(Note: In a recent Last Week Tonight, John
Oliver related how the flaws in Law and Order have reflected on how the
world views policing and the fallacies within them. I will do the best I can not
to reiterate his original argument, which I couldn’t find a flaw in.)
For a series that was on the
air for twenty years in its original run, it’s kind of surprising in retrospect
that the original Law and Order had so few serial killers. While I can’t
state this with any certainly, I think the number of episodes averaged out to
barely one per season and that’s mainly because the series doubled down on them
in the last ten years. Perhaps Wolf and his writers were sticking somewhat
close to reality when the acknowledged that serial killers wasn’t as big a
problem as the media seemed to think.
I only recall two during
the first four years – Michael Moriarty’s time on the series before he was replaced
by Sam Waterston. ‘Vengeance’ actually demonstrates how measured a tone the
series took in its early year – there were three killings of young women, the
detectives had to work to find the connection, the lengthy interrogation of the
murderer was eventually tossed out by the killer’s clever attorney and when
asked to arrange things so that the killer might face the death penalty in another
state (New York didn’t bring the death penalty back until 1995) Ben Stone (Moriarty)
refused to go along with it because he believed that it wasn’t the state’s job
to kill people. For the record, Stone was as willing to push the boundaries of
the law as far as he could but compared to all his fellow prosecutors he was ‘soft
on crime’.
Much of the cases dealing
with serial killers fundamentally were more about punishment than anything else
and could often be shown as flaws in the law. In ‘Trophy’, an arrest of a man
who has killed two young boys is revealed not someone copying a former killer, someone Jack McCoy (Waterston) put away five
years earlier, but the actual killer. Eventually
we learn that McCoy’s former assistant – and former lover – withheld exculpatory
evidence with the understanding that’s how Jack did business. The attorney is
prosecuted and at no time does Jack express any remorse – or responsibility for
what transpired. There are no consequences for him either, and McCoy over the
next decade becomes the prime example of a prosecutor who is willing to do
anything to the law to get his man. (I’ve gone over some of these examples
before, so I won’t repeat myself here unless it’s pertinent.)
And even with these
monsters, none of the detectives or attorneys treated them as if they were any worse
than the other killers they were tracking down. The same can not be said of Law
and Order: SVU. However, before I go into its flaws, I have to make a critical
argument with the entire concept of the spin-off.
First of all, and I don’t
think this needs to be said, it’s not like the original Law and Order had
no rapes or sexual assault cases in its first decade. Hell, there were
more of them then serial killers. And I have to tell, the approach the series
took was far more realistic than the spinoff ever did. By which I mean, these
mostly male detectives and attorneys barely believe any of the accusations.
In ‘Out of the Half-Light’,
an African-American teenager accuses white cops of raping her. The detectives
and attorneys eventually find out this is the phony claim of an Al Sharpton
like politician who wants to use the girl to expose the rot in the police
department. In ‘The Violence of Summer’, Stone does not believe that two criminals (one
a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman) are responsible for the rape and assault
of a reporter, whose sex life disgusts him. This trend of male detectives and attorneys
not believing female victims goes on throughout the first decade, but in many
ways the best example of this is ‘Helpless’ in Season 3.
Dr. Olivet (Carolyn McCormick)
is sexually assaulted by her gynecologist. When she goes to Logan and Ceretta
(Chris Noth and the late Paul Sorvino) they are given some leeway to investigate,
but even knowing the victim makes the brass reluctant to pursue - it’s just not enough of a crime. Eventually,
they discover a pattern of molestation but when the cops decide not to pursue
it, Olivet takes measures in to her own hands, planning to record his next
assault. Instead, she is anesthetized
and raped. Even after this the detectives bemoan her common sense (“She’s a PhD!”
Ceretta says) and its only after Stone is convinced by Ceretta – not Olivet –
that he prosecutes. The doctors’ attorney (Tovah Feldshuh in the first of what
would be series of brilliant guest appearances) has no problem making Olivet’s
experience into a voluntary encounter, no matter what the evidence might
suggest. The doctor is convicted, but the judge throws out the verdict saying
it’s based on ‘emotion, not evidence.”
The doctor is finally
convicted – and he is a monster. Eventually its revealed that he has raped or
molested nearly sixty women over the years. But it is very telling that as soon
as the case is done, everyone else except Olivet is allowed to move on. In an
episode not long after called ‘Point of View’, a woman accused of killing a man
she says was threatening to rape her convinces Olivet that she was justified.
Stone decides not to use her, but the defense does. Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) usually restrained
says that they have to go after Olivet’s credibility, which means using her
past rape as a bias against her being impartial. Ben hesitates about doing
this, saying they need to tell her, but acquiesces and has no problem raking
Olivet over the coals to win. The fact that the so-called victim is lying does
not change the fact that the male prosecutor wanted to use a sexual assault to
attack a woman’s credibility. Nor was it something that would be forgotten with
time: more than fifteen years in a case where Olivet was again testifying for
the defense, Jack was more than willing to attack her credibility not just by
using her previous assault but her past sexual history.
So from the beginning the
opening narrative at the beginning of every episode of Law and Order: SVU - “sexually based offenses are considered
especially heinous’ - is a lie that the
original series had spent the better part of nine years demonstrating. So the
question now becomes: why was SVU created at all, other than to express
the worst elements in humanity?
To explain, a little
history. Way back in 1999, when SVU began Wolf and his writers were
considering the show to be more character driven than the original. In the
first season we learned far more about the characters than we ever did anybody
in the original franchise. Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was the product of
a rape. Eliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni, told you we’d get back to him) was a
happily married father of four. Brian Cassidy (Dean Winters, who got out when
the getting was good) was a rookie detective still trying to figure out the ins
and outs of sexual deviancy: at one point, we opened an episode with him and
Olivia in bed together.
The problem is, Wolf was never
good at character development. He’d tried a version of it in the eighth
season of Law and Order and it was so haphazard and scattershot that he
basically abandoned it after that. He would end up doing the same at the
beginning of Season 2, introducing a female prosecutor (there had been no trials
in the first season) and basically changing the format to a far closer version
of what had made the original a smash. You can’t deny it was effective but look
at what the show is about.
Because let’s not kid
ourselves: SVU is all about brutality and the basest instinct of
humanity in every form. At its core, the show is about violence towards women
and every possible perversion that can happen to them. Occasionally they will
throw in abuse of children, and every so often they’ll deal with violation of a
man, but if you’re an actress and you have a guest shot on Law and Order:
SVU, the best case scenario is that you’ve been brutally raped by a
powerful man and nobody but the detectives believe you, even though they are
picking apart of every element of your story when you’re not in the room or
even when you are. If you’re dead, you might get more respect but only if there
are a lot of other previous victims. (In all honesty, the prostitutes on Deadwood
got more respect than any of the ones we’ve ever seen on SVU. That’s
sad.)
And if you are a monster,
if you’ve raped and killed multiple women – or honestly, even if they merely think
you have – well, God help you if you end up in their interrogation room. Because
it’s only a matter of minutes before Elliot Stabler is beating you to a pulp
and is pulled off by Benson after a minute or two.
I don’t think its entirely
a coincidence that the level of police violence in SVU (and Chicago PD) arose with the arrival
of the War on Terror. If it were just a case of ends justifying the means – a questionable
concept that the flagship series was at least willing to consider – than it
would be bad enough. But honestly, the
fact that Stabler got away with what he did for so long speaks to a level of
misogyny within the department.
In the first season finale,
the detectives all met with a department shrink (Audra McDonald). All the
detectives had flash signs, but none more troubling than Stabler, who told the
doctor with no hesitation how much he wanted to track down some paroled felons
and kill them. At the end of the episode, the cliffhanger occurred when the
shrink said one of the detectives needed to leave the department. The obvious
selection was Stabler but it turned out being Monique Jefferies (Michelle Hurd,
who went on to have a superb career in television) who had mentioned that she
had seen someone she knew was a sex offender at a bar – and went home with him.
To be clear: a detective who
fantasized about killing offenders and criminals was not only allowed to stay
at his job, but his lieutenant (Dann Florek) went before the board and argued
that his desire was acceptable behavior given the nature of the criminals. But
when it came to a female detective who had a questionable sex life, that
same lieutenant transferred it out,
making the argument that this was a slow motion method of ‘eating her
gun’. No one at the time or even years after the fact even seems to have
blinked at this blatant sexism. I noticed the unfairness of it at the time and
was one of the reasons I stopped watching the series after Season 2.
I think the blatant sexism
in the cast of SVU is another argument about the treatment of women in general.
Yes, I know Mariska Hargitay has been there for twenty four years and is now
running the squad. Would it shock you to know that from the departure of Hurd
in early season 2, there were no female detectives on the series until Kelli
Giddish joined the cast in 2007 – and
remains to date, the only one. The
message is pretty clear. To understand crimes primarily against woman, you must
be a man.
This is a message that
recurs throughout much of the bits and pieces of the series first ten seasons
(I’m going to let that stand as a big enough sample size) in addition to prosecution.
Stephanie March and Diane Neal alternated as prosecutors the first decade of
the shows run, and they were considered so interchangeable that when Neal left
March ended up replacing her, even though her character had supposedly left New
York to go in witness protection. (Wolf’s never sweated the details about these
things.) Other prosecutors would burn out very quickly, even when played by
such exceptional talents as Christine Lahti, Debra Messing or Sharon Stone. The
job is currently being held by Rafael Barba. Very clear: the only people who
handle crimes against women effectively must have a penis. Hargitay has held
her job more because she’s considered ‘one of the boys’ than her real
accomplishments.
This is the problem that
has been at the core of SVU since its foundation, and why it is the
worst violator of the idea of the predator. It’s not just that it glorifies
brutality, both against the victims and the perpetrator, its that it
fundamentally sees no reason to change and argues that it never has too. The
killers are monsters, we do get that by now, but they are given more time and
energy on the series than the victims themselves. That is the lie that is in
the title: the victims have never been special to the writers that are supposed
to be telling their story.
Now some of you may think
that I have spent so much time dwelling on Law and Order: SVU that this
is strictly on critique on this series alone.
The thing is, if you spend enough time among the procedurals – such as Criminal
Minds, Bones, FBI et all – you notice that there is no difference between
them in this regard. The villains are given exponentially more time than they are
worthy of and the heroes do whatever is necessary to catch them. Only the
methods differed from show to show, and often that has more to do with the
network or producer than the general opinion of serial killers. The victims – and the ones left behind – are irrelevant
to the process. Of course, anyone who has spent time in Peak TV knows the sole
exception, and I will deal with him and the series he was the subject of when I
end this series of articles.
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