Musings on the Murdoch Mysteries

Canadian television doesn't get a lot of respect from the academic and critical film and television community. The BFI and Wayne State University Press, despite their ample list of monographs in their BFI TV Classics and TV Milestones series on American and British television shows, have not published a single volume on a Canadian television show. I find this not only interesting but also unfortunate because, of the limited number of new television series I watch these days, the two shows I enjoy the most are two Canadian TV shows, Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries.

Both Heartland (CBC, 2007), the contemporary family saga of the Bartletts and their Alberta ranch, a show that has elements of the rural and pastoralist myth in it, and Murdoch Mysteries (CityTV, 2008-2011, CBC, 2-11-), a Canadian mystery series set in Victorian and Edwardian Toronto, have been very successful by any measure. Both Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries have been, for example, on air for thirteen seasons and been commissioned by the CBC for a fourteenth. Both are currently the longest running drama series on Canadian television with 214 and 211 episodes respectively. You would think this would garner at least a modicum of attention from the academic and critical community but it hasn't as of yet.

In the rest of this essay I want to focus my gaze on Murdoch Mysteries and the various levels on which Murdoch functions or "works".

The Production Level:
ITV's involvement brings with it quite a pedigree in adapted detective fiction including Inspector Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, DCI Banks, Vera... Another thing that struck me about the show is how like classic Doctor Who Murdoch is. It simultaneously entertains and educates.

The Narrative Level:
Murdoch Mysteries is centred around the various cases of Precinct Four of the Toronto Constabulary its detective, Inspector William Murdoch, its constables, particularly Constable George Crabtree, its coroners, Dr. Julia Ogden, Dr, Emily Grace, and, once again, Dr. Ogden, its Inspector, Thomas Brackenreid, and the criminals, politicians, members of the Toronto Constabulary who intersect with the main characters of the series.

The narrative level of Murdoch contains the character traits and character arcs not only of the central characters of the show but also recurring characters who reappear on the show, some criminal, some not, like Eva Pearce, Terrance Myers, James Pendrick, and a brilliant young man who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. When these recurring characters reappear it is like seeing old friends even if these old friends have murder and mayhem on their minds.

One of the interesting things about Murdoch, given that it is a show grounded in history, is that among the characters who we viewers see as we watch the series are historical figures and incidents from the Canadian, British, European, and American pasts such as Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agnes Macphail, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, Clara Brett Martin, Florence Nightingale Graham, Mark Twain, Harry Houdini, the Wright Brothers, Wilfred Laurier, Emma Goldman, Prince Alfred, W.C. Fields, the Canadian and British women's suffrage movement, and the Great Fire of Toronto of 1904, among others.

As is typically the case with ensemble arc driven television shows, Murdoch takes viewers on a journey that intersects with the journeys of its characters. Those who become involved with the show have a lot to chose from as they intersect with the characters of the show. Will Julia and William finally get married, they might wonder. Will George find someone, they might ask themselves. Will George's Book become a success? Will Julia and the suffragettes succeed?

The Genre Level:
Murdoch is a drama, a tragedy, a satire, a parody, a comedy, a romance, a detective and mystery show, science fiction, steampunk, costume, adaptation, horror. The show has a wonderfully wry sense of humour.

The Historical Level:
As I noted Murdoch is set in Victorian and post-Victorian Toronto. This gives Murdoch a different flavour when compared with the other numerous detective shows on Canadian, British, and American television. While the Toronto of Murdoch is dominated by Anglo-Saxons and WASP culture, the city, thanks to immigration, is becoming ever larger, ever noisier, and ever more culturally, demographically, and socially diverse. There are references to the various neighbourhoods of the city, the various ethic groups of the city, the various classes of the city, and the various historical and cultural geographic landmarks of the city.

As I noted earlier, we meet, in the course of the series, various well known historical events and historical figures and various not so well known historical events and figures. For those with a historical and social scientific bent like myself, Murdoch is a kind of historical and social scientific pursuit.

The Nationalist Level:
Like the classic CTV series Due South (1994-1999), Murdoch plays with the notion and idea of Canadianess. I might add here that Inspector Murdoch is kind of a RCMP Constable Benton Fraser, one of the main characters of Due South, for the 21st century. In fact, Murdoch's half brother seems to me to be an intentional chop off the old Fraser block. One of the themes that runs throughout Murdoch, just as it, according to some, was and is a central theme of Canadian history and culture, is the difference between Canada and the behemoth to its south, the United States.

As was the case with the Canadian references in Due South, most prominently to Diefenbaker, one suspects that the references to Canadian history, Canadian culture, and Canadian historical figures, is something American viewers are unlikely to get save perhaps those that are well known south of the border. Winnifed "Freddy" Pink, in her younger form, for example, seems to be a reference to Anne of Green Gables fame, a historical reference some Americans might get.

Some might find it interesting that Murdoch, like Due South, has a firm grasp of American history, something that living next to the US and being inundated with American media, given the geographical realities of Canadian settlement, certainly promotes. Canadians, claim many, including film maker Michael Moore, seem to have a firmer grasp of American history and culture than Americans have of Canadian history and culture.

Murdoch is somewhat similar to Forgotten Silver (1995), the Peter Jackson and Costa Botes faux documentary, that played into and played with New Zealand nationalism and ethnocentrism offending some when they learned the documentary was actually fictional, in the process. As was the case with Forgotten Silver, where a Kiwi was first in flight, the developer of the moving camera shot, and the creator of colour cinema, the character of James Pendrick, a Canadian, is first in flight, the creator of the electric car, and the developer of a new and dangerous weapon. Like Forgotten Silver, Murdoch plays into and plays with notions of Canadian nationalism in what some might call a reflexive, parodic, satiric and postmodernist way.

The Parodic and Satirical Level:
One of the fascinating things about Murdoch is that though it is set among the British Canadian Protestant elite, middle class, and working class cultures, and Murdoch is a Victorian gentleman, he is also, as Brackenreid periodically notes, a "Papist", a Roman Catholic, an outsider, an other.

Murdoch pokes fun at Canadianess and Canadian nationalism in a number of ways. When Prime Minister Laurier walks into Precinct Four one of the constables does not recognise him. Is this a poke at contemporary Canadian knowledge of Canadian history?

Murdoch undercuts Canadian nationalism, for example, by referencing the breaking of a treaty between the government of Ontario and Ontario's First Peoples in 1903 when silver is discovered in First People's territory in an episode where Murdoch and Crabtree investigate a murder that takes them into First People's lands. So much for Canadian exceptionalism.

Murdoch also undercuts notions of Canadian exceptionalism by pointing up the similarities between the Canadian spy Terrance Meyers and his American cousins, Very LeCarreesque.

The Intellectual Level:
Murdoch has, at times, a moral heft to it as when Murdoch and Inspector Chief Constable Giles debate law, justice, and loyalty in a deeply tragic episode.

The Postmodern Level:
Murdoch plays with us 20th and 21st century viewers and our popular culture capital in addition to our historical capital. The female comedian in the vaudeville episode, for example, recalls Joan Rivers. Murdoch references Hitchcock, the film D.O.A, and the Steven Spielberg film Raiders of the Lost Ark, among others, and actually simulates them. Additionally, the show makes us, I suspect, connect and perhaps even laugh at Crabtree's discovery of pizza (by the bite), hamburgers, and hot dogs, and one of the characters' dismissal of beef on bread.

Murdoch, which is fairly historically accurate, also plays with history in a kind of present meets past way. Murdoch, for example, invents the lie detector and the taser, amongst a host of crime fighting technologies and categorises what we today call serial killers as sequential killers.

A lifesize replica of Hagia Sophia and the Holy Grail in Markham Ontario? A killer corset in Toronto? Valerie Solanas before Valerie Solanas? H.P. Lovecraft and Toronto's Edwardian goths?

A note on the Halloween episode Sir.Sir?Sir!!! (12:6, 2018):
What a fun and humourous episode. If the comments on IMDb about this episode are a guide, those who watched it and commented on it at the IMDb website seemed to have missed the episode's indebtedness to the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Apparently, if this is prologue past and present, many are not as aware of postmodernist intertextuality as some would like us to think. I suppose we can, given this, why many of the "reviewers" didn't seem to have grasped the fun, humour, and parodic aspects of the episode. Nor, of course, do many of the younger viewers have any sense of media history. Welcome to the brave new digital world where those who have the world literally at their fingertips show little in the way of inquisitiveness.

Envoi
Murdoch Mysteries, what a wonderfully fun television show that is also quite moving at times thanks to its Buffylike emotional depth...

The Books of My Life: The Singing Detective

Film and Television Studies academic Glen Creeber seems to have carved out an academic career, in part, by writing about Dennis Potter, the author of the highly regarded BBC television shows Pennies From Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986). The bibliography of Creeber's book The Singing Detective (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), in fact, lists four other books and articles Creeber has published on the Gloucestershire born Potter.

In his monograph on Potter's The Singing Detective, Creeber reprises the much made criticism of auteur theory, the notion that there are some film and TV authors, that such an approach doesn't take into account the fact that film and TV are collaborative media. The fact of the matter, however, is that Movie critic and University of Warwick academic Victor Perkins argued as long ago as 1972, in his book Film as Film, that film was indeed a collaborative medium but that in some instances the director acted as conductor of a film bringing all of its plot, narrative, and mise-en-scene aspects of a film together just as a conductor brings together the score and all the instruments of an orchestra in a performance of, for example, Mahler's First Symphony. Somewhat ironically, Creeber goes on to argue, after giving us his auteurist straw man, that while a number of people--costumers, editors, directors of photography, set designers, and so on--contributed to the making of The Singing Detective, Potter and the director Jon Amiel were the primary auteurs of the serial, a perspective not dissimilar to that of Perkins.

In The Singing Detective Creeber argues that Potter's serial is a complex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanaytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Fascinatingly, Creeber's book likewise is a compex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanalytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Creeber's book is such a dialogical hybrid, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether Creeber is arguing that Freudian psychoanalysis is transcendental, is a Bergerian social and cultural construct that has taken on a cultural life in the post-late 19th century West, or both. And while Creeber has interesting things to say about the Freudian aspects of The Singing Detective I was more convinced that at its heart Potter's work was more a pilgrim's progress and a paradise lost and refound, and more a critique of Calvinist theodicy, than a Freudian tale of therapeutic salvation.

In the end what Creeber's monograph on The Singing Detective, a serial I very much enjoyed when I first saw it in the 1980s, pointed up to me again is that most books on film and television shows simply aren't as entertaining, moving, and thought provoking as that which they are trying to interpret. I found Creeber's monograph to be, despite an attentiveness to the religious dimensions of Potter's work, pretty much standard, one might even say generic, film and TV criticism by a film and television academic embedded in a fin-de-siecle socially and culturally constructed academic film culture.

The Books of My Life: Changing the World

As Alan Dawley notes in his Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), the nature of American progressivism, which originated in the era between the 1890s to the 1920s, the period that is supposed to encompass, according to many American historians, the American Progressive Era, has been extensively debated by many of those same historians. Dawley's book is one of the latest tomes to take on the challenge of defining what American progressivism was and is.

Progressivism, as Dawley notes, has been defined in several ways by historians. Some historians, for example, see American progressives as those American political reformers trying to reign in the destructive aspects of the laissez-faire liberal capitalism wrought by the corporations that dominated the American Gilded Age from 1877 to the early 20th century. Others argue that progressives were nostalgic middle class Jeffersonian elites trying to take the United States back to the pastoralism that they believed dominated the nation before the Gilded Age. For still others progressives were older middle class elites who were attempting to regain the power and authority they had lost to the new corporate elites of the Gilded Age. Still others see progressives as the urban professional class trying to restore moral order in the face of challenges to it by urban political machines. To still others Progressivism was an effort by the urban political machine and their working class allies to expand their power and influence. Still others see the progressives as the promotors of ideas, ideas like pragmatism, that they hoped would change the world for the better. To still others progressivism was a movement of corporate elites and their bureaucratic allies who wanted to bring scientific and managerial order to the chaotic world of turn of the century American politics. To still others, progressivism was some or all of these.

For Dawley American progressivism, which lasted well after the Progressive Era ended with the Woodrow Wilson presidency, progressivism was initially a complex and not very cohesive movement that counted in its ranks Yankee Protestants, social gospelers, Jews, Catholics, secular Americans, the labour movement, ethnics practising mutual aid, economic managers, and female reformers. Progressivism was, according to Dawley, a social movement which centred around the key symbols of American efficiency, American millennialism, the utopian belief that American progressives could change America for the better, and American messianism, the utopian belief that Americans could unilaterally or in concert with other nations, particularly other Western nations, make the world a better place. As Dawley notes, these key cultural scripts or symbols intersected with a universe of other symbols circling them including ethnocentric, racist, and sexist symbols such as the White man's burden, civilisational uplift, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP superiority, and calls, from some progressive quarters, for a more activist if still limited government, a limited redistribution of wealth, municipal ownership, the greater regulation of liberal free market capitalism, and the rethinking of America's role in the world to bring about a more orderly America and a more orderly world.

There are a number of things I liked about Dawley's approach to American progressivism. Dawley's book is sensitive to the dynamics of progressivism and how progressivism and its culture or meaning system was changed by what was happening in the US and what was happening in the world. Dawley argues, for instance, that American progressivism was not only a response to the seemingly chaotic and unequal world brought about in the land of equality for all by corporate laissez-faire liberal capitalism, but also a response to revolutions in Mexico and Russia and World War I and World War II.  Dawley's sensitivity to change at home and abroad allows him to explore the changes that progressivism underwent in the 20th and 21st centuries as a result of broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces. As Dawley notes, progressivism, which was a liberal social movement that shrank the gulf between liberalism and the radical left in its earlier form, became more internationalist, realist, and leftist after World War I, the horrors of which diminished utopian American millennialism and utopian American messianism among Progressives. Dawley is aware of and nicely utilises cultural approaches to social movements to flesh out the role meaning and meanings play in social movements and in the progressive social movement in particular. Dawley is particularly good at showing what historians still tend to minimise and at their peril, the impact of WASP religiously grounded culture on broader American culture. American millennialism and American messianism, both of which provided the cultural scaffolding for the myth of American exceptionalism and impacted the domestic and foreign policies of American economic and political elites. American millennialism and messianism didn't, after all, come out of nowhere.

Dawley's book is somewhat like progressivism itself, descriptive and normative, empirical and advocacy oriented. It attempts to describe the forces that gave rise to progressivism and it attempts to explore the culture and cultural contradictions of American progressivism from within a progressive tradition that, normatively, advocates for a more multicultural and internationalist progressivism. Dawley's book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of American social movements, for anyone interested in a more cultural sociological and cultural anthropological approach to the history of social movements, and for progressives wondering where progressivism came from, where it went, and where it might be going.

Musings on American Right Wing Populist Moronicity...

For most critics of right wing populism, I suspect, the thing that they probably find most interesting about that social movement is its general inability to distinguish fact from fiction and truth from fantastical and fanatical myth. And while the inability of right wing populists to discern fact from fiction is intriguing and important, for me, the most interesting thing about right wing populists is their lack of knowledge about their own identity group history.

While some right wing populists seem to fancy themselves knowledgeable intellectuals, they are, because of their ahistoricism, fundamentally anti-intellectual. For instance, they don't seem to grasp the historical fact that post-World War II "conservatism" is actually a political and cultural hybrid. William F. Buckley style conservatism, for instance, is actually a mashup of Enlightenment laissez-faire liberalism and a pre-Enlightenment conservatism that celebrated the superiority of elite manor house culture and Christian theocratism, hence its Anglo-Catholic and Catholic impulses. Buckley style "conservatism" was an ideology, in other words, that romanticised capitalism--traditional conservatives decried capitalism for undermining the conservative old order leading, eventually, to the rise of the vulgar middle class, economic and political power--along with traditional rural elitism and theocratic Christianity.

Populism, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast born out of similar if differently constituted cultural scripts. It is an intellectual anti-intellectual and anti-academic social movement whose historical forebears include the nativist know nothings of the American 19th century and the nativist John Birchers of the 20th. It is a liberal social movement in its general devotion to the dogma of free market or laissez-faire capitalism and its empathy and sympathy for the capitalist rich peoples movements of the American 20th and 21st century. It is modern and postmodern in its devotion to the theologies of extreme narcissism. It is traditionally and religiously manichean in its division of the world into the good and pure, them, and the evil and impure, anyone who doesn't agree with them. It is traditionally religious in its opposition to intellectual diversity and its seeking out of heretical latter day "witches".

Welcome to the Kingdom of Glupov...

The Dixiefornication of the Republican Party has given us not only an incompetent narcissistic moron as president, a theocratic idiot grandpa as vice-president, and Republican lawmakers who have turned stupidity into a not so fine art. It has also given us [pun intended] ever increasing levels of anti-intellectual moronicity in a nation that has become a textbook example of an Idiocracy and a casebook example of a country in which moronicity is running ever more amok.

These red, white, and blue faced idiots screaming and yelling about big government taking away their right to be a moron, don't even have the brains to realise that they are not anywhere close to being the hard volcanic island of right wing myth. Given this empirical reality these empirically challenged morons are not free to inflict their moronicity--their failure to wear a mask and distance during a pandemic that is killing thousands, for instance--on me or anyone else.

These meatheaded members of the cult of moronicity do not seem to realise the obvious, that we live in a world and in a country of networks and that we live in a world and a country in which what one person does or doesn't do, can and does impact others. As most writers on liberty from an Enlightenment perspective realised long ago, but apparently not these goobers, when you have a multitude of individuals you have a multitude of potential liberties which are sometimes in conflict. Hence someone or something, the imperfect government, for example, is necessary in order to adjudicate between liberties. Nor do they appear to comprehend that liberties are, like speech, limited. One does not have the liberty to commit murder, at least officially, nor does one have the liberty to falsely yell fire in a theatre. One can only assume that this nuanced exploration of liberty is irrelevant to these morons since for them the only liberty is, in a kind of bully boy meets dictatorial "approach", their liberty. For them, in other words, it is their liberty their way or you can hit the highway.

I wouldn't give a fuck about all this if these morons were snuffing themselves in a kind of death cult in love with dying and doing it in Texas fashion. When they threaten me and others, however, I do give a fuck. These morons have no right to threaten my health or my life or the lives and health of others.

The Books of My Life: The Man With the Movie Camera

By the time I first saw Dziga Vertov's, Yelizaveta Svilova's, and Mikhail Kaufman's The Man with the [a] Movie Camera at Indiana University for the first time, probably in one of James Naremore's film classes, the film and its author-supervisor, editor, and cameraman, were already feted and celebrated particularly by those who wanted to make films that not only described the world, if not in a Hollywood kind of way, but that also changed the world they described.

Graham Robert's The Man with the Movie Camera: The Film Companion (London: Tauris, Kinofiles series, 2000) nicely explores Vertov's film on a variety of different levels. Roberts nicely puts Vertov's "experiment" in its historical, political, economic, cultural, and biographical contexts. Robert's provides an intriguing and enlightening structural and textual analysis of Man's shots, scenes, montage, and mise-en-scene, untangling the argument of the film in the process. Finally, Roberts's book explores the afterlife of the film in both the USSR and the West.

For Roberts The Man with the Movie Camera has to be set against the backdrop of constructivist, futurist, and what Roberts calls productivist, cultural and artistic contexts. Man, Roberts notes, was an experiment doomed to failure in the USSR of the late 1920s and 1930s, just as the dogma of socialist realism with its heroes, villains, and uplifting plots and its emphasis on the need for a literature, film, and theatre, that could be readily understood by the masses. Man, with its montage is the message structure and its message of Soviet power bringing about the triumph of socialism in one country, the USSR, and inevitably globally, was, or so Soviet leaders thought, simply not amenable to easy interpretation by the masses. As a result, Vertov's career languished.

As Roberts notes, the powers that be in the USSR and the Soviet masses may not have been ready for Vertov's, Svilova's, and Kaufman's Man with the Movie Camera, but avant garde artists and filmmakers in the West in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were and many film makers and film students impacted by the countercultural 1960s in the West, such as Jean-Luc Godard, and even in the Iron Curtain East, such as Dusan Makavejev and his wonderful and wonderfully Vertovian collage film WR: Mystersies of the Organism, were. It was the counterculture sixties with its celebration of the experiment film and of the need to change the world that provided the context in which I first say Man With the Movie Camera.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the avant-garde, Soviet film, Soviet experimental film, ahd the artistic straitjacket that was state mandated socialist realism.