"Nichts bleibt"
Eisbrecher - Supermodel
Barring a pile-up at the airport, this should go up a couple hours before I arrive at my apartment. I've been visiting family over the past month, and though I'd arranged in advance for a backlog of puns and run-on sentences to post during my absence (many thanks also to Secretary of Flexing Hegseth's primitive antics for an easy political segue) I at one point realized I'd be too wiped to write anything after my flight, so let's see... what media have I been consuming during my trip? Let's start with Lynn, the abstract puzzle game inexplicably featuring a strong female protagonist.
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| gag me with a spoon |
As a rule such additions prompt a double double-take. First off, why was the emotive fluff included at all? Second, if you're gonna do it, why must it be the same idiotically trite and repetitive nonsense every time? The little girl is sugar and spice and everything nice, the magic spirit saves and falls in wuv with a wounded manly type, toss in some goblins or something and maybe an evil wizard or cute animal companion? Sure, whatever, pile it on. Come on, even by eight years old most of us were ready for other options.
Or at least you'd think so. But what audience age bracket is Death In Paradise's targeting? I caught a couple of episodes of it years ago and didn't think much of the old beach cops routine, nor am I much of a fan of cozy murder mysteries. A longer look these past weeks brought my attention to the show's fairly snappy directing, a formula distilled to on-cue entrances and exits, an "I've gathered you all here" ending summation every episode, exactly one-point-five emotions per character per scene, and the occasional pratfall comic relief moment. If a bot's not already copy-pasting these scripts, they're wasting money.
Characters naturally follow. The smart guy has to be a diffident, stammering stumblebum solving cases by what appear to be flashes of divine inspiration rather than self-driven ratiocination. Low-ranking males are comic relief failing at life in a new way every episode and tripping over their own shoelaces in scene after scene so that the nearest female may prove herself smarter, faster and superior in every way. The only dignified male is the blatantly post-sexual old fossil of a daddy-figure existing to pat girlies on the head and verbally bitchslap their tribe's other males to put them in their place. Female suspects are as a rule red herrings stepping aside for a guiltier male by the parlor confession scene. If culpable in some way, females must be provided with a greater noble purpose under whose umbrella to operate. She was saving her family. It was self-defense. She was emotionally distraught. She just wuvs too much. Or her antagonist was a beast, was a loser, was a bad businessman losing the family fortune, was guilty of <something sexual> etc. A woman's conflict against a man is an opportunity to ladle negative qualities onto him until we come out convinced any man in fact deserves whatever's coming to him, more time is devoted to her justification for murder, and she herself struts offstage to the soft twanging of emotive strings establishing her moral superiority.
In the one instance I've seen so far where women are guilty of killing an
innocent man, it's downplayed as an accident. The victim
himself is minimized, never speaking a single line or even appearing as a character to
prevent us from sympathizing with him - though at least for once he's not
demonized to make us believe he deserved it. The emphasis is placed on the killers' emotional vulnerability to exculpate them in the audience's eyes. We're immediately
assured of one woman's morally upright contrition, and the other did it
all for love, and the reveal quickly transitions into a comic relief
ending scene where another woman is praised for having helped a hapless man satisfy his fiancee's demands,
to reaffirm the status quo of man bad; woman good.
If this tedious old routine is sounding familiar, don't credit the BBC with it. It's the same exact "man bad; woman good" formula you've been seeing in every Hollywood flick the past fifteen years (and in most of them before that) and I've been pointing it out in games and comics and really... everything. Death in Paradise itself is highly successful. You can tell when they budget extra commercials rivaling the show's own runtime. Not just one but two spin-offs already. Fifteen seasons and counting. Supposedly it's boasted five detectives in sequence over that time, and given the writing's strict worship of formula, I feel confident each and every one will prove the same exact diffident nebbish wringing his hands apologetically whenever scripted in a scene opposite a woman. And there are a thousand more series just like it in the medium of television alone.
I've been commenting on this topic for over a decade now, and it's still hard for even me to wrap my head around how thoroughly feminism, that is to say misandry, permeates every creative medium, every public statement and classroom and ad break. No matter if you tell yourself your own country lacks a feminist lobby as visible as in the States, you have been absorbing their abuse from the cradle, whether from Hollywood, the BBC, every "news" outlet, what-have-you. It's the default. It's safe and homey. It's a "cozy" mystery.
It's murder. You have to dive into the most oppressive hellholes on the planet like Muslim dictatorships or North Korea to find comparable brainwashing campaigns so unchallenged as to outreach even the universal fairytale conventions about generic toothy, googly-eyed goblins jumping out of the walls at a plucky heroine. Because if I'm being honest, even Lynn's chibified wonderland cannot be called over-done or gratuitous compared to yet another and another scene of a male character stammering ineffectively while a woman cuts him down to size by virtue of her ovarian supremacy.
And that's where this post would end... if I hadn't also caught one episode where a daughter is revealed as having murdered her mother. No men involved. Sure, it's not directly bucking the default man bad / woman good juxtaposition, just sidestepping it, but four years ago when it aired I would not have bet on a TV show, especially a successful one, passing up the chance to pivot to a last-minute reveal of a filthy, vicious, malevolent male at the root of all evil. Still wouldn't bet on it.
But it's something, damnit. Another tiny crack in the facade.
I can't help noting that minor heresy against feminist dogma occurred in the only episode I've seen eschewing the standard mystery boilerplate as well, dodging red herrings or a final summation. Maybe they were just in a hurry? Or maybe the feminist litany of vituperation against and degradation of men is thus revealing its proper place among the primitive, trite, infantile mass-media formulae for the exploitation and manipulation of the ignorant masses, a fairytale for the simpleminded, a pile of stock gimmicks stapled onto any and every work regardless of relevance, like goblins jumping out of the walls.
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