In
1991 Prime Suspect was broadcast on British television to
great critical and public acclaim. The production received numerous
awards for its writer Lynda La Plante and star Helen Mirren, including
a rather controversial BAFTA Award for Best Drama Serial. Prime
Suspect's importance to the development of the police drama
series as a genre in Britain is great. By installing a woman as
the head of a murder squad, Prime Suspect broke new ground
in terms of both gender and the authenticity in the portrayal of
the internal dynamics of the police as an organisation.
Almost
six years earlier, La Plante had brought to the television audience
the formidable Dolly Rawlins as the single-minded leader of a group
of disparate but gutsy women criminals in her successful television
crime drama Widows. With Prime Suspect and the creation of
DCI Jane Tennison, La Plante continued to elaborate her predilection
for problematic heroines, but this time, her central character is
not a criminal but a woman both shaped and defined by her role as
an officer of the law.
By being positioned as the head of a murder squad hunting for a
sadistic serial killer, Tennison transcends many of the traditions
of the British police series. It is interesting to note that La
Plante did not put Tennison forward primarily as a woman police
officer who does her job the feminine way. In terms of the British
police series, Tennison's female predecessors such as Kate Longton
(Juliet Bravo) and Maggie Forbes (The Gentle Touch),
had been deliberately represented as bringing the nurturing and
compassionate aspects associated with femininity to the role of
senior police officer. In fact, it would be true to say that central
to programmes such as Juliet Bravo, The Gentle Touch and,
indeed, the American police series Cagney and Lacey, was
the exploration of the contradictions inherent between the institutionalised
masculinity of the police and the presence of femininity. The dramatic
resolution, however, was usually to endorse the compassionate compromise
made by the female characters between being a good police officer
and being a "real" woman. The fascination of Tennison as a character
was the powerful and compelling focus on the internal and external
confrontations and contradictions faced by a leading female character
who was in most circumstances a police officer first and a woman
second.
It is, in fact, the Tennison character, and Mirren's performance
of her, that unify and act as the reference for the six programmes
in the series. And although La Plante has only written Prime
Suspect/s I and III, her creation of Tennison, her exacting
original script, and Mirren's own compelling performance, have generated
a successful and repeatable legacy and framework.
Symptomatically,
the subtext for each individual drama in the series has some kind
of social issue as its basis and could be read as in order as: sexism,
racism, homosexuality/young male prostitution, the results of physical
abuse in childhood, class, and institutional conformity in the police.
Equally symptomatically, it could be noticed that each drama contains
a character who has a particular investment in the chosen subtext--e.g.
one of the officers is black, in the next drama, one is gay, in
the next, one has suffered childhood abuse, and so on. In a rather
obvious, sometimes crude manner, this device has been used to situate
and contextualise the tensions of the internal police dynamics within
those of the larger society. It is our fascination with Tennison
that spawns a more integrated and sophisticated involvement with
the drama. Because of Tennison's place in the text, the issues of
gender in the police force is never far away, as evidenced by the
fact that masculinity and male relationships are also always under
inspection.
Above
all, no matter the focus of a case on a particular social problem,
it is the institutionalised performance of masculinity and femininity
within the police force which dictates the often considerable dramatic
tension. In Tennison's pursuit of serial killer George Marlowe in
Prime Suspect I, for example, not only must she prove she
is an exceptional detective and win the support of her male colleagues,
but the narrative is shot through with her compulsive need to succeed
in her job at any cost. Her obsession with her police career even
becomes tinged with perversity when the interrogation sessions between
Tennison and Marlowe are used to generate a fake, yet compelling,
sexual tension. The fact that she will get out of bed at night to
interview a serial killer but will not make time to see to the needs
of the man in her life heightens the idea of perversity and obsession.
In
a culture still guided by the binary divisions of active masculinity
and passive femininity, the fact that Tennison is a woman means
that her sexuality and sexual practices are subject to much more
dramatic scrutiny than if she were a man. Tennison does not, however,
stray much from the sexual conduct expected from the male officer
in the television police genre. As Geoffrey Hurd explains "the main
characters.... are either divorced, separated, widowed or unmarried,
a trail of broken and unmade relationships presented as a direct
result of the pressures and demands of police work".
The
focus on sexuality, however, is dramatically changed by Tennison's
pregnancy in Prime Suspect III and her consequent abortion
in Prime Suspect IV. This moment marks the watershed in her
personal and career conflict and it is interesting that the following
programmes (not written by La Plante) then seem to devote themselves
to saving Tennison's soul. No moral judgement is made about the
abortion; in fact, it is not even discussed. The imperative is clearly
to establish Tennison's reputation and stature within the police
(she is promoted to the rank of superintendent) and to re-establish
her and contain what femininity remains within a heterosexual relationship
with a professional equal, the psychologist played by Stuart Wilson.
In
Prime Suspect VI, an interesting intertextual exercise is
carried out when the Marlowe case is re-opened, with the investigation
now centred on Tennison's own police practices. Apart from one long-standing
loyal male colleague, the male ranks are again seen to close in
the face of this unsympathetic woman who remains insistent on her
infallibility and methodical detection. Her ultimate triumph in
the case casts her in a new but recognisable mould, that of maverick
cop, where gender is even less of an issue.
-Ros
Jennings
Ansen,
David. "The Prime of Helen Mirren." Newsweek (New York),
16 May 1994.
Carter,
Bill. "A British Mini-series with Many Lives." The New York Times,
2 May 1994.
Dugdale,
John. "Intruder in a Man's World." New Statesman and Society
(London), 11 December 1992.
Rennert,
Amy, editor. Helen Mirren: Prime Suspect: A Celebration.
San Francisco, California: KQED Books, 1995.
