The Fall: authority that nobody in the room argues with

Television has a standard shape for a woman in charge of an investigation, and the shape is a struggle. She arrives, the room resents her, and the case runs alongside the slower business of her being accepted. Prime Suspect set that template in 1991 and a great deal of what followed worked inside it.

The Fall, created and written by Allan Cubitt and broadcast on BBC Two across three series between 2013 and 2016, declines the template in its first ten minutes. Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, played by Gillian Anderson, is seconded from the Metropolitan Police to review a case in Belfast, and nobody in the building has anything to say about it.

An authority nobody argues with

The absence of friction is the show’s most deliberate structural choice and the one most often missed. Gibson gives instructions and they are carried out. She is deferred to in briefings. Her competence is assumed by everyone including the people who dislike her, and the series never stages the scene in which a man learns to respect her.

Removing that scene has a specific consequence. If a character has to earn her position on screen, the position is provisional and the audience is invited to assess whether she has managed it. If she simply holds it, the assessment never opens, and everything the character does is read as the exercise of a settled fact rather than as evidence in an ongoing case.

This is authority of the kind described on this site in the office: institutional rather than personal, resting on a rank and a chain of command that exist outside the frame, so the character does not have to keep asserting it. Anderson plays her accordingly, with almost no volume and very little movement, which is the register that arrangement makes available.

The grammar answer

The series gives that authority a sexual dimension in the first episode, when Gibson approaches a junior officer outside the station, tells him her hotel room number, and walks away. He comes. The script of the pick-up is inverted at every step: she chooses, she sets the terms, and she treats the result as concluded.

Two episodes later the officer has been killed and a senior colleague puts it to her that she slept with a married man who has left a widow. Her answer takes the objection apart as a sentence rather than as a moral question, pointing out that the same act is unremarkable when the man is the subject of the verb and uncomfortable when the woman is, and asking him to notice which version he is having difficulty with. It is the most quoted moment in the series and it is quoted because it is diagnostic rather than defensive.

Cubitt has written publicly about the intention behind it, arguing that women’s sexuality is generally permitted only a narrow expression and that Gibson insists on an autonomous one. Anderson has said something adjacent about the costume, that Gibson is not dressing like a man and not using clothes to obtain anything, but dressing for herself. Both statements are on the record and both describe a character built to be unavailable for interpretation by the people around her.

A killer who is also a picture-maker

The other half of the series is a man who arranges and records what he does. Spector, played by Jamie Dornan, selects women, watches them for weeks, and positions their bodies afterwards. He keeps materials. In the second series a recording he has made addresses the person watching it directly and asks what they think they are doing there.

That is an unusually blunt piece of construction and it tells you what the show believes it is about. Spector kills, and he also composes, and the series keeps returning to the difference between the way he arranges a scene and the way the investigation records it afterwards. The same body is being framed twice, for opposite purposes, and both processes end in a picture.

The direct address in the recording does to the viewer what the printed tradition does with a returned look, examined here in looking at the camera. It closes the window. The audience stops being concealed and gets named, and whatever comfort there was in watching has to be re-examined on the spot.

The charge, and the answer

The series was accused of misogyny from its first run, by named critics in the national press, and the accusations were specific. One argued that it dressed the brutalisation of women in production values. Another called it an extended rape fantasy. A performer campaigning on the subject named it as violence against women used as entertainment.

Cubitt answered in print in 2013. His argument was that sexual violence is an exercise of power rather than of desire, a position he attributed to feminist analysis of rape, and that the drama returns to it repeatedly through Gibson. He also said he had wanted neither to sensationalise the material nor to sanitise it. Anderson defended the scripts as unsensational and grounded in the reality of the crimes.

Neither side of this has won, and the honest position is that both are describing the same footage.

The editing problem

The most useful academic criticism of the series is formal rather than thematic. Writing on the show has pointed out that Cubitt intercuts Gibson’s consensual encounter with Spector washing and arranging a victim, so that two entirely different events are placed in the same rhythm, and that the cutting itself proposes a correspondence the script would reject.

The counter-reading, also published, notes what the camera does with the two women’s bodies. Gibson remains clothed and in control of the frame; the victims are undressed and posed. On that account the series redirects the gaze rather than surrendering to it, and the contrast is the argument.

Both readings survive a rewatch, which is unusual and is probably the most interesting thing about the series. The 1940s crime cycle discussed in the femme fatale in film noir also supported opposite readings, and for a similar reason: the images do one thing and the structure around them does another. Forty years and a great deal of theory later, a drama built explicitly to answer that problem produced the same split.