Police Drama: the Baroque Connection

Police public drama can be construed as a distinct television genre, essential for understanding the connection between public arts and government. The genre contains all the basic elements of regular crime narratives, hence the police component. But rather than along the lines of an investigative procedure, these elements are structured around one or several tensional nuclei, which stand for the drama component. The public aspect derives from the nature of production, i.e. funding and logistics provided by a public institution, but principally from the effort of concurring with a public issues agenda.

I will explore the hypothesis that, beyond focusing on matters of obvious and stringent general concern, police drama is the main form of representing the process of government in the public imagination. The reflection (mirroring) of governance in police public drama is simultaneously a reflection (reasoning) on the social, political, cultural, psychological, and first of all moral determinations and consequences of government. This is especially so in its most complex manifestations, frequently referred to, in the frame of European theoretical debates, as ‘multilevel governance’ (Benz et al. Reference Benz, Heinz, Hornig, Fischer-Hotzel, Kemmerzell and Petersohn2016).

I will also explore the mutual (and, for the most, probably unintended) affinities between murder mysteries and Elizabethan and Jacobean Baroque drama.Footnote ¹ The plots of Baroque drama, especially in its Elizabethan and Jacobean form, are more often than not premised on homicides to an extent that seems to justify the association of (historical or typological) Baroque with the notion of hardboiled. Murder is mainly represented as an output of court intrigue (with Shakespearean history plays as the most spectacular example), but it may also occur in bourgeois milieus (e.g. the anonymous Arden of Feversham, first published in 1592), insistently recalling the social background of modern crime fiction. Even more relevant than the licence of piling up victims of violent death is the fact that some of the most prominent Baroque tragedies can be reshaped as murder mysteries, as peremptorily proven by recent film and publishing experiments.Footnote ²

If we reverse the angle, we can easily observe that modern murder mysteries are also resonant with cardinal Baroque procedures and devices, such as breathtaking changes of perspectives (both narrative and ethical) similar to Baroque significant ‘deformations’; the science of exercising wonder and stupefaction over the audience (Langdon Reference Langdon, Beaven and Ndalianis2018, 44–45); the use of redoubling and parallelism (i.e. between the police and the criminal world, or between plotlines) as forms of structural, internal mirroring; and plays of hypotheses and appearances (masques beneath masques) generally placed under the figurative emblem of the ‘red herring’. Actually, given their possibilities of narrative extension, as novelistic or television series formats, modern crime fictions are able to manage mental spaces according to the labyrinthine recipes of Baroque imagination to a much higher degree (and, possibly, effect) than Baroque tragedies themselves.

This catoptric installation of sorts, i.e. the mutual mirroring of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and public television drama, is not set up in order to elucidate questions of genealogy. Not that such interests would be irrelevant, but they require a different context and different means. The effect that I expect to derive from this interplay of reflections is the simultaneous change of the dominant scholarly perception on the Baroque/neo-Baroque, and on the social-aesthetic function of police public drama. The mutual ‘mirroring’ is meant to point to the partially convergent search of both forms of drama, beyond their highly different mental and social contexts, for a poetics of government which I propose to call ordo-Baroque.Footnote ³

In other words, the association of Baroque drama with contemporary public television police series could bring to prominence a poetics centred on the practical-moral imperatives of administration and government, instead of the much more popular versions of the neo-Baroque succinctly exposed by Omar Calabrese, perhaps the most influential proponent of the concept: ‘It is easy to say what “neo-Baroque” consists of: a search for, and valorization of, forms that display a loss of entirety, totality, and system in favor of instability, polydimensionality, and change’ (Calabrese 1992 [Reference Calabrese and Lambert1987], xii). From the angle of the poetic government of the ordo-Baroque, significant form emerges from the interplay between the presumed consistency of Law, and its continuous specification in the variegated forms of the world of life, i.e. of real people interacting in actual situations, on various levels of uncertainty and risk. What I call the ordo-Baroque implies an ethical thrust that distinguishes it from the epistemic, world-view-centred approach of neo-Baroque theories.

British police drama seems to construe police officers as avatars of the noble lead characters of tragedies. They have to face basically the same dilemma as classical tragic figures. On the one hand, they are posited as morally superior, be it even on the simple premise that they are granted the privilege of carrying guns, or more precisely of being, in principle, enabled to kill under the protection of law. But this very position puts them under the huge pressure of witnessing human misery and cruelty at their worst, which either absorbs them into cynicism and greed, or infects them with Baroque melancholy, under the modern guise of psychic depression. Actually, the law enforcer does not embody Justice, but the human condition, the allegorical human being subject to fatal physical and moral degradation/corruption. Police drama also offers the most detailed and elaborate artistic representation of the manner in which rational bureaucracy is confronted with its own limits and blind spots. The fallibility of the procedures, rules, categories applied on the diversity of real life situations and persons, on the one hand, and the fallibility of the human agents that are dispensing justice, on the other, have distorting effects on the ideal model of law enforcement. The various drifts from ‘straight’ public service generate a whole range of ethical imbroglios, or ‘ornaments’.

The seminal Machiavellian advice on connecting government and dramatic representation was that the spectacle of power should generate astonishment, as a blend of fascination and fear. That is to say, power should blind the spectator and thereby hide its own weaknesses. Yet the inheritance of Baroque drama, in spite of its spectacular load of physical and mental violence, decidedly tends to the opposite direction, i.e. to a dramatic representation of government that doesn’t hide, but exposes, sometimes even ostentatiously, indecision and vulnerability (Ornstein Reference Ornstein1960; Ribner Reference Ribner1962; Müller-Wood Reference Müller-Wood2007). The Baroque Elizabethan and Jacobean drama brings to the fore the rupture of the bond of trust between rulers and subjects by staging examples of pathological cruelty. Whenever such examples are chosen from among Renaissance tyrants of Italian city-states, we can sense a polemical infatuation with Machiavellian political teachings (Roe Reference Roe2002; Hadfield Reference Hadfield2004; Redmond Reference Redmond2009).

Contemporary British public television drama series go to extreme lengths in presenting police work and its subsequent investigative procedures as a metonym for justice, and of the dispensation of justice as a metonym for governance in general. With the same movement, they also offer an equivalent of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama’s explorations of the immanent limits of powerFootnote ⁴ by pitting police work against its own procedural and moral blind spots. The ordo-Baroque poetics of government is a narrative strategy aimed at comprehending this dynamic complexity.

In this spirit, I will concentrate on one of the most telling examples of the manner in which the public eye of television drama focuses on who supervises the supervisors of public legal and moral order. I am going to explore Line of Duty, a series written by Jed Mercurio, initiated in 2012, that has gone through five seasons, with a sixth, and presumably last, originally announced for 2020 (Nicholson Reference Nicholson2019; Robinson Reference Robinson2020; Ling Reference Ling2020). The first three seasons were produced by BBC 2, then from season four on (2017), the series was taken over by BBC 1. What makes this show a highly suitable example for my above tenets is that it is a self-reflexive police drama, which can be described as meta-investigative, in its close following of the activity of the (fictional) AC-12 unit – an acronym that stands for ‘anti-corruption’. Every season uncovers a serious case of deviation of the policing means from their legally and morally sanctioned goals (with ramifications going up to the top echelons of the public force), minutely investigated by Superintendent Ted Hastings and his aides-de-camp, Detective Inspector Kate Fleming and Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott.

Through a structural convolution which appears simultaneously as quintessentially Baroque, ridden with moral significance, and touching on vital resorts of government and governance, Line of Duty presents investigators investigating investigators. But, most relevantly of all, its understanding of police work, and through it, metonymically, of complex governance, is in manifest affinity with the moral and psychological tensions of Baroque drama. This is what I will attempt to point out, through the successive survey of thematic areas identified by two accredited Baroque symbolisms: the mirror and the labyrinth.

Spectacular Anamorphoses and Specular Estrangements

According to a famous account by Jurgis Baltrušaitis (Reference Baltrušaitis and Strachan1977 [1969]), anamorphosis (which literally means ‘deformation’, but in this context connotes meaningful, even revealing deformation), is the major determining feature of the Baroque imagination. Even if this is much easier applicable to the field of visual arts, a connection to drama structures is relatively at hand. Tragedy as such, in its classical Aristotelian demeanour, can be retrieved as a seminal process of anamorphosis. It looks at heroes, i.e. at characters who should represent the norm for and be the object of encomia, of public poetic praise, from an angle that distorts their original composure. Baroque tragedy further accentuates this anamorphosis through its habit of attributing to its central characters the basest instincts leading to tyranny. But this accrued taste for representing morally deformed characters preserves, in a suggestive/negative manner, a sense of quest for righteous and virtuous government.Footnote ⁵

The use of the quintessentially Baroque motif (and device) of the deforming mirror could count as a particular instance of anamorphosis. Police drama in general offers the opportunity of siding organized crime with crime fighting in an ironic analogy that suggest a play of mirrors. In this meta-police drama, investigative intelligence and procedural abilities are distorted to the point of being turned against themselves. Since the bible of the series rests on investigating investigators, Line of Duty offers the spectacle of highly trained detectives using their experience, skills and talents not in order to catch criminals, but to escape the rightful enforcement of law by their anti-corruption fellow detectives. The most powerful intimation of dramatic Baroque specularity is to be found in the frequent procedural scenes that bring together, on opposite sides of the interrogation table, highly trained police officers. The crux of screenwriter Jed Mercurio’s subtlety resides in the manner in which the polarity hunter–hunted, detective–culprit, innocent–guilty is rhythmically inverted.

The most spectacular and specular confrontation of this sort is located in the fourth episode of the fourth season (Mercurio Reference Mercurio2017). Its suggestive title is ‘Moral Superiority’ and it climaxes with the interrogation of Detective Chief Inspector Roz Hartley, suspected of murder. Which, in fact, she has committed, but under conditions of self-defence that are in themselves a telling example of the reversibility of the perpetrator–victim statuses, but that she cannot reveal without devastating consequences. At the beginning Roz gives the impression of having been caught on the wrong foot, and of yielding under the amount of evidence gathered against her. But then comes the tipping point: her composure of submission and anxiety fades out and she confidently and ironically reverses the odds by targeting the motives of the leading investigating officer. Actually, she conducts a sharp and articulated attack against her nemesis, Superintendent Hastings, that includes allegations of sexist attitudes and affiliation to Masonry (the latter poignantly and memorably dismissed as ‘the mafia of the mediocre’ – Mercurio Reference Mercurio2017, 51). The subtlety is that, while being highly exaggerated, all these allegations cannot be automatically dismissed as false, therefore putting even Hastings’ close and admiring collaborators Arnott and Fleming in an awkward situation. On the chess board of the investigation, Roz’s manoeuvring in her favour of gender equality policies is an astute strategic move. But on a deeper psychological level, it indirectly reveals the bitterness she has accumulated in her struggle through the ranks as a black female police officer. Her restrained but radiating scorn is both acted up and deeply authentic.

Specular interplay may also generate intimately ambiguous relations between investigators and investigated. A most emphatic example is the bond created between Detective Sergeant Arnott and his counterpart John Corbett, a police officer working undercover as ‘John Clayton’, who is suspected by AC-12 of having gone rogue. Even after Corbett/Clayton’s admission that he ordered the assassination of fellow officer Maneet Bindra in order to keep his place in the criminal hierarchy, Arnott’s revulsion is obscured by the fact that he recognizes himself in the other’s rage against the machinery of intra-police corruption he hopes to expose by pursuing his undercover inquiry to its final end (Mercurio Reference Mercurio2019, 47). At the peak of this ambiguous relationship the viewer is incapable of telling who is playing whom; who is the tool and who the mastermind.

The trope of mirroring offers the opportunity of representing government as a process that can metabolize its own opposite, organized crime and corruption. At the same time, following the representational logic of Baroque mirroring, it could be inferred that television itself, as a public service, and thereby as part of the governing process, mirrors itself in the representation of complex governance delivered by police drama series of its own device.

Labyrinthine Labours

The labyrinth is probably the archetypal Baroque motif, theme and symbol. But it is not easily connectable to drama, least of all to government. The recovery of the motif in neo-Baroque theories attempting to explore the ‘spirit’ of our time was done preferentially from an (anti)epistemic perspective. The labyrinth, as metaphor of the radical critique of metaphysics, is presumed to express the gap between consciousness and world, between phenomenon and numen, it is projected as a meandering vagrancy through a maze of completely illusory ‘ultimate’ principles (Degli-Esposti Reference Degli-Esposti1996; Baler Reference Baler and McGaha2016). If at all associated with drama, this touches not on its force of articulation, but on the dramatic situation of feeling lost in the world (Egginton Reference Egginton2010). If associated with government, the labyrinth would rather connote the Kafkaesque, essentially impenetrable, ‘celestial’ bureaucracy.

These theories ignore an important dimension of the labyrinth. In her explorations of the classic and early Christian roots of this symbolism, Penelope Reed Doob uses a tripartite taxonomy according to which a ‘metaphoric labyrinth’ can be interpreted as a sign of: (a) complex artistry; (b) inextricability or impenetrability; and (c) difficult process (Reed Doob Reference Reed Doob1990, 64–94). While (a) and (b) can be easily reconciled with influential visions of the Baroque,Footnote ⁶ or the neo-Baroque (Degli-Esposti Reference Degli-Esposti1996; Baler Reference Baler and McGaha2016; Egginton Reference Egginton2010), (c) appears to have faded from the screen of cultural theory. But it is precisely to this last axis, or layer of meaning, ‘difficult process’, that we should resort in order to reconstruct the bridge between the Baroque spirit and the ordo-Baroque poetics of public police drama.

In order to proceed with this line of argument, let’s consider Reed Doob’s elaboration of the notion of ‘difficult process’:

Actually, government as such also comes into the question, in the context of the analysis of Virgil’s Aeneid:

An ordo-Baroque poetics of government, intentionally or not, associates the labyrinth not (only) with ethical and epistemic puzzlement, but (also) with a meandering (in the sense of difficult) accumulation of collective and personal experience (keep in mind the classical labores, ‘works’), with the deposit, the archive, and with the slow, at times indisputably and unavoidably painful birth of a good (or at least satisfactory) polity.Footnote ⁷

Much like Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, murder mysteries and crime fiction offer an effective mediation between drama and the Baroque imaginary of the labyrinth, which otherwise seem structurally opposed. The investigative narrative accommodates both the need for intensity and closure of classical tragedy, and the reduplications, detours, and rallentando techniques of Baroque narratives. The labyrinthine pattern of the investigation approximates the ramifications and networking of the thinking process, which implies doubt, self-contradiction, successive adjustments, recoiling, radical reversals, or simply dead ends. Consequently, murder mystery plots consist of several courses of inquiry, which seem to refer almost directly to what Reed Doob’s terms ‘multicursal’ (i.e. with more than one exiting solution) labyrinths (Reed Doob Reference Reed Doob1990, 11).

The metaphorical and operational connection between detection and navigating a labyrinth is notoriously made in ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, a Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story (Irwin Reference Irwin1994). But the theme gathers a special nuance in the context of a meta-police drama such as Line of Duty. The multiplication of plot lines, for instance, is emphasized by the multiplication of the investigators themselves. The series develops multilevel and intertwining investigations carried out by regular police detectives, simultaneously with the meta-detectives that investigate the former (at times with intra-AC-12 suspicions that further split the investigation), while suspected/suspended officers conduct their own parallel inquiries (or counter-inquiries, if they try to cover tracks) in order to (honestly, or onerously) exculpate themselves. At the same time, the fact that the AC-12 team has to periodically retrace the steps of previous investigations, be they recent or distant in time (the later situation verging on the subgenre of ‘cold cases’), evokes the experience, typical of traveling through a maze, of repeatedly crossing the same ‘straits’.

The alternation between dynamic, hardboiled and slow-paced sequences of events is pervasive in all five seasons of Line of Duty. Moreover, the realistically rendered force interventions of the police prove more often than not inconclusive or fail completely. This contradictory rhythm suggests advancement in a tortuous unknown territory, where firm decisions, though unavoidable, are likely to mire one even deeper in the unknown (and sometimes in utter ridicule). The experience of being ‘lost’ in the labyrinth of an investigation also connects to another Baroque motif: illusion. The continuous play of appearances (innocents that seem guilty, and vice versa) climaxes on converting the experience of the maze in a haze of moral judgement. The recurrent confrontation of investigative rules and procedures, as well as the general human deductive capacity, with their own limits, points, as already stated, to the blind spots of the policing process, but, at the same time, these blind spots are presented as tests that punctuate a difficult, but not senseless labyrinthine roadmap.Footnote ⁸

Police Drama: The European Connection

Most probably, police drama was synthesized as a distinct genre in the UK on the premises of the domestic tradition of reflecting complex social ordering through dramatic structures (represented in the above by Baroque tragedy, but, of course, not reducible to it), and also of the British primacy in the creation and development of detective and murder mystery fiction. To this we should add the decisive favouring condition of a ‘Baroque’ public television, open to experiments that lead to what is commonly called ‘quality TV’, i.e. the complication of popular genres and formats to the level of turning them into vectors for nuanced social and moral judgements (McCabe and Akass Reference McCabe and Akass2007).

Nevertheless, by shedding light on the Baroque-ness of police work, British police drama conveys a vibrant image of governance that transcends the differences between UK and the continent. It presents the difficult processing of a specific case in the memory of the public institution, which is to say that police drama, as a public art, offers an expressive mimesis of institutional learning. Governance is performed as a slow, difficult, but decided reinstatement of order, as a maieutic of current decency. One of the distinctive features of police drama, that makes it particularly replicable, or at least attractive, for continental Europe at large, is its attempt to retrace laws and procedures to their real origin, which, more often than not, is lived experience.

The letter of the law (and of every imaginable set of regulations or procedural drill) is meant to be categorical and final; it should convey a clear and uncompromising volition (a fiat). But British police drama delivers a poetics of law and government resonant with the fluid, anamorphic nature of actual legal cases. The tension/connection between positive law and real life is a challenge for European societies, and for the European project in general. Therefore, the expressive and imaginative solutions given to this conundrum in the British context through the genre of public television police drama remain significant and inspiring in the broader frame of European devolution, or multi-level governance.

Moreover, police drama might make the case for an understanding of public arts not only as forms of critical reflection on government abuse, but also as part and parcel of actual government, at least because they have a privileged access to streams of confidence and self-confidence that are vital for the process. ‘Confidence’ refers here to the bond between the public institutions and the public, while ‘self-confidence’ refers to the degree in which men and women working in public institutions believe in their mission.

The logical extension of the current study would be a future analysis of the manner in which the suggested ordo-Baroque poetic government has been actually absorbed in Scandinavia, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and so on. It should also inquire whether, and in what forms, the genre was adopted in Eastern Europe (where the totalitarian legacy still weighs heavily on the perception, if not the actual functioning of police and policing). But for the moment, the argument was restricted to pointing out the resources offered by the British format for building a poetics of complex order, of multi-level governance that could prove instrumental to the configuration of a European political imaginary. Set in this perspective, the exploration of the origins and estimation of the ordo-Baroque cohesive potential of British police drama becomes an enterprise of European scale and import. And this, in spite of the objective irony that this awareness emerges at a time when Great Britain had officially left the European Union.