I am rewatching The Killing, which my wife had never seen, and I find myself just as sucked in the second time around. If you haven't seen it you can find it on Netflix. It is a detective murder mystery that is so detailed and attentive to the nuances of each of its characters that it progresses on an approximate ratio of 1 episode = just less than 1 day in the narrative. This may sound excruciating to some of you, but I promise that all four seasons are intensely satisfying and so compelling that even on the second viewing make me want to abandon my entire life to immediately binge watch the entire thing.
It also rains in virtually every scene which I find a calming reprieve to the oppressive and eternal heat of Los Angeles.
A thought: could you say, in some sense, that "The Killing" is rewatching you? That it loves you? That its gift of rain is actually a sort of altruism, a gift given without a giver, a door left open only by accident that means, after all, everything? Could it be that the object of your love is reciprocated by that object that doesn't speak? Or, if it does speak, it is in a different language, the reverberations of which we can only faintly make out. If the altruism of a loved object might lead one to abandon, to rejection or refusal of the logic of late capitalism, the necessity of self making towards a goal, a reward, that can be made flesh in the form of capital, which brings the self into being as an exchange and use value, then perhaps television does bear us, ever so slightly, towards an outside, an other side on which a detached notion of love might become the founding principle of an elsewhere to come.
ReplyDeleteBill - I'm also a fan of the Killing, though I never managed to make it through season 4. I felt the show drop off after the culmination of the first investigation, though your post has inspired me to take another look at the show. I'd recommend taking a look at Wind River (a film, also on Netflix), which reminded me of The Killing in tone and in its revelation of the central crime. Of course, as a ~90 minute film, its pacing is not as deliciously smoldering as that of The Killing. A more disturbing resonance between the two properties is their somewhat flippant depiction of Native Americans as obstructing the "honest" efforts of the white Law.
ReplyDeleteI'm hesitant to touch on Josh's thoughts, as I worry that my slapdash interpretation would disturb their poetry. I'm moved by this notion of "a door left open only by accident" - I am similarly swept up by the rainy gloom of The Killing, and its PNW setting achieves a similar affective resonance to that of The X Files and Twin Peaks. Do the tax credits available in Canada, which lead to so many TV shows being shot in Vancouver, contaminate the foggy perfection of the PNW atmosphere with the mark of capitalist motivations, or can the mist still guide us to an unspoiled "elsewhere"?