The Fall: Virgins or vamps

How do you like your female homicide victim — innocent or guilty?

A woman returns home after drinking at a bar to find that someone has laid out a set of her underwear on her bed. There has obviously been an intruder. She calls 911 and a male and a female officer arrive. When they find no signs of forced entry, they start cross questioning her. Had she been drinking? Did she have boyfriends? The already spooked victim backs off from pursuing the complaint. A few days later she is murdered.

Violence against women is still the bread and butter of crime shows, but in BBC’s The Fall, set in Belfast, creator Allan Cubitt explores just how biased this television genre has been. Cubitt uses the character of a high-ranking detective superintendent in London’s Metropolitan Police, Stella Gibson, to cut through the swathe of stereotypes. The perfect choice to play Stella comes in the form of the inscrutable Gillian Anderson (X-Files), whose deadpan detective work is only as expertly crafted as her new blonde coif.

Take the scene in which Stella is writing a press release about the victims with the police chief and the PRO. Take out ‘innocent’, she says to their bewilderment. If it were a prostitute who was murdered, would she be just as innocent, asks Stella, driving home the point that by leaving out ‘innocent’ for certain victims we send the message that they were culpable or less deserving of being treated like any other victim. Isn’t this the same language we use when reporting homicides in Pakistan?



The stereotypes don’t evade Stella either, who is chastised by the police chief for having a one-night stand with another detective.

Did you know he was married, he asked in tones full of Irish Catholic indignation.

He wasn’t wearing a ring, she replies.

But didn’t you think to ask, retorts the police chief.

He didn’t think to tell me, she says.

Thus, Cubitt brilliantly lays bare the double standards. How quick the police chief was to chastise Stella for having a sexual relationship. How invisible to him was the shared responsibility of the married detective. But the real kicker comes when Stella reminds the police chief that he was a married man when they had had an affair.

Stella’s strength is her chilled demeanour, which would be completely acceptable for a man in her position. It drives everyone around her crazy because they can’t figure her out. Cubitt shows we are accepting of quiet, superior, unexplained male behaviour than when it comes from a woman. And if you watch closely, you’ll see most of the men are hysterical and falling apart in the show.

The Fall is centred on the hunt for a serial killer, which is nothing new as such, but viewers in Pakistan will appreciate the Belfast setting. Northern Ireland’s history is similar to ours. For example, one police officer is openly threatened by a suspect. A day or two later, the officer is shot dead outside his house. Could have been straight out of a scene in Karachi.

Packing heat, killing stereotypes

DCI Jane Tennison



1 Prime Suspect’s Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison was almost the prototype for the female copper in 1991. The icy Helen Mirren played the inscrutable detective, whose character was based on a real-life DCI, according to the show’s creator, Lynda La Plante, in an interview with The Independent in 1993.

Detective Inspector Sarah Lund



2 There is not a smidgen of make-up on Sofie Gråbøl’s face in the three seasons she plays Detective Sarah Lund in the Danish show Forbrydelsen (The Killing 2007) created by Søren Sveistrup. Her Nordic facade barely masks her high IQ but it was the masculinities of her character that form its base. She even had to act like a man to get Lund right.

Detective Olivia Benson



3 Mariska Hargitay has played this character since 1999 on Dick Wolf’s Law and Order SVU, possibly one of TV’s longest running crime shows. She is a cop who will go to any lengths to solve a crime, including putting herself at risk of rape in prison. Her vulnerabilities are just as powerful as her strengths which puts Benson in our top 3 female police officers.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, July 7^th, 2013.

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