[This fall I
watched Netflix’s Unbelievable, one of the most
compelling and important TV shows I’ve seen in a good while. The show opens up
a number of AmericanStudies conversations, so this week I’ll highlight and
analyze a handful of them, trying my best to avoid SPOILERS (but probably not
entirely succeeding). Leading up to a crowd-sourced post on the TV
recommendations of fellow AmericanStudiers—share yours in comments, please!]
On two cop duos
who reflect the spectrum of possibilities for this crucial civic organization.
First of all, as
we have seen far too often in recent years, it’s entirely possible (if not all
too common) for police officers to be neo-Nazis,
white
supremacists, connected to the
most hateful and destructive forces in our society. Those connections are
deeply ingrained in American history, and help explain why the police and other
authority figures frequently took part in lynchings and racial
hate crimes, why many police officers participated in the violent attacks
on the 1913
women’s suffrage parade in Washington, why these public servants have too
often taken a hostile stance toward fellow Americans. Yet without denying the
legacy and ongoing presence of those issues, I would nonetheless say that they
stand clearly outside the official role and mandate (“To protect
and to serve”) of police and law enforcement forces. Just as we can
recognize (for example) that many judges (past and present) have been motivated
by prejudice without dismissing the importance of courts and laws, so too can
we separate these despicable police officers from the institution’s important civic
role.
But even within
that official civic role, there is a wide spectrum of how police officers can approach
their job, and more exactly how they approach the civilians whose protection comprises
the most important part of that job. For some officers, it seems that those
civilians, and particularly civilians from minority and disenfranchised
communities, are by default suspicious, potential adversaries who must be
treated as such. It was that attitude, for example, which led New York City
police officers to treat the five young African American men known as the
Central Park Five as criminals from the outset, as illustrated with such
frustrating potency by the interrogation
sequences in Ava DuVernay’s amazing When They See Us. And
just as frustratingly (and from what I can tell far too typically when it comes
to women
who report sexual assaults), it’s that attitude which quickly comes to
dominate the interactions
between Kaitlyn Dever’s Marie Adler, Unbelievable’s
first rape victim, and the two detectives (Eric Lange’s Parker and Bill
Fagerbakke’s Pruitt) investigating her assault. To Parker’s credit (SPOILERS in
this sentence), he does eventually recognize his own mistakes and failures,
even calling himself one of those bad cops who “we should get rid of.” But by
that time their hostile treatment of a victim has done a great deal of
permanent damage.
As I wrote
yesterday, such damage is especially ironic and tragic when it is done to a
rape victim in the aftermath of her assault, by the people tasked with not only
bringing justice for that crime but also and just as importantly compassion for
her ordeal. And in Unbelievable’s
other two protagonists, Merritt
Wever’s Detective Karen Duvall and Toni Collette’s Detective
Grace Rasmussen, we see just how much can change when the police approach
victims and civilians with that combination of goals in mind. The show
establishes that difference with particular power in Duvall’s very first
encounter with a rape victim, Danielle Macdonald’s Amber.
In every choice and detail in that stunning scene, Duvall embodies a police
officer determined to solve a crime yet just as determined (perhaps even more so
in this initial encounter with a traumatized victim) to do whatever she can to
help Amber in this devastating and crucial moment in her life. Duvall and Rasmussen
are portrayed as real people, not idealized heroes—but real people who
illustrate all that’s possible, for individuals and for our society as a whole,
when the police are at their best.
Next
UnbelievableStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post and show? Other TV shows you’d recommend and analyze?
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