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What began with literature ends with gore. At least I’ll get some reading done, I thought a year ago, and some thickish novels did follow, but that was then. Now I can’t remember the last book I finished. In the final innings of the pandemic, all discipline has fled. I check the boxes at work; overeat; sleep 10 hours a night; and watch people murder each other on TV.
I never bothered with crime shows before Covid. Now I binge one after the next, to the exclusion of all else. Within the genre, my tastes are specific. No time for the cosy period piece, Hercule Poirot or Foyle’s War, say. I require gloom, and blood by the bathtub.
What isn’t necessary, particularly, is quality or originality. I churned right through Hinterland — which turns rural Wales into a murderer convention — despite its complete refusal to depart from a single convention of the contemporary homicide opera. Unstable protagonist, haunted by his past? Salt-of-the-earth deputy (female, preferably) who tries to keep our hero grounded in reality? Sceptical superior officer who gets in the way? Murderers who live in houses decorated like low-end antique stores? Soulful shots of twilit landscapes? Tick, tick, tick.
Hinterland is fine art compared to Marcella, an objectively terrible series whose heroic improbabilities of plot and character don’t stop it from taking itself dead seriously. Of course (spoiler alert) the police officer who went crazy with guilt because she was responsible for her child’s death and attacked her colleagues before mutilating herself and then apparently dying in a fire is found sleeping under a bridge and is recruited by a rogue cop with secrets of his own to infiltrate a mass-murdering crime family in Belfast whom she then liquidates before stealing their fortune and their baby, with which to start a new life. Of course! I consumed all three incoherent seasons of this boudin noir in a week, and was not sated.
It took me a while to realise that this bizarre self-seriousness was just what I was looking for. My shows are loyal to their pretences. And florid, baroque pretence is where the best of them all, Hannibal, excels. I have a pretty strong stomach, but I quickly started to wonder just how much viscera display was permitted on network TV. Quite a lot, it turns out. The amorality of the show is comprehensive. It doesn’t waste even a nod towards the ethical questions raised by murder as spectacle. It’s audience surrogates are not the tortured FBI agent but the pair of wisecracking forensic scientists who like to tease the corpses. The show is nominally about the intimacy of violence, but its salient feature is that it looks fantastic, from the satanic psychologist’s wardrobe to slow-mo shots of droplets of blood dissolving in water.
What has come over me, and why now? A study published in January found that those people who watch a lot of apocalyptic horror movies were more resilient in the face of the real-life pandemic. “These kinds of movies apparently serve as mental rehearsal for actual events,†professor John Johnson of Penn State summed up. Students of philosophy will recognise Aristotle in this: he argued, 2,500 or so years before Professor Johnson and his colleagues rocked up, that tragic drama, by inducing feelings of fear and pity, helps us regulate those emotions in ourselves.
This is probably some truth in Aristotle’s view. But my guess is that my binge-viewing is less about processing the horror of the pandemic so much as the crushing dullness of it. The undifferentiated, aimless, endless character of life in lockdown is the hard part for me — the feeling that life has maintained its hardships but lost its point. The universe of murder TV, while amoral, is rigid with imperatives. The killer must kill to express his nature, and the detective’s life is ordered, urgently, by the search. Succeed or fail, they hurtle toward a resolution, and another corpse surfaces the following week. Within this life-and-death structure, everything shimmers with meaning, beauty, drama.
If this is right, the appeal or gore is not that it modulates our fear of death, but soothes our nagging sense of meaninglessness. It’s about ennui rather than mortality. I’m not saying that Hannibal is Sartre. But Sartre is not available on Netflix.
Robert Armstrong is the FT’s US financial editor. Email him at robert.armstrong@ft.com
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