Women, dropping like flies

by David Benjamin

“All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien

MADISON, Wis.—Admittedly, I watch too much television. Much of my viewing dwells on cop dramas. I watch enough of these shows to discern patterns. This is why, in the fifth season of a British series featuring Inspector Lynley, I had a sense of foreboding when DI Lynley reconciled with his wife, Helen.

“Tommy” Lynley had spent two seasons separated from Helen. He had let “the job” interfere with his family life and had shown little sympathy after Helen’s extremely predictable miscarriage. I say predictable because, according to some unwritten dramaturgic fiat, TV cops never have sweet little newborn babes. If they have children at all, the kids are surly teenagers, drug-addicted dead-enders or abduction victims. The TV cop’s ideal kid is a rebellious teenage junkie covered with tattoos, riddled with piercings and abducted by Albanian white slavers.

In season five of “The Inspector Lynley Mysteries,” Tommy reconciles with Helen and they go all lovey-dovey,. “Oh Christ,” I said to Hotlips, “this can’t go on.” By ironclad rule, TV cops never have happy marriages. Most are already pre-divorced. British detectives tend to be so socially inept that can’t even get a gal to the altar. So, here’s Lynley, blissfully married and having regular sex with his spouse. Helen works as a psychologist for the police, so she understands the demands of hubby’s job and shrugs off his all-nighters as the price she pays for true love.

“This can’t go on,” said Hotlips.

It didn’t. At the end of season five, a crazed girl points a gun at DI Lynley. Intervening psychologically, Helen talks soothingly. She calms the girl. The crisis seems over. But, suddenly, the bad guy in the story directs a slur at the crazed girl. The girl’s rage reignites. She aims at DI Lynley. Helen—still in shrink mode—leaps between gun and husband. Too late, she entreats the girl not to shoot. The bullet goes straight to Helen’s heart. Tommy is saved. Helen expires on the street, exacerbating DI Lynley’s perpetual state of brooding guilt. Although senseless in context and startling to viewers, Helen’s death serves nevertheless to sustain the TV cop show fan’s faith in the comforting familiarity of formula.

I knew Helen had to go, but it bothered me because for years, through myriad cop shows, I’ve recognized a certain strain of misogyny in this pattern. The creators of these shows seem to harbor a conviction that they get more viewer gratification by killing women that they do when they knock off guys.

The foremost exponent of this proposition is the Law and Order: Special Victims franchise, now the longest lasting cop show in history. Its bread and butter is violence against women, many of whom end up naked and dead, often serially. The ones who survive their rapes, beatings, disfigurement and trauma inevitably receive from Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), who has become the longest lasting cop in TV history, the assurance that “None of this is your fault.”

The presence of a woman—Olivia Benson, Barbara Havers, Jane Tennison—standing over the dead body of a murdered coed or mutilated hooker serves to veil television’s appetite for killing women.

I first noticed this trend in another cop show, “NCIS,” in which crimes against women are not obviously its guiding premise. In “NCIS,” victims tend to be sailors and Marines, a largely male demographic. Because of this, the show’s steady flow of murdered women is all the more incongruous. Indeed, the lifelong anguish and brooding guilt of the show’s hero, Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon), derives from the murder of his wife and daughter. Frequent flashbacks to this seminal tragedy haunt Gibbs and justify his closed-off and cryptic emotions. Meanwhile, the women of “NCIS” are dropping like flies. Season two ends with a bullet to the brain of special agent Caitlin Todd, theretofore played with wit and éclat by Sasha Alexander. Until the scriptwriters senselessly murdered her, Kate was the show’s most interesting and engaging character.

In its femicidal drumbeat, “NCIS” goes on to kill a) Gibbs’ third (or fourth?) wife, Diane, b) NCIS director Jenny Shephard in a hail of bullets, c) NCIS director Vance’s wife Jackie, murdered by rogue Israeli commandos, d) NCIS pathologist Jimmy Palmer’s blameless wife Breena, killed by Covid-19 (really? C’mon!), e) agent Nikki Jardine, also riddled by a hail of bullets, f) special agent Paula Cassidy blown to smithereens by a bomb—while saving a bunch of guys, g) a substantial percentage of the girl sailors in the Navy, f) a scantily clad swimsuit model in particularly grisly style, and h), in an act of gratuitous cruelty, Emily, the cute, spunky daughter of FBI Agent Fornell. Eventually, the show even kills Kate’s successor, Ziva. Although Ziva later springs back to life, this TV miracle takes two years and hardly mitigates the viewer’s pain over her expiration.

The pain, however, is the point. As demonstrated in a vast range of genres, murders of guys occur in veritable droves. For example, I once tried to keep up with the number of males shot, stabbed, strangled and blown up in the movie True Lies. I lost count in the eighties. The only woman killed in the whole movie is the evil sexpot, Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere), whose demise is immensely satisfying—which, again, is the point.

The violent death of a woman is an anomaly that summons an emotional reaction—a shock—that tends to be felt more deeply than the death of a man, or of eighty-odd men who have the temerity to oppose Arnold Schwarzenegger.

My simple analysis of this phenomenon is that, since immemorial, men have been assigned roles that risk death—soldier, firefighter, gendarme, steeplejack, cannon fodder, etcetera. Men have borne the brunt of battle, women have nursed the wounded. Men, to support their families, have gone into the depths of earth and ocean, teetered on the ledges of high steel, flown airplanes into barrages of flak, lined up on Soldier Field to face the Monsters of the Midway, while their women, what? Dusted the furniture and baked cookies.
You don’t kill someone who’s got ginger snaps in the oven.

It’s tradition: Men are strong and silent, women are vulnerable and voluble.

Consider, for example, The Shawshank Redemption, a film with an all-male cast. The most effeminate among the first-nighters in the prison—dubbed “Fat Ass” by the inmate fraternity—bursts into weeping and cries out in anguish. His reckoning, which arrives with manly decisiveness, is to be beaten to death on the cellblock floor. The hero of the story, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), utters not a peep nor shows a flicker of feeling throughout a gruesome scene that troubles even the hardened criminals who had taunted the weepy weakling. The viewer, both appalled at this atrocity and swayed by the prison ethic that Fat Ass was asking for it, soothes this ambivalence by admiring Andy’s quiet strength.

When the Titanic sank, the women were loaded onto lifeboats, the men were left behind to drown. Men, even in the face of death, hold their water, keep their peace and take it “like a man.” Women are punished by losing their men.

So, as I observe and lament the untimely dispatch of cool girls like Kate, Gibbs’ wives and Fornell’s little girl, I reflect on the subtle but persistent imprinting, on our collective psyche, of the variant value of human life according to gender. The moral of a thousand stories is that when you kill a girl, even if she’s no more traditionally feminine and delicate than her male counterparts in the CID, FBI, NYPD or NCIS—even if she’s Ziva!—you tug more effectively at the heartstrings of the voyeurs who watch her die.

Or, if the babe you’re killing is Juno Skinner, you think what a beautiful corpse she’s gonna make.