Neill Blomkamps’ commitment to the plight of the global 99% seems radical for a filmmaker given a block-buster budget and a chance to work with superstar Matt Damon.  The South African filmmaker’s District 9 (2009), his lower-budget break-out hit, used keen allegories, metaphors, and evocative sci-fi visuals to deliver a parable about barely post-apartheid social justice.  Elysium, as many reviewers have noted, vastly increases his budget and gives him too many toys.  As a result, what could have been an effective story about the haves and the have-nots, and a struggle for real democracy, gets buried under movie conventions that obscure the film’s more progressive heart.

In Blomkamp’s tale—which he wrote and directed—it’s 2154 in a desiccated, devastated Los Angeles.  Our hero, Max (a very appealing Damon), is now a man, though Blomkamp flashes back to his childhood as an orphan raised by nuns alongside a girl named Frey (Alice Braga, as an adult) who remains his love-interest throughout his life.  Max has a checkered past—he’s a reformed thief, trying to scratch out a living among the rest of his poor peers on Earth.  They live in the shadow of Elysium, a utopian, wealthy and privileged world, devoid of illness, that shimmers in the sky like beacon, always visible but impossible to reach.

Gangs of resisters try to penetrate its airspace in souped-up space shuttles full of illegal immigrants.  While the metaphor might be heavy-handed and obvious, it’s cheering to see immigration taken up as a theme in a sci-fi film with a political critique on its agenda.  Groups of desperate brown people leave the crashed shuttles when they reach Elysium, fleeing for the pods that will cure their diseases or looking for a life superior to the ones they left behind on Earth.  (Those pods look like present-day, cancer-promoting tanning booths, as it happens, a nice ironic touch.)

In the future LA, everyone speaks Spanish, as Blomkamp’s cast embodies the prediction that Latino/as will soon be the U.S. majority population.  On Elysium, most—though not all—of the rich and powerful people are white.  In a newly global space society populated mostly by Anglo-Europeans—signified by the fact that they speak French or British-accented English—President Patel is of South Asian extraction, but Delacourt, the villain (played stiffly by Jodi Foster, though her white, white hair and ice-blue eyes are wonderful), is a white woman determined to seize his power for herself.

The plot doesn’t matter much, but it’s fun to track Blomkamp’s analogies and allegories through his visuals and his casting choices.  The film’s racial politics dictate that the social justice gangs on Earth are comprised of men across race, including Mexican actor Diego Juna, who plays Max’s friend, Julio, and the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, who plays Spider, the head of the resistance.  Much of the dialogue is in Spanish with English sub-titles; the English is often spoken with an array of accents.

The film’s other villains are white men, most notably Sharlto Copley, who played the hero in District 9 and here is cast as Delacourt’s henchman, Kruger, a coldly vicious specimen who betrays her in his own bid for power.  Max, the “good” white man, is destined to become a martyr, supremely sacrificing himself to rewrite Elysium’s computer programming to ensure that his fellow dispossessed earthlings will become full citizens.

I can applaud a film that ends with democracy and health care for all, especially one in which the politics of racial difference are addressed so explicitly.  But as I watched Elysium, I couldn’t help but notice its terrible gender representations.  The lovely, compassionate Frey has grown up to be a doctor, whose path crosses once again with Max when he turns to her for medical attention.  Frey is a (single) mother with a child dying of leukemia; Frey’s only hope to save Mathilda (Emma Tremblay) is to get her to Elysium, where she can be treated by their magic, death-defying machines.  Through a set of plot contrivances, Frey and her daughter wind up with Max and Kruger in a shuttle rocketing toward the utopian planet.

But Frey’s presence is only useful to secure a typically virtuous, threatened womanhood in a film otherwise about male heroism.  Frey is beautiful and silent; on the shuttle, Kruger threatens her with rape, running his knife across her face (metaphorically if not literally) while Max/Damon watches in impotent horror (he’s tied up at the time).  Once they arrive on Elysium, Frey is burdened with her sick daughter’s body, racing through Elysium’s Get Smart-esque series of doors and passageways and richly green neighborhoods looking for a machine that will cure her.  The kid has more interesting dialogue than she does.  Of course, by the end, Max and the other men save both mother and child.  All Braga can do is sigh with grateful maternal relief and look gorgeous.

Foster’s Delacourt has little to do.  She’s just a whiter-than-white ice queen with a pan-Anglo/European accent that sounds ridiculous.  Her dirty dealings and illegal maneuverings—and her anti-immigrant racism—require her to die.  Her throat is cut, staining her gorgeous gray suit, and she bleeds out right in front of Frey, who can neither save her nor establish common gender-cause.

As an allegory, Elysium is fun, even smart, and visually compelling. Blomkamp has a sense of humor; those intimidating sliding doors that close on the villains while the heroes run through them all boast signs that say, “Caution:  Heavy Doors.”  Blomkamp conceives of 2154 LA as a mash-up of Johannesburg shanty-towns, Pennsylvania’s old steel towns, and a kind of Appalachian outpost, while Elysium is the ultimate in gated suburban communities.  Blomkamp creates a future Earth with gritty realism.  That his hero is a mortal man who’s filthy and bloody and sweaty even before he’s assigned to save the world makes Max empathetic and appealing.

But too many “car” chases (here, retrofitted space vehicles) and too much hand-to-armor combat between Max and Kruger detract from Blomkamp’s central theme.  And the film’s gender politics imply that even 150 years from now, women will still be prey to sexual violence and require good white men to save them.  Can’t we imagine something more progressive than that?

The Feminist Spectator

Blanche DuBois is an iconic character of the white male American imaginary, a damaged, even pathological figure, whose sexual and emotional pathos drives Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.  The canonical play has been revived on Broadway several times in the last few years, once with Cate Blanchett in a production originally mounted with her Sydney-based theatre company, and once by director Emily Mann with an all-African American cast.  Now, Woody Allen enters the Williams arena with his own film adaptation of the play, also starring Blanchett, in Blue Jasmine.

Reconceived as a cross between Streetcar and the Bernie Madoff story, the film chronicles the downfall of “Jasmine” (born Jeanette, the Blanche character), a comfortably clueless member of the 1% whose life begins to unravel when her husband, Hal (Alex Baldwin), is indicted for financial fraud of the Madoff magnitude.  Fleeing New York, where former friends now only pity her reduced circumstances, she settles in with her working-class sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), in San Francisco.  By Jasmine’s standards, Ginger’s apartment on Van Ness is tiny and cramped, but Jasmine proceeds to crowd it even more with her out-sized personality and expectations, disrupting numerous people’s lives with her illusions and narcissism.

Allen uses flashbacks to measure the distance Jasmine has fallen, and to gradually implicate her in her own misfortune.  From a millionaire’s life in New York to a one-bedroom flat in San Francisco; from cavorting with the rich to working as a receptionist for a lecherous dentist; from presuming she deserves the luxury she’s been handed to maintaining those illusions, even when she’s precipitated the crisis that dissolves her thoughtless privilege, Allen creates a compelling portrait of a ruined woman.

His adaptation—which uses much of Williams’s plot and some of the play’s dialogue, even as it expands the narrative to include a Madoff-like scheme and a revised story for Ginger (the Stella character)—also emphasizes that Jasmine is nothing but a performance of herself.  Where Williams hinted that Blanche had a soul that was corrupted by circumstances both emotional and economic, Allen denies Jasmine a heart.  As Stacy, Feminist Spectator 2, remarked, she’s only a series of screens, projecting an image of herself crafted to fit what “white woman” and “wealth” mean on the Upper East Side of contemporary New York.

As a result, where those recent Broadway theatre revivals managed to cook up some empathy for the deluded Blanche, Allen makes it difficult to feel anything but contempt for Jasmine.  Blanchett’s completely unvarnished performance is marvelous; it’s rare to see a woman so exposed on screen, and an actor so unconcerned with how she looks.  That Blanchett plays against Jasmine’s utter concern with her own surface creates a tension that makes her performance fascinating.

The rest of the cast, too, is excellent.  Hawkins plays Ginger/Stella with confused guilelessness, one moment persuaded by Jasmine’s pretentions that Ginger deserves more from her life, and the next settling in rather happily with the rough-hewn mechanic, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), who adores her.  Hawkins captures Ginger’s confusion about how much striving is enough, given that she’s actually content with what she has.  Ironically, Hawkins—who’s British—and Blanchett—who’s Australian—play these quintessential American characters with real insight into what they represent about contemporary white American femininity.

Chili serves as the film’s Stanley, the working-class, physically magnetic hero, given a much more lovable, humanized reading by the sweetly sexy Cannavale.  Peter Sarsgaard’s Dwight is the upper-middle-class Mitch stand-in with the potential to save Jasmine from herself.  With a conveniently deceased wife and a ton of money, Dwight seems the perfect white man on a white horse riding to Jasmine’s rescue.  But she can’t stop herself from lying to him about her past, finally, once again, undoing any possibility of future redemption.

Blanchett makes these plot machinations believable, and the combination of Williams’s dialogue with Allen’s (and exchanges that seem improvised, they sound so natural and spontaneous) keeps the film moving along in a literate and compelling way.  But as my former colleague, the famed, late theatre historian Oscar Brockett, used to say, “Why this play [read film]?  Why now?”  The perennial interest in the madwoman (as Sondra Gilbert and Susan Gubar wrote years ago) who’s somehow the exemplar of white femininity; the woman whose agency is warped by a deluded sense of social propriety; the woman with no desire of her own, except for maintaining her own fantasy of herself, from the outside, for others . . . isn’t stereotype shopworn by now?

Blanchett (for whom Oscar buzz has already begun) is terrific and makes the film worth seeing, along with Hawkins, Cannavale, Sarsgaard, and Baldwin as the Madoff figure, Louis C.K., as a man who seduces Ginger without telling her that he’s married, and even Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger’s first husband, Augie, all of whom bring nuance to characters that could be two-dimensional.  But it’s too bad we get to see all this good work in such a tired tale.

The Feminist Spectator

Teaching my course on gender, sexuality, and pop culture last spring, I encountered some of the progressive, queer-friendly narratives of the ABC Family network’s line up for the first time.  I’d stopped watching Pretty Little Liars before one of its four teenage heroines came out as a lesbian.  And I knew nothing of the queer vampire (or is it werewolf?) on Teen Wolf.  Who knew that ABC Family programmed stories that would be equally at home on Logo, if that LGBT channel had the money for higher production values?

The Fosters premiered on ABC Family this summer, and multiplies exponentially the gender-, race- and sexuality-related content of its sister shows.  Stef (Teri Polo) and Lena (Sherri Saum) are an inter-racial lesbian couple called the Fosters who also happen to be foster parents.  The musically talented Brandon (David Lambert) is Stef’s biological son from a prior heterosexual marriage; Jesus (Jake T. Austin) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez) are teenage Latino twins the couple fostered and then adopted when they were children.

Stef is a cop; Lena is the vice principal at an ocean-side, progressive charter school all their children attend.  In the first episode, Lena impulsively agrees to foster Callie (Maia Mitchell), a teenage white girl just released from juvenile detention.  It turns out she was sent away for smashing up her step-father’s car, but only after he beat up her little brother, Jude (Hayden Byerly), for wearing a dress.

I didn’t see the whole season, which ended this week with Stef and Lena’s wedding.  But I’ll watch again when it resumes, as I’m curious which themes the show will take up next season and how its characters will grow.  And if I have to look to ABC Family for representations of multi-racial queer characters, count me in.

The “Family” designation of this ABC network perhaps explains the “after-school special” tone of some—though not all—of the writing on The Fosters.  Issue after social issue is packed into each episode in ways that sometimes feel didactic.  When Jesus and Mariana find their birth mother, for example, and proceed to see her without telling Stef and Lena, the woman turns out to be a junkie with a murderous boyfriend.  She takes money from the twins, but can’t straighten out her life enough to really be of use in theirs.

After Jesus and Mariana learn this hard lesson, Lena comforts Mariana by acknowledging that it must be hard to have a birth mother who chose not to have her children in her life.  But Lena explains that she and Stef did choose to parent Mariana and Jesus, and that families of choice often make more sense and provide more support than those bound by biology.  Can’t argue with that.  And I registered my surprise and pleasure at hearing a character on television explain families of choice so eloquently. 

Stef and Lena, who’ve been together for ten years, cap the series’ first season with their wedding.  Stef is reluctant, sabotaging the upcoming nuptials with sarcastic remarks and casual indifference until she realizes that she’s internalized her father’s homophobia.  When she accepts that the doubting voice in her head is not hers, but her father’s, she uninvites him from the wedding and moves forward with her commitment to Lena.

The wedding ceremony scene is nicely subdued.  Lena’s father, who officiates, announces how pleased he is that the Supreme Court finally did the right thing by realizing that all people are entitled to equal protection under the law.  Again, I found myself delighted to hear a television character expressing such an opinion. 

Danny Nucci plays Mike Foster, Stef’s ex-husband, who also happens to be an alcoholic cop (they once were partners on the police force).  His addiction is the least persuasive plot line in the first season, too easily resolved when we see him attending an AA meeting in the last episode.  Even though ABC Family’s network tag-line is “A New Kind of Family,” it seems a show like this can’t get away without some sort of heterosexual adult male presence.  Nucci doesn’t have much to do as Mike, except be the standard-bearer for a straight guy trying to be mindful of his privilege and his masculine presumptions.  But I suppose even that contributes a useful, if mostly pedagogical, point of view. 

The actors carry the show with earnest performances that soft-pedal the dialogue’s frequent preaching.  Although they’re not quite convincing as a romantic couple—despite frequent bedroom scenes with a generous amount of bare skin and physical intimacy—Polo (as Stef) and Saum (as Lena) manage an affectionate chemistry that makes them plausible as a couple with five kids who manage a household and two full-time jobs.

The young cast is excellent.  Austin and Ramirez have a lovely rapport as Jesus and Mariana, the Latino twins; that they look out for one another, even as they begin to meld with the rest of the family, provides some sweet sibling moments.  Mitchell and Lambert, as Callie and Brandon, the two oldest teens, try to avoid their growing erotic attraction all season, especially once Stef and Lena decide to formally adopt Callie and Jude.  When Callie and Brandon finally hook at up their moms’ wedding, the moment precipitates a cliff-hanger crisis in preparation for Season Two.  Mitchell is terrific as Callie—she’s an appealing, smart young actor who reacts with nuance in a role that could be cloyingly overplayed.

Domestic arrangements, with their trials and tribulations, are the stuff of television sit-coms and melodramas.  The Fosters falls into predictable patterns, exploring high school traumas, the complications of a blended family, and the complexity of people across generations helping one another through their lives.  That the parents here are lesbians, that the family is multi-racial, and that four of the five kids are adopted from a disorganized and uncaring foster system makes The Fosters worth a look.

The Feminist Spectator

The Killing‘s third season proved a terrific corrective to the flabby, rainy, interminable, “Who killed Rosie Larson?” affair of its first two.  With a taut story-line and ever-deepening lead performances, show-runner Veena Sud proved she could create a moody, suspenseful, character-driven series without resorting to a rain machine.

[Spoiler alert!!]  This season’s story focuses on a serial killer who preys on homeless young women, most of them still teenagers.  In Seattle’s demi-monde, they live on the streets or in an overcrowded, understaffed temporary shelter run by a priest named Pastor Mike (Ben Cotton), who might or might not be the one killing them.  One of this season’s strengths is how it’s proposed a number of different suspects, and how surprising the revelation of the real killer turns out to be in the season finale.  With several men isolated as potential murderers, none of these young people are safe on Seattle’s streets.

Even those charged to protect these kids take advantage of their vulnerability and dependence.  Twitch (Max Fowler), a young man who dreams of moving to LA to be a model, is raped by his probation officer, for no apparent reason.  The man seems tired and disillusioned but nothing more than casual cruelty makes him force Twitch into the back of his car to hurt and humiliate him.  All the kids are accustomed to trading sexual favors for what they need to survive; turning tricks, the series suggests, is even how they get some of their emotional needs met, as the men who aren’t out to kill them are sometimes even nice to them.

Lyric (Julia Sarah Stone), Twitch’s girlfriend, also flirts with Bullet (Bex Taylor-Klaus), the butch lesbian/transman who’s actually in love with her.  Even though these young people live in abandoned buildings or underneath highway overpasses, their emotions cycle through teenaged traumas of crushes unrequited and feelings wounded by slights and misunderstandings.  That they’re typical teenagers contrasts with the extraordinary danger of their lives on the streets.

No one can save anyone from the trouble lurking in The Killing’s third season.  At the start, detective Sarah Linden (the remarkable Mireille Enos) seems to have turned over a new leaf.  She’s left the police force to work security on an island near Seattle, dating a pleasant young man who knows nothing about her past.  Enos’s performance in the first few episodes makes Linden seem a truly different person—her face glows with happiness and she’s light on her feet.  Both she and her former partner, Holder (Joel Kinnaman)—a recovering drug addict—say they’ve even stopped smoking. Their billowing cigarette smoke was as omnipresent as the rain in the first two seasons.  But by the time they’re embroiled in the new case, their rectitude is a joke and the squad car they sometimes share is filled with the acrid tar and nicotine of their mutual disillusionment.

Until Linden returns to the squad as a special hire, Holder has a new partner.  Reddick (Gregg Henry) is a lazy lifer, a middle-aged straight white man who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.  His innate sexism and his casual disparagement of the victims they investigate wearies Linden, whose caustic retorts put the older man in his place.  Reddick and Holder make an odd couple and Kinnaman does a nice job playing Holder’s uneasiness with Reddick’s political and professional attitudes.  But when, in the finale, Reddick briefly becomes a suspect, he redeems himself by demonstrating an intuitive understanding of a young boy who goes missing.

Peter Sarsgaard guest stars this season as Ray Seward, a Death Row inmate accused of killing his wife, Trisha.  When the serial killer’s victims begin multiplying, their resemblance to Trisha’s murder begins to throw doubt on Seward’s conviction.  Linden, who worked his case, tries to exonerate Seward, as the story of his wife’s death ties the two cases together.

Despite Linden’s growing certainty that Seward didn’t kill his wife, the story moves inexorably to his (botched) execution in the season’s penultimate episode.  So many nuanced character quirks make the episode masterful.  Becker (Hugh Dillon), the sadistic Death Row prison guard taunts Seward mercilessly during his last days of life.  Becker boasts of his power and authority to his meek son, showing him the gallows before Seward’s hanging.  Dillon’s portrait of struggling masculinity is compelling all season, as Becker’s ruined marriage and personal isolation make him oddly sympathetic, even as he remains the villain in a capricious, cruel prison system.

But once Seward’s execution begins, Becker fails to muster the courage to cover Seward’s head with the death hood.  Henderson (Aaron Douglas), the prison block’s moral center, who’s tried to befriend Becker and his wife but can’t cross the complicated lines of authority and power to really change anything, steps in to hood Seward at the end.  Henderson looks in the doomed man’s eyes, silently wishing him strength, and the assembled prison guards all look away with shame and horror when Seward’s neck doesn’t break when his body drops through the trap door.  His body writhes on the noose as he kicks and grunts.

The execution scene indicts a broken justice system.  Seward admits to his misdeeds; he might not have murdered his wife, but he beat her.  He insists his violence is genetic.  He’s followed his father into crime, and worries that his son, Adrian (Rowan Longworth), whom he hasn’t seen since his wife’s murder, will also inherit a criminal destiny.

Played by Sarsgaard as a mess of conflicting emotions, Seward is one of the great television villains, in part because The Killing humanizes him.  If he begins as imperious and superior to the other prisoners and the guards, in the end, Seward is just a man who doesn’t want to die.  His growing fear and panic, and his desperation to somehow save himself, work against the emotional remoteness with which he prefers to consider his less-than-exemplary life.

Seward’s relationship with Linden shifts incrementally, as Sarsgaard and Enos make the most of each glance and emotional nuance every time their characters interact.  They hate one another; the Seward case almost ruined Linden’s career, and damaged her enough to make her (in her own harsh assessment) unfit to mother her own son.  But the complicated, ambivalent bond between the two broken characters grows stronger until the moment Seward dies.  Linden watches his execution from the gallery, appalled that she couldn’t finally save him, grief-stricken at whatever role she played in his death, and locking her eyes with his before the death hood finally falls over his face.

Sarsgaard’s Ray Seward ranks with Bill Irwin’s Nate Haskell on CSI and James Purefoy’s Joe Carroll on The Following.  These murderers have complexity and depth, with ironic erudition and a ruthless, intelligent evil that make them chilling.  That Seward is innocent only makes his story that much more poignant.

Elias Koteas joined The Killing this season as James Skinner, the lieutenant now in charge of the squad, with whom Linden has a sexual history.  Skinner’s mysterious moodiness and battle fatigue complement Linden’s fierce, silent cynicism and determination.  Their ambivalences mesh and they generate a sad erotic magnetism.  When, in the last half of the two-part final episode, Skinner is revealed as the serial killer, the surprise seems both believable and not.  It’s hard to be convinced that the killer is a cop, and, in fact Linden and Holder’s boss, who supervised the case as they worked.  But Koteas, as Skinner, manages in the last episode to be persuasive about the secret reasons for all his doleful gazing and all those hands wiped wearily across his brow this season.  He’s been killing young girls for years, dumping their bodies in places he tells Linden they’ll never be able to imagine let alone find.  And he’s tired of pretending to be someone he’s not.

Halfway through the finale, Linden and Skinner sleep together once again, drawn by what seems their mutual sorrow.  But as the climax of the story nears, Linden puts the pieces together.  In a terrific, wordless scene, the camera focuses on her face as the knowledge dawns, and then cuts to Skinner’s, as he understands that she has realized who and what he is.  Eloquent looks pass between them and devastating emotional changes cross their faces.

In an expository but tense and atmospheric confession scene, Skinner explains that he’s saving the girls he murdered from inevitably hopeless lives.  They’re invisible garbage, he says; no one misses them when they disappear.  But he also admits that he relishes the end of their lives, when they know they’re going to die, give up hope, and see their destiny in Skinner’s face.  He’s addicted to the thrill of this god-like power.

In a final murderous manipulation, Skinner provokes Linden to kill him by reminding her that she loves him.  Linden’s horror and humiliation that she could so misjudge someone wins out over whatever professional instincts she might still possess at the end of this dark-night-of-the-soul season.  She shoots Skinner once, and then, provoked, again, her face a contorted mask of hate, regret, and vindication.

Each of this season’s episodes is horrifying, smart, and precisely realistic.  None of the characters are conveniently saved.  You wait for Ray Seward’s name to be cleared; it never happens.  You keep thinking Kallie (Cate Sproule), the lost street girl whose disappearance prompts the season-long investigation, will reappear, but she never turns up.  Linden asks Skinner where he disposed of Kallie’s body, but his blank look indicates he can’t even remember the girl Linden and Holder have spent the whole season trying to find.

Kallie’s wayward mother, Danette (the terrific Amy Seimetz), who realizes too late that she might have taken better care of her child, is left bereft.  She closes her eyes and counts to five, hoping Kallie will just be there when she opens them, just as she was when she couldn’t quite get the hang of hide-and-seek as a child.  That her daughter is long dead and gone quashes the story’s last chance for a redemptive ending.

The Killing is surprising and appalling, as it delivers some hard truths about human nature and about an underclass that’s rarely considered systematically or sympathetically in film or on television.  Some of the homeless kids come from middle-class homes, but they’ve left for good reasons, caught in the contradiction between who they are and who they’re expected to be.  For example, Bullet, Kallie’s friend on the street, is caring and protective, but even her butch/lesbian/trans swagger can’t keep Kallie safe.  Early in the season, she’s raped by a man she thinks is hiding her friend.  Bullet herself isn’t safe, and her adopted masculinity can’t save her.

Bex Taylor-Klaus plays Bullet against easy stereotypes of a gender non-conforming young person, creating a character that’s smart and emotionally acute.  Bullet and Holder establish a sibling-like affection as they work to find Kallie.  When Bullet also becomes a victim of the serial killer, Holder is crushed enough to almost return to his addictions.  He attends her funeral, remarking how much Bullet would have hated the feminine portrait her grieving parents place by her casket.  Bullet is a sensitive, intelligent representation of a transgender youth, and Taylor-Kraus’s performance avoids prurience and sentimentality.

The Killing’s brutality might go too far.  The detectives’ resignation about the dark side of human nature might be as unrelenting as the rain in the first two seasons.  But I respect a show that doesn’t try to leaven its narrative with easy fixes and moral uplift.  Linden and Holder are damaged by the crimes they try to solve.  They, too, are flawed, but they hold firm to a notion of justice that remains the only way they can survive a capricious world in which power seems arbitrary and cruel.  But unlike many other detectives and cops represented in popular culture, these two are touched by what they see.  Their souls wither, but they can’t look away.  They suffer for what they can’t fix.  And rarely celebrate what they can.

Linden is one of the best female characters in contemporary popular culture.  Enos and the series writers borrow the tropes of male detectives and translate them into a character that carries the narrative’s moral imperative without ever relying on conventionally gendered wiles.  Linden is smart, tough, dogged, and wounded; when she smiles, cracking her mask of peering wariness seems a miracle that reveals a person with real emotion underneath.  Linden’s turtleneck sweaters and baggy jackets hide her body, but she never becomes one of the men—she’s singular and unique in a narrative world we think we know.  Holder, too, breaks the mold, with his hoodies and street-lingo and the depth of his own humanity.

That Veena Sud and her writers and directors can illuminate new aspects of such a conventional pop culture domain makes The Killing irresistible.  I hope there’ll be a fourth season, so that we can see where Sud takes Linden and Holder next.

The Feminist Spectator