There is an unspoken pact between an audience and a film or TV programme: the programme promises to deliver particular satisfactions: warm, family comedy without crudity (The Good Life) or action, exotic locations, gadgets, Aston Martins, beautiful women, elegant tailoring, resourcefulness and a certain wry nonchalance (Bond, James Bond).
We come to any artistic event with expectations about the nature of the content and the pleasures it will deliver. As such, the furore over the rape scene in Downton Abbey is not a debate about whether terrible things happened in country estates in the 1920s, or about the 9 o’clock watershed, or about ghastly things being depicted on TV in general; it is about the betrayal of a trust, the breaking of a promise. Et tu Brute?
Downton may have explored disease and demise, killed off its male lead, one unborn heir, and its most appealing young woman. It may have sought to stave off sickly sweetness with the constant presence of at least one malignant canker in the body politic. But to allow the sickening rape of its purest, most generous, honey-hearted character was a stride too far. Like a stream of expletives in a wedding speech, we felt soiled, assaulted.
How could you? I asked for bread and you gave me a stone, for fish and you handed me a serpent. I may have purposed in my heart not to set before my eyes any vile thing (Psalm 101:3), but you put it there anyway. The pact has been broken.
Downton was like a weekly visit to a favourite uncle – and then the uncle attacked us. On the surface this looks like yet another example of the despairing search for ratings – and well it might be. However, at another level it may betray a deeper problem, a broader crisis in the collective artistic imagination. Do we even know how to make goodness attractive, interesting, inspiring anymore in any sustained way?
I have already forgiven Downton, though it will never be quite the same between us. Still, I am hoping that the writer will have found a way to steer us through the minefield of anger, anguish, shame, vengeance, bitterness that he has laid, and offer us a picture of how a community can help one another to find healing after such a cataclysmic event. Redemption is indeed glorious but, oh, that it were not so terribly necessary.
Mark GreeneLICC Executive Director |
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