British Justice Meets American Vengeance, For Fun!

No arguments here…

(Contains mild spoilers for Promising Young Woman, Baby Driver, Doctor Who, and Luther.  Happy, nerds?)

With the modern approach to watching TV through streaming services, you can branch out from the regular slew of American fare and sample movies and shows from other countries much easier.  I’m patriotic with my choices, mostly because we have the widest selection, but its important to experience stories from other sources.  I like Chinese action stuff and my wife is into Scandinavian thrillers.  I stumbled onto a couple of French crime shows that are also pretty cool. 

I remember years ago when I first sat down to watch the British classic, Doctor Who.  I watched the rebooted series with my daughter and we knocked out the adventures of the ninth and tenth doctors in a couple weeks.  I stuck with it.  She bailed after Rose left. It was that show that piqued my interest because I had always assumed that genre shows were all the same everywhere.  Good guys vs bad guys, some standard conventional plot twists and characters, and the good guys figure out a way to win.  Wow, was I wrong. 

Doctor Who is quicker, smarter, and good guys die.  A lot.  Winning also looks a lot different than in the USA. There is a different sense of justice and the universal code for how a good guy behaves isn’t so universal.  One episode always sticks in my head, called the ‘Army of Ghosts’.  The companion Rose reminds the Doctor that the enemy has guns, and the Doctor replies: “And I haven't, which makes me the better person, don't you think? They can shoot me dead, but the moral high ground is mine.”  Opinions on the morality of gun control aside, this shit does not happen in American shows. At all. One, the moral high ground is not an absolute in this country since everyone thinks they’re standing on it.  Two, the American belief is not to live with honor.  It is to survive.  The winner isn’t the one who can claim a moral victory.  It’s the one who gets to go home at night, crack open a beer, and live another fifty years.

There is an undercurrent of justice that is different over there.  In US fiction, blowing the bad guys away is the way to end a story and administer justice. Even if the protagonist is guilty of crimes, only the villain needs to be punished. British people rely on the justice system a little more than we do. Baby Driver is an example.  Baby is a getaway driver and by the end of the movie he is guilty of being an accessory to multiple bank robberies, and to save the girl he loves and some innocent bystanders, he kills a psychotic member of his crew.  Americans would forgive the murder and probably would let the robberies slide, as long as the bad guys get their comeuppance. We want Baby to live and runaway with the girl.  But the movie is written and directed by a British Edgar Wright, (who I like) and Baby has to atone for his sins in prison and lose what’s left of his hearing.  It doesn’t ruin the story, it just points out how we each deal with bad guys.

Another huge difference is our reliance on manners and decorum.  One of my favorite shows of all time is Luther, with Idris Elba.  Great show about a pretty shitty cop. The funny thing is the aspects of the character that make him a ‘bad cop’ in London wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow on American TV.  He skirts the rules, he goes rogue and makes mistakes that get people killed.  He has relationships with murderers and other criminals without the police department’s knowledge.  He is a bad cop because of procedure.  To us, he’s just a TV cop. We don’t give a shit about the rules when it comes to justice.

Also, there are few guns on the British cop shows.  The gun laws point out the stark difference in police procedure.  There are a lot of incidents where the perps are asked to stop what they are doing and they do so.  It’s as if it’s a game of hide and seek and they got spotted behind a tree.  There are more conversations that uncover the crime than action.  There is a reliance on manners that would be laughable on shows here at home.

I saw the excellent film Promising Young Woman recently, and not just because I have a movie star crush on Carey Mulligan.  A movie made in the States by a British writer and director, not unlike Baby Driver.  A woman who is traumatized by the death of her best friend takes it out on potential rapist douchebags and those who contributed to her friend’s suicide. I can’t tip the ending, but the revenge part of the film is satisfying and original.  Its not just from a British perspective but a woman’s, and I would like to see a lot more of it.  What stuck with me other than the shocking ending was her approach to the local predatory assholes that pretended to take care of a woman too drunk to stand, but instead tried to assault or rape her when they got her home. She feigned her blackout stupor and shocked them by waking up and shaming them.

Cool.  Unique.  Startling.  Not sure Ohio was the best setting for that to take place.  Sure, we have the douchebags who rape and the sense of entitlement and all the booze.  Sure, they deserve it.  But the film shows that she’d been doing this every week for years. I’m just not sure she would be able to turn the tables over and over, week in and week out, and get out of every scumbag’s apartment…safely.  I don’t trust these pieces of shit to shuffle their feet and admit to being rapists, then say Well, you got me and let her leave without any retribution.  I chalked that up to British mannerisms and gaining the moral high ground.  I also was shocked to find out she wasn’t killing these fucks or at the very least, cutting their junk off. The creator wanted to tell a different type of story, but I was expecting some good ol’ frontier justice. I don’t expect it real life, but I want it in my fiction.  British fare tends to obey rules of engagement that aren’t followed here, whether in real life or on our TV screens.