-philosophical bullshit (does it come as a surprise that the serial killer is a former literature major who still quotes Nietzsche, or more disturbing, are viewers not meant to be surprised that Spector didn’t have an “ordinary” upbringing but grew up instead in various care homes?). Stella robs Paul of his own self-created misogynist spectacle when she cuts short Paul’s prattle about “being really free” (i.e. women-killing as the last frontier!) and tells him that he’s just another guy and reminds him of the banality of his misogyny. She lets the killer know that there’s nothing special about his killing, nothing to inspire a thousand documentaries and pop-sociology crime books, because it is a familiar hate—women already know all about it, so shut the fuck up, Paul.

The Fall is a BBC show so maybe we can’t expect too much. It still individualises Spector’s pathology while throwing words like misogyny around. I mean, we do see it in action but in a particular context: bad German criminals beating up an escort during a night of sex, working class Belfast men beating their wives about. I don’t know very much about Belfast but Spector’s white male ordinariness is a blessing, here, a privilege, yes—he gets to stalk the streets of Belfast at night dressed in a black hoodie and is unnoticed. Nice-looking whiteness does not inspire alarm, as it turns out. As for nice middle-class white men, Paul Spector is the aberration—the worst kind, as it turns out, which is what is troubling about the show. Does it, in the end, make a spectacle of (white) (middle-class) male violence even while trying to portray it as banal, ordinary? In Out, in contrast, misogyny is everywhere—from sons to husbands and police officers and factory supervisors. The only “nice guy” in this story, perhaps, is a migrant worker—who isn’t also entirely free from how misogyny structures the behaviour of men who do not actually hate women; so deprived is he of sexual contact with a woman he thinks it’s okay to stand in the dark and pull a woman close to him, even if he’s not going to hurt her.

Of course, The Fall is a cop show. Justice is meted out via a very compelling feminist female police woman with great hair and silky blouses who eats cheeseburgers while drinking red wine and has sex with whoever, whenever, and is also kick ass. The character is a liberal feminist dream in one sense, with echoes of governance feminism—the only kind we get in law and order shows.  In contrast, in Out, the female characters, whether they exact vengeance or not, are not a part of the brutal police machinery and legal system; they are always the victims of it, and Out never lets you forget this.

But what does it also mean for our cultural moment, fascinated as it is with the nice guy as rapist and killer, that the same face that plays a killer also sells you (or used to sell you) brand names and fashion, a face meant to incite both pleasure and consumption? One face indistinguishable for another; the same face but different, the same body, positioned and conveyed in another manner.

Who or what is the nice or the ordinary guy?