Is this TV’s most sexist show?
Allan Cubitt defends his hit crime drama against accusations of sexism. Andrew Billen adjudicates.
There are programmes it is hard to make your mind up about – The Undateables, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, everything Ricky Gervais has done since Extras – and then there is The Fall. Some have called this serial-killer drama, in which the fetishistic stalker of professional brunettes is hunted by a chic, blonde woman detective superintendent, misogynist. Others have pronounced it ‘‘the most feminist drama on television’’. Which way is a critic to jump?
I have more recently discovered that The Fall is as problematic to talk about as write about. At the British Film Institute recently after a screening of the first episode of series three (currently screening on Sky TV’s SoHo), I chaired a Q&A with its stars, Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson, and its writer-director, Allan Cubitt. It was a somewhat rowdy occasion. Anderson’s fans worship her and for good reason, but they are prickly. The last time I interviewed her for this paper about playing DSI Stella Gibson, tweets went around saying I should never be allowed to do so again. Sure enough, there were soon calls for another chair next time she came to the BFI.
Then there is Dornan, the Northern Irish model-turned-star of Fifty Shades of Grey, who plays The Fall’s killer, Paul Spector. It turns out he has his obsessive fans too. A woman with an Ulster accent shouted out from the dark that she wanted to know if Anderson was having an affair with ‘‘our Jamie’’ – an absurd allegation that did not, obviously, deserve or get an answer.
Of everyone on the stage, Cubitt, the extremely experienced TV hand who co-wrote Prime Suspect 2 in 1992, got off the lightest. Enemies of The Fall were either holding their tongues or absent. They would certainly include the Mail’s TV critic, Christopher Stevens, who called it ‘‘an invitation to share an extended rape fantasy’’, and The Observer’s Rachel Cooke, who accused it of being ‘‘in the business of glamorising violence against women by equating it not only with sex, but with sexual attractiveness’’. Alison Graham, the Radio Times’ television editor, who has waged an honourable campaign against violence against women on TV, included it last week in her list of dramas that make women afraid to be alone in their homes.
Yet Amy Sullivan, praising its feminism in The Atlantic last year, differentiated The Fall from other shows, such as Luther, that graphically depict the murder of women and hailed it as a ‘‘remarkable achievement’’ that she hoped would herald a ‘‘new normal for women on television’’. This gratified Cubitt, a big, longhaired bloke who must be in his 60s (he is shy about his age) and who is an avowed feminist. He says he has been equally bucked up by the support of his 22-year-old feminist daughter, who has told him to give the accusations of misogyny no further thought.
Now, over the phone, I ask him to think back to his pitch and why he thought television needed another drama in which women were terrorised by a serial murderer. ‘‘The notion of a serialkiller drama makes my heart sink a bit,’’ he says, disarmingly. This was why, he says, that although Spector kills three women, we see only the last murder. Although he attacks another and kidnaps a fourth woman, the only other person he kills thereafter is a man.
‘‘I wasn’t drawn to the idea of writing The Fall by the serial killer, but serial killings make for very complicated cases and I wanted the psychological pressure on the [police] team to keep building up. To get further leads, the police need him to attack again, which of course they do not want either. I was interested in the pressure that puts people under, particularly someone like Gibson, who seems more than normally wedded to the idea of protecting females, not just the potential victims but also females in general.’’
Cubitt intended The Fall to be, if anything, a critique of the serialkiller genre so rampant on television. He particularly detested the way many thrillers started with a faceless, nameless victim lying brutally killed. Although The Killing redeemed itself through its portrayal of the grief of a young girl’s family, he hated the way it started with her running for her life through a forest. ‘‘You don’t know who’s pursuing her and you don’t know who she is. I think that’s a shocking way to start something, having no emotional investment in the characters.’’
By picking a killer of women as Gibson’s foil, Cubitt, he says, was able to instigate a discussion about male-on-female violence, sexism and misogyny. The Fall is set in patriarchal Northern Ireland. Gibson’s boss, Burns, is a Godfearing Catholic, who had a onenight stand with her and remains consumed by guilt and lust. He thinks Spector is a monster. She insists he is merely along a spectrum from him, a senior officer who has just hit on her. Burns, naturally, is bettered in this argument, for Gibson is so much the most intelligent person in every room she enters that it makes us almost feel sad for the rest (with the obvious exception of Spector, who comes closest to matching her sinuous intellect).
‘‘One of the reasons the charges of misogyny make no sense to me is because the thing would need to hate women overall for that to be the case,’’ says Cubitt. ‘‘And it doesn’t. The reverse of that: it actually promotes and empowers the women characters all the time as much as it possibly can. But I’m not writing saintly individuals either. I’m trying to write people who are believable. So Gibson has flaws.’’
Yes, Gibson is flawed yet her flaws are the obverse of her virtues. During what is intended as a brief sojourn in Belfast, where she has been sent from Scotland Yard to investigate the Spector murders, she sleeps with two junior officers. Since as far as we can tell she has no partner or children, she is of course free to do this, and in any case we can assume married fathers will have long regarded such work assignments similarly; as actors like to say, ‘‘F...ing on location doesn’t count.’’
Cubitt says: ‘‘I heard someone using the terrible term ‘freemale’ the other day – free of male – but what I’m establishing at the beginning, I guess, is that she hasn’t got the problematical husband that she might have had in season one and was dropped because he wasn’t very interesting.’’
Not everyone, however, buys this inflating of Gibson into a feminist icon BBC Radio 4 programme Body Count Rising presenter, the actress Doon Mackichan, says that Gibson’s ‘‘powerful feminist speeches’’ are undermined by her ‘‘husky, breathy voice, the endless voyeuristic shots of her in a hotel room in satin lingerie, the sexual come-on to the attractive female pathologist in a hotel bar cementing her embodiment of a male fantasy of what a powerful woman looks like’’.
When I interviewed Anderson two years ago for The Fall’s second run, she was aggressive in her defence of Gibson, a woman who ‘‘gets her needs met in life’’. In the first episode of this season, Tom Anderson, her latest copper lover, who was shot at the end of the last season, asks why she went first to tend to the also-wounded Spector. Her reply is that he was more severely injured and she is determined that he lives so that he may face trial. That, Anderson told the BFI audience, was indeed the reason.
I ask Cubitt if that’s the whole story. ‘‘If I’m honest, no, we shouldn’t take it at face value. There’s a moment when they’re in bed in season two where [Tom] Anderson says that Spector has a certain allure and Gibson says, ‘You might find him alluring, I detest him with every fibre of my being’. I don’t believe that’s quite true.’’
This brings us to the dark allure of Spector and, specifically, the casting of the extremely goodlooking Dornan to embody that fatal attraction. In the very first episode, Spector strips to his underwear, although not possibly the underwear Dornan once advertised on posters. It is true that none of his victims fantasises about him but the family’s teenager babysitter remains in love with him even after he is revealed to be a killer.
I feel that Cubitt is at his least convincing when he says that he cast Dornan ‘‘against type’’ because he is ‘‘an interestinglooking guy’’. His case is surely not helped by Dornan’s appearance, between the last season and this, as the irresistible sadist Christian Grey in the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey.
What I find hard, though, is not looking at Spector – his face is interesting – but seeing through his eyes. There was a scene in episode four of series one (directed not by Cubitt but by Jakob Verbruggen) that I found particularly difficult. From Spector’s viewpoint we see Annie Brawley, the young woman he is about to attack, sitting on the lavatory and even wiping herself. This seemed to deny his victim dignity even before the assault that immediately followed.
‘‘Yeah, well, you might well be right about that. I’m not saying that everything we’ve done has been absolutely perfect. What I do argue is, my sympathies were entirely with Annie.’’
My conclusion is that there is a genuine and semi-intended tension in the piece between its enlightened feminist message about male violence, as encapsulated in Gibson’s articulate speeches, and its camera’s male gaze. There is a scene in the first season in which Gibson holds a press conference and a high button on her blouse pops. Anderson told me that the moment was to emphasise Gibson’s vulnerability. Cubitt says it was a comment on the media’s obsession with women’s dress. I think it was a voyeuristic moment designed to disconcert the male viewer.
There was another such moment in the opening episode of this season, I think, when the camera seems to join Tom Anderson in looking down Gibson’s low-cut shirt. Noticing, she folds her arms and closes her coat over her chest. Cubitt insists none of that was intended. So that, presumably, puts me on the pervy continuum that ultimately leads to Spector.
The good news, brothers, is that this season began in an emergency ward led by a powerful, but competent and altruistic surgeon played by Richard Coyle. ‘‘You know, I think he’s a good man. Anderson is a good man too,’’ says Cubitt, ‘‘but I think probably The Fall was overdue a few other good men.’’
I am glad Cubitt concedes that we exist. The Fall sometimes makes me wonder. Perhaps that’s what it’s for. The Times
Season 3 of The Fall is now screening on Sky TV’s SoHo channel.