The Bluestocking, vol 227
The Phantom of Heilbronn
Happy Friday!
A note for new readers: unlike last week, most editions don’t have a long piece by me—subscribe to The Atlantic for that—but excerpts and discussion of two or three articles I’ve found interesting that week, plus some more random links.
However, this week is weird because I’ve seen two different artworks which are smart and thought-provoking.
Helen
The Queen of Crime-Solving (Guardian)
Early one morning in June 1982, a smartly dressed man was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in central London. The dead man was carrying two Patek Philippe watches, one on his wrist and one in his top jacket pocket, both of which had stopped. The pockets and seams of his suit trousers contained 5kg of bricks and rubble. He was also carrying a forged Italian passport and about £10,000 in cash. The next day, police in Rome confirmed the man’s identity. His name was Roberto Calvi and he was the chair of an Italian bank with close ties to the Vatican. Calvi had been missing for at least six days. He was due to appear in an Italian court the next week to appeal against a conviction for illegally transferring several billion lira out of the country. The press called him “God’s Banker”.
Calvi’s death was recorded as a suicide, but his family believed he had been murdered, possibly by the mafia. In 1991, almost 10 years after Calvi’s body was found, the family hired Kroll, a private detective company, to carry out a new investigation into his death. To review the evidence, Kroll in turn hired a forensic scientist named Angela Gallop.
Not to be all duelling banjos, but I would argue that forensic anatomist Sue Black—whom I profiled in 2016—is the queen of crime-solving. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this profile of Angela Gallop, which also covers the privatisation of forensic work, and the severe cuts the field has endured since 2010.
One thing it doesn’t go into—and I mentioned only briefly in my Sue Black profile—is how experimental and high risk some of modern forensics work is. You might have heard about the incident where DNA from a suspected female serial killer, The Phantom of Heilbronn, kept turning up at crime scenes, before it turned out to be . . . a woman at the factory that made the cotton swabs. I also wrote about the poor police officer who came up as a match on a partial fingerprint at a crime scene she hadn’t attended, and was pursued tenaciously . . . until it was eventually conceded that the match was mere coincidence, even though the chances of that were supposed to be infinitesimally small.
That’s why I am concerned by the collision between forensics methods which are prone to misinterpretation, or less conclusive than generally believed… and the kind of cutbacks required by shrinking budgets. As David Simon writes in Homicide, juries tend to treat DNA and other forensics as a slam-dunk, not least because of all the cop shows that imply it is.
Bluestocking recommends: The Morning Show (Apple TV). The premise here is that Mitch and Alex, the hosts of a popular morning show, have been America’s favourite on-screen couple for 15 years. That ends when Mitch is outed for multiple affairs with co-workers. This show does what drama does best: explores the theme (relationships with unequal power dynamics) in multiple permutations. Perhaps its biggest success is with the character of Mitch, whom Steve Carrell manages to balance on the knife-edge of rich prickdom without making him completely unsympathetic—helped by the generous amount of hypocrisy in those who once enabled his behaviour and now denounce it.
Talking of which, Jennifer Aniston is excellent as his “charming narcissist” co-host. (Those are the words of Jack Davenport, playing Alex’s husband exactly as he once played Steve from Coupling, so a part of your brain is always going: “you left Susan for this cow??”)
PS. The infallible voice of Sophie Gilbert informs me that season 2 veers wildly off into “a camp masterpiece”, so let’s pretend it was cancelled at the end of season 1.
Bluestocking Recommends II: To Kill A Mockingbird, Gielgud Theatre, London
This didn’t open officially until yesterday, but since I knew I wanted to see it, I booked a ticket for Tuesday’s preview, when it was cheaper. (There are also on-the-day Rush tickets for £15 if you don’t want to pawn your heirlooms). Spoilers ahead, but come on, this book has been on the GCSE syllabus since AD 34.
Bad points first. The scenery is static and overbearing. Broadway, where this production originated, is a long way behind British and particularly European theatre in its assumptions about how much stuff you need to wheel on and off stage so people know the scene is taking place on a porch. Some of the Southern accents are yee-haw golly-gee bad. And some of Aaron Sorkin’s signature moves have by now calcified into flaws. While it’s cathartic to watch Atticus telling Bob Ewell how much better he is as a human being, it is also a bit self-congratulatory. If you’ve seen the Leviticus scene in The West Wing you’ll know the vibe.
But. . . but. Sorkin has captured everything I loved about the original book, while sensitively updating it. Calpurnia, the Finches’ black maid, is given more space to question Atticus’s insistence that the kids respect everyone, even murderous racists: She tells him to think about who he’s disrespecting by doing that. Get inside someone else’s skin and crawl around in it? Why should she want to do that in a society which won’t even let her in the church when Mrs Finch is being buried? Why doesn’t anyone feel the need to get inside her skin and crawl around in it? It’s a well-made point about the myopia of the benevolent patrician.
I wonder if this Atticus revisionism was influenced by this Malcolm Gladwell piece from 2009, which argues that Southern liberals were wrong to indulge the idea that their white supremacist neighbours were decent but misguided—and that their benign paternalism needed to be supplanted by the harder edge of the civil rights movement for true racial progress to occur.
Here is Gladwell, for instance, on the scene where the unexpected arrival of Jem and Scout at the town jail prevents Tom Robinson being lynched—Scout recognises the local farmer Walter Cunningham among the mob as the man underneath the hood, which shames him out of going through with it. Atticus then gives a homily to his daughter on the need for empathy. “[Walter] Cunningham, Finch tells his daughter, is ‘basically a good man,’ who ‘just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.’ Blind spots? As the legal scholar Monroe Freedman has written, ‘It just happens that Cunningham’s blind spot (along with the rest of us?) is a homicidal hatred of black people.’”
The other updatings are equally thoughtful. The character of Dill—based on Harper Lee’s IRL friend Truman Capote—is more obviously proto-gay, which makes it heart-rending when his mum turns up and tells him to stop being so damn much. That bolsters the book’s existing theme of what you lose when you leave childhood—how Jem must learn about violence and “being a man”, while Scout resists being forced out of dungarees and into pretty, limiting dresses. (See kids, generations of girls before you also thought femininity was bullshit too!)
One update I’m less sure about is playing down the coding of the Ewells as “white trash.” They’re not visibly dirty and ragged here, although there are still references to them living at the dump. The Music Man did something similar with its wrong-side-of-the-tracks suitor for the mayor’s daughter and I was similarly baffled, not least because Sorkin makes the pivotal moment of Tom Robinson’s trial when Tom says that he chopped wood and did chores for Mayella Ewell “because he felt sorry for her.”
This is the racial transgression that Maycomb County’s jurors cannot forgive—not violating a white woman, but pitying her. As Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash explains, the existence of slavery (and then segregation) also propped up the class system. The implicit promise in the American South to its dirt-poor whites that no matter how disrespected they were, they would always be able to look down on Negroes. The repression of women historically offered the same salve to low-status men.
Mayella Ewell is therefore one of the most absorbing characters in literature. One of the feelings you get most clearly from reading about lynchings and the KKK was that they were designed to enforce compliance through terror—nowhere is safe when the law won’t protect you, and life is a nightmare with no relief. (Both Lovecraft Country and the Watchmen TV series explore this well). However, that is also a description of living with a domestic abuser, and we know Bob Ewell both beats and rapes his daughter. I judge people’s character by how much they can hold in their mind that Mayella Ewell is both victim and perpetrator. (I wrote about that in relation to the Karen discourse here.)
That Gladwell piece also cites a legal scholar, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, who has studied the 288 black men accused of raping white women in Virginia between 1900 and 1960: “‘White men did not always automatically leap to the defense of white women,’ Dorr writes. ‘Some white men reluctantly sided with black men against white women whose class or sexual history they found suspect. Sometimes whites trusted the word of black men whose families they had known for generations over the sworn testimony of white women whose backgrounds were unknown or (even worse) known and despised. White women retained their status as innocent victim only as long as they followed the dictates of middle-class morality.’”
Gladwell adds: “Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.”
This production walks the Mayella Line adroitly, with Atticus instructing the jury to feel sorry for her tomorrow—but not today, when a man’s life hangs in the balance.
Honestly, though, one of the joys of To Kill A Mockingbird is that every character in the book has something to add: Link Deas, the “town drunk” who is suspiciously nice to his black workers; morphine-addicted Mrs DuBose (treated more harshly here than in the novel, on the basis she was a racist even before she was a smackhead); Walter Cunningham, the proud but poor farmer who pays Atticus in hickory nuts before putting on the white hood.
And, of course, Boo Radley. He is still as mysterious a figure to me as ever. Is he an agoraphobe? Mentally ill? Autistic? Or what we would now call special needs—a childlike man unable to deal with the world? I love how Lee refuses to resolve his mystery completely, by telling the story through Scout’s childish eyes, and this production makes him equally unknowable.
I imagine some people don’t like To Kill A Mockingbird because it’s too neat, too precision-engineered. I would also normally revolt against any play where a character says the name of the play in the play—plus it is objectively funny that Aaron Sorkin has leaned into making the white dude the main character. But the story’s ambivalence and contradictions save it from banality: it argues the lynch mob is appalling, but ends with another group of white men dispensing with the law and deciding what constitutes justice among themselves.
I loved this. Pawn your cat, buy a ticket.
Quick Links
“It seems to me that the Iranian Government have been more effective than arguably they should have been in re-framing the story about the willingness of the UK to repay a historic debt, which rather detracts from the more important fact, namely that the Iranian Government takes hostages as matter of policy, that this is reprehensible, and that in all the discussion about Nazanin’s release, they have not fully been held to account for this. ” Jamie Angus of BBC News reflects on the Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe story (LinkedIn).
Freddie deBoer on self-diagnosis and mental illness as an identity.
“Never before have I written a story with which my male peers were so eager to help. They sent tweets, they sent podcasts, they proposed merch. “I really want to make one of those ’90s pop-star shirts for tooze,” one enterprising friend texted, along with a Backstreet Boys Etsy link. Maybe this is what Tooze feels like all the time, I thought — carried along by great gusts of boyish enthusiasm, lavished with informative chats.” The Cult of Adam Tooze. I enjoyed the casual mention of his house in the Bahamas. (New York Magazine)
Great work by Sirin Kale on the story of a man who internet-stalked at least 62 women. The police just don’t have a good strategy on men who commit chronic, multi-victim crimes like stalking and flashing (or the will to execute it).
From the postbag: there were some great responses to last week’s issue on “orphan takes”. Phil pointed out perhaps the greatest orphan take of our time: ugh, men who hate the idea of a female Doctor Who just need to get over it. (What men?)
James adds: “One slight extra part of it: The phenomenon that, in the course of the furore around an Orphan take the originally exaggerated offence actually occurs.”
Emma says: “I just googled to make sure you hadn't made up Susan Hall (which TBF would have been very funny and I wonder how many of us would have spotted it?)”
I wish I had done this.
See you next time!