Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation - British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century

This analysis of the community and its institutions in Broadchurch has shown that the series makes full use of the range of traditional characters, motifs, and plot elements of crime drama and crime fiction in order to dramatise the process of change the town is facing. The institutions whose representation has been explored previously, i.e. the types of institutions and the ways in which they become involved in the plot, are part of these conventions. In the following, I will analyse more specifically how the crimes themselves, the murderers, and the constellation, self-conception, and behaviour of the investigating officers emphasise and negotiate social change. Throughout the first series, the media and the police point out again and again how the murder “may have changed [the] town forever (S1/E5, 00:03), how it may “run a crack through the community” (S1/E8, 00:33), and that the “investigation has left its mark on a close-knit town” (S1/E8, 00:37). In fact, the crime and investigation are a means to bring to light cracks and marks that are already in place – or, as both the detectives and the townspeople fear, the crimes themselves might be manifestations of a general cultural coarsening and brutalisation, a sign that traditional values and moral guidelines of social behaviour are on the wane.

Visually, the series often uses a technique that seems to highlight the opposition between the crimes and the setting, presenting beautiful and serene views of nature, which in their purity and calm create an eerie contrast to the crimes that have been committed there. In the first series, these are mainly the cliffs, the beach and the sea; in the third one, the well-kept lawns and greenery of Axehampton House make it hard to believe that Trish should have been raped in this place.1 The camera work makes the most of this contrast, at one point slowly moving away from the crime scene until the humans are no longer visible and all that remains is the impression of green nature – and, of course, the knowledge of what has happened there, and the voice of Alec calling the forensics team (S3/E1, 00:28). In the case of Axehampton House, the series plays with further contrasts beside this first one of natural beauty and human depravation: secondly, there is also an element of class, as the manor house represents a refined, highly cultured social sphere whose ideals of good manners and restraint do not coincide with the violence of rape. This sphere is long gone, as the series emphasises – the ‘lord of the manor’ rents out the house for parties, and all that is left of the old upper-class lifestyle are his childhood memories and some old cricket bats.2 Thirdly, Axehampton house also introduces intertextual associations with ‘golden age’ crime fiction, in which crime often penetrates the splendid world of the country house (see Knight 78). The way in which the manor house is presented as a crime scene in Broadchurch can be seen as an ironic nod towards this classic tradition, indicating that times have indeed changed both for manor houses and for crime fiction.3 That the crime in question is not murder, but rape, is highly significant in this context, since the classic tradition would never have presented a sexual assault as the central crime; the highly aestheticised, old-fashioned, and somatophobic genre of crime fiction needed its body gone and safely buried.

Broadchurch , too, only comes up with this – in the classic tradition of the whodunit4 – rather atypical type of crime in the third series, which is part of a general progression within the series towards a more pressing sense of social change. The crime in the first series is of a far more traditional kind: it is murder, and the murderer is part of the victim’s closest circle of family, neighbours, and friends. Danny is the friend of Joe’s son Tom, and Joe and Danny have developed a close relationship by themselves, a purely platonic one, as Joe insists. He kills Danny on impulse when the boy wants to end their secret meetings and confronts him with the accusation that he, Joe, wants a more physical relationship. All of this is shown in retrospect with the information “59 days earlier” while Joe is confessing the murder to Alec (S1/E8, 00:13), a technique that suggests that his confession is true. The killing escapes general categories, both for the murderer himself – “If I can’t understand it, why should you?” (S1/E8, 00:23) – and also for Ellie in her dual role as both detective and wife of the killer. When she asks Alec, “Is he a paedophile?”, he helplessly and unhelpfully replies: “Why do you need a category?” (S1/E8, 00:43) and adds: “I don’t have these answers. I don’t. People are unknowable.” (S1/E8, 00:44) Joe claims that it was essentially a positive bond that he shared with Danny: “I only ever cared for him.” (S1/E8, 00:40) It is a puzzling crime full of contrasts: before his confession to the murder, Joe is presented throughout as a nice person, well integrated, caring, and loving, and the basis for the crime was a sense of love. However, there are, of course, sexual implications and suggestions at the psychological manipulation of a child. Besides, Joe brutally strangles the boy, professionally hides every trace, and successfully keeps up a façade of innocence for weeks. All of these actions add sober calculation and rationality to the emotion and spontaneity of the crime.

Mark Lawson perceives this as a lack of “psychological plausibility”, the “one big flaw” in Broadchurch, both in series one and three, and he ascribes it to the conventions of crime fiction, in which “the eventual villain often has to be someone whose means and motives have been least clearly shown to the viewer”. This is certainly one way of accounting for the strangely incongruous solution of Joe as murderer. However, this incongruity also has a deeply disturbing effect, which may be its most important raison d’être : the crime comes from the very heart of the community and is driven by emotions and personal bonds. Because of this, it is a ‘communal’ murder in the sense of Tönnies’ ‘communal society’, and thus it is only fitting that the rational, modern, ‘abstract’ court in series two cannot administer justice as it befits the community; this is done by the townspeople themselves when they send Joe into exile (S2/E8, 00:42). Joe’s development during the second series, his detachment from his own deed and his refusal to take responsibility for his actions can be seen as representative of the threat that hangs over Broadchurch; the possible loss of its essential will and move towards the arbitrary will, which makes the individual decide on his or her most profitable course of action within a given situation, putting aside general moral principles and the interests of the community.

Following this progression, the crimes in series three are clearly ‘abstract’ ones: the rapist chooses his victims randomly, without any personal connection, simply based on opportunity. As Trish flatly remarks when she learns the truth: “So I was just unlucky.” (S3/E8, 00:40) The rapist, Leo, is addicted to pornography, which, as has already been delineated, is an epitome of abstract, impersonal relations. His methods are based on rational planning, calculation, and efficiency. His motivation – besides the sexual gratification – is a feeling of power and control (S3/E8, 00:36), i.e. personal gain without any sense of give and take or balancing as it is part of any power relation in a community, where an increase of power is always accompanied by an increase of responsibility for those less powerful. In Trish’s case, the situation is more complicated because the actual rapist is Michael Lucas, a sixteen-year-old who has been manipulated into the deed by Leo. Interestingly, Leo claims that he did it because he felt sorry for Michael (S3/E8, 00:35), which amounts to the travesty of a true personal bond, while in fact the deed seems to have been driven by the need for power and control, just as Leo’s direct rapes. Leo begins to take young Michael under his wings as a reaction to Michael’s being bullied by his stepfather Clive (Sebastian Armesto) (S3/E8 00:23). Respect for the elders and traditional hierarchies are a cornerstone of the communal society, and Leo represents a break with this society – he is officially a part of it and plays on the local football team, but in his attitudes and secret actions he defies its values completely. This moral change profoundly affects the detectives. Early in the case, Alec confesses: “Murder I can make sense of. But these sexual offences…” (S2/E2, 00:20), and when the case is solved, he tries to reassure himself and Ellie by claiming: “He is not what men are. He is an aberration.” (S3/E8, 00:37) This reassurance opens up the central questions rather than solving them: if Leo is an aberration, what is the norm, and is it really still the same? The recurring motif of pornography and its moral implications seem to point against it.