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avevale_intelligencerWe've been binge-watching The Mentalist, which is very good, and we're on the last season now. In the season we just watched, around about the sixth or seventh episode, the show's Big Bad, Red John, was unmasked, and James Hibberd in Entertainment Weekly had some thoughts about that here: http://ew.com/article/2013/11/24/the-mentalist-red-john-review/
I think he missed the point. (Next bit won't make much sense unless you've read the article.)
Yes, Red John could have been a deeply sinister, charismatic, omnicompetent villain who kept on popping up, uttering his evil laugh and slipping through the dragnet time and again. He could have been like...oh, I don't know...the Master.
Exactly. It was important that Red John be an apparent nonentity, just as it was important that Gormogon in Bones be just some schmoe with bad teeth who got one second on screen before being blown away. The entire point was that the huge mystique that these killers constructed around themselves concealed, rather than revealed, their essential dullness. Serial murder is, when you get right down to it, the epitome of dull; I killed her, then I killed him, then I killed...that's why we hear of so many of the perpetrators embroidering and embellishing it with fantastic trappings and rituals and justifications and so on. Touches of colour and magic to brighten the dead, sad lives of people who can't think of, or value, any other way of interacting with people than by killing them.
And then again: layers. Yes, Sheriff McAllister was apparently dull, but if we know anything from history at all, it is that dull little men can accomplish monstrous evil, and sway millions with the force of their personalities. I had no trouble believing that McAllister had "built a secret empire" within the law enforcement system, and never been detected doing it; I mean, who would suspect him for a moment, unless every other possibility had been eliminated?
And what about his last words, before Jane cut off his airway? "I have genuine psychic--" One of the things I like about the show is the way it danced on the edge, setting off Jane's harsh, hard-nosed scepticism with the more reflexive, less considered unbelief (or half-belief) of his comrades, and then showing us someone like Krystyna Frye who might have just been doing the same as Jane, and then again... Of course, it was just the sort of thing a lunatic like Red John would say, especially in extremity, a last attempt to make himself too interesting to kill, and a last fatal misjudgment of Jane's character; if Jane had ever been faced with incontrovertible evidence of the reality of psychic powers, even (or especially) his own, he would have destroyed it instantly and utterly and then forgotten all about its existence. It would never have fitted his world-picture. Those words, if nothing else, would have sealed Red John's fate.
But suppose they had been true?
The article does justly point out some flaws in the episode in which Red John dies, and rightly censures the programme makers for not knowing till more than halfway through the run how they were going to end this arc. But in making Red John a workaday, humdrum provincial sheriff, and still having him be Red John, they made an important point; in a world where Donald Trump can become the President of the United States, monstrosity and lunacy might come from the humblest and most unassuming of sources, and anyone might be a brilliant criminal mastermind.
I think he missed the point. (Next bit won't make much sense unless you've read the article.)
Yes, Red John could have been a deeply sinister, charismatic, omnicompetent villain who kept on popping up, uttering his evil laugh and slipping through the dragnet time and again. He could have been like...oh, I don't know...the Master.
Exactly. It was important that Red John be an apparent nonentity, just as it was important that Gormogon in Bones be just some schmoe with bad teeth who got one second on screen before being blown away. The entire point was that the huge mystique that these killers constructed around themselves concealed, rather than revealed, their essential dullness. Serial murder is, when you get right down to it, the epitome of dull; I killed her, then I killed him, then I killed...that's why we hear of so many of the perpetrators embroidering and embellishing it with fantastic trappings and rituals and justifications and so on. Touches of colour and magic to brighten the dead, sad lives of people who can't think of, or value, any other way of interacting with people than by killing them.
And then again: layers. Yes, Sheriff McAllister was apparently dull, but if we know anything from history at all, it is that dull little men can accomplish monstrous evil, and sway millions with the force of their personalities. I had no trouble believing that McAllister had "built a secret empire" within the law enforcement system, and never been detected doing it; I mean, who would suspect him for a moment, unless every other possibility had been eliminated?
And what about his last words, before Jane cut off his airway? "I have genuine psychic--" One of the things I like about the show is the way it danced on the edge, setting off Jane's harsh, hard-nosed scepticism with the more reflexive, less considered unbelief (or half-belief) of his comrades, and then showing us someone like Krystyna Frye who might have just been doing the same as Jane, and then again... Of course, it was just the sort of thing a lunatic like Red John would say, especially in extremity, a last attempt to make himself too interesting to kill, and a last fatal misjudgment of Jane's character; if Jane had ever been faced with incontrovertible evidence of the reality of psychic powers, even (or especially) his own, he would have destroyed it instantly and utterly and then forgotten all about its existence. It would never have fitted his world-picture. Those words, if nothing else, would have sealed Red John's fate.
But suppose they had been true?
The article does justly point out some flaws in the episode in which Red John dies, and rightly censures the programme makers for not knowing till more than halfway through the run how they were going to end this arc. But in making Red John a workaday, humdrum provincial sheriff, and still having him be Red John, they made an important point; in a world where Donald Trump can become the President of the United States, monstrosity and lunacy might come from the humblest and most unassuming of sources, and anyone might be a brilliant criminal mastermind.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-25 02:15 am (UTC)