A Review of a Review
Dear Ms. Franklin:
When my highbrow friends deign to watch TV, your opinion has way more influence than mine. So when one of them said, "The New Yorker reviewed that show you go on about” and handed me last week’s magazine, the pages folded back to reveal Mireille Enos’s caricature, I knew I could give up trying to sell the show to the eggheads. Nothing I now say can compete with your dismissal of The Killing.
I don’t entertain any fantasies that I can change your mind about the series, but I do want to address a couple of your complaints.
I disagree that the chase scene that opens the series is just “creepy exploitation” of violence against teenaged girls. Rosie’s run through the forest [and those aerial shots showing the West Coast wilds slinking along the city’s edge] awaken our memories of the fairy tales Grandma read to us as children—the ones meant to give us the skills to avoid trouble: stay on the path, don’t talk to strangers, avoid nibbling other people’s possessions.
I now realize that Grandma wanted us to avoid her own mistakes, for everyone must make a run through that forest, either literal or figurative, as a compulsory rite of passage. We could pledge good behavior while we snuggled on Grandma’s lap, a picture book open in front of us, but when our curiosity and hunger for experience took us—inevitably—into the woods, those fairy-tale strategies were wholly inadequate. We didn’t know where to go when we found ourselves in the wrong part of town, what to say [or keep to ourselves] when we engaged that strange man in conversation, what to do when we swallowed something we should have declined.
Sometimes young people get pushed into an oven and roasted, sometimes thrown in a car trunk and drowned. Rosie reminds us of that reality. More often, though, we escape the forest with our lives, though our experience there does do some irrevocable damage. And the extent of that damage makes the characters of The Killing so compelling that I don't understand how you can dismiss them as superficial.
We learn, for example, that Stan Larsen [Brent Sexton], Rosie’s father, spent early adulthood in the belly of a wolf, and that experience gives him not only an instinctual ferocity but also painful doubts about his humanity. We saw him go for Jasper’s throat with the precision of a predator; we saw empathy triumph over violence as he released the teacher rather than deliver the death blow.
Aunt Terry [Jamie Anne Allman], on the other hand, must have encountered an unsympathetic huntsman when she wound her way through the woods. This man left her internal organs intact but removed a metaphorical heart, which now keeps her from making the kind of commitment that would let her marry and raise children as her sister has. [And I hope that we don’t learn that Terry's loss influenced a bad decision with the man who hurt Rosie.]
Det. Holder [Joel Kinnaman] knows the pebble path home, but whatever he consumed to stuff his emptiness allows him to open the mailbox only, not the front door. Poor Bennet Ahmed [Brandon Jay McLaren], like the frog prince, is willing to do the work to get a place at the table—the kingly Councilman Richmond [Billy Campbell] ensuring his rights—when everyone else just wants to smash him against the wall for his differences.
And mother Mitch [Michelle Forbes] has made the evil Queen sympathetic. As she looks through the window of the Ahmeds’ apartment [this story’s mirror], painfully aware of what she has lost [not superficial cosmetic appearance this time], we almost wish she could recover a still-living daughter—even at Amber’s expense. These characters illustrate the successful journey out of the forest in a way Grandma and the Grimm Brothers never did, and we understand the damage and losses these adults suffer because we know them ourselves.
I have no experience with the way television networks promote their series, but I do know that in my profession, the marketing department does not consult those of us in the trenches as it builds an image to sell our services. So I can’t help but wonder if twenty-somethings too young to have watched Twin Peaks thought their provocative question “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” was an original ploy to generate interest in a new show. You can’t count on the marketing folks having the same background as a television scholar like yourself, and it’s unfair to penalize the series and its creative team for something over which it might not have had any control.
What your review did for my highbrow friends is provide them with a couple of one-liners so that if The Killing ever comes up in conversation—they have to know everything, you understand—I can now count on someone saying, “That show made me feel as if I was in an abusive relationship,” for they do like to plagiarize you without doing the heavy lifting of actually watching the series for themselves.
Meanwhile, my lowbrow friends and I are preparing a series finale beer-and-pizza party—alas, we can’t sit around eating bowls of Fruit Zooms and Bits’n’Pieces—where I am sure I will learn that I have made a foolish $50 bet on Nathan being Rosie’s killer.
My Head Hurts
News of a mysterious Mohammad and the FBI take-down of Linden and Holder have exploded the variables competing for attention in my head. We can’t have a new suspect this late in the game! Not after I have hyper-analyzed the most insignificant bits of conversation and body language. Are blackberries in ditches on the councilman’s mind because he observed them while helping Nathan push the car into the lake? Why does Terry light up at Mr. Ames’s entrance to the wake while his crone of a wife (?) puckers her already sour mouth? I feel like I’m in the middle of a chess game when the size of the board and number of pieces have just doubled! What are the rules now?
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