Law & Order

Since moving to Boston, we inherited two televisions with the house. Each is connected to cable (a necessity here). One TV is in the basement and is pretty much permanently affixed to PBS-Kids (and/or a running loop of Thomas the Tank Engine videos). The second TV is in our bedroom (remember, we inherited this setup) and is also permanently affixed to a station, in this case TNT. Why? Because my wife looooves "Law & Order." Luckily, it can be broadcast three or four times a night and since it's been on TV since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's plenty of episodes to show.

We watched the show often, since our time in NYC. However in recent years I've found the show to be harder and harder to watch. The formula has become tiring. First of all there are the factual implausibilities: the level of murder in L&O-Land makes Manhattan look like Baghdad, the DA's staff have only two prosecutors, and the fact that the late seasons had the Manhattan DA (who has been a liberal Jewish Democrat for the past 300 years) as a cornpone Tennessee Republican cracker.

But the formula goes as such: (1) Before the opening credits is some grisly murder 'torn out of the headlines' (which is OK as a premise, I'm not criticizing this part as much as categorizing); (2) the police procedural which ALWAYS has a red-herring. Always. Jeez! The cops go after some generally skeevy dude and it's always wrong. Finally the real culprit is unearthed and it's often tendentious (it's the way cheap mystery writers create the sense of the unknown by either defying logic or by not giving you enough info). The green herring (as opposed to red), the real culprit, is usually a B-list movie star - a quick hint for the fourth wall viewer (3) The DAs are brought in and since the perpetrator is clearly guilty (sporting swastika tattoos on their forehead or what have you) the case must be made artificially suspenseful by having a major piece of the evidence thrown away on some technicality ('suspense' in L&O in the "Order" portion is as fictive and false as the 'mystery' is in the "Law").

This part generally causes me to leave the room in frustration. I just don't like being force fed images of stupidity. It's almost equivalent to the parts of late Dirty Harry style 80s films when the judge allows the serial-rapist to go free because the arresting officer read him his rights while hepped up on Twinkie filling.

The 'Suspense' is fake, false, and insulting... and the rest of the case proceeds from that handicap; the ADA needs to prove the killer shot his grandmother but the gun was ruled inadmissible because it was made out of pressed-together Korans. Whatever. The 'suspense' also violates the basic rules of narrative: a story makes sense for real reasons.

The L&O from the other night was a beaut: (1) the death is of a woman who was stoned to death (religion? maaaybe). (2) The red-herring was a set of Albanian Muslims who were known to be violent against immodesty (the victim was an art show producer who was showing pictures of Muslim violence against women). (3) The herrings are given an airtight alibi by the FBI (who have put the group under watch) but who happened to be investigating the murder victim because of NSA warrantless wiretapping; ya see, she was talking about "jihad" over the phone (and that was the theme of the art show, har har). However, lucky break! The FBI wiretap overheard that the victim was having an adulterous affair with the Muslim artist whose work she was going to show! Aha!

Now, so far, the writers have developed three very provocative plot directions but since we're in the throw away section of the show, none of these will be used again. Some people could look at this as a sign of the salubrious artistry of the screenwriters. But smart people (like you and me) will recognize that each part is salacious tabloid exaggeration - things that just don't really exist in real life and especially in close proximity to each other. No matter. It's all in the bin, for now we find out that the victim's son is the culprit.

He's discovered through another set of tendentious links. The victim's husband failed to mention to the cops that his son is a paranoid psychotic who has been brainwashed by an Evangelical pastor (played by a B-list Movie Star, Samwise Gamgee and/or Rudy depending on your age) into believing he was a messiah. The pastor convinced the killer to stone his mother to death because she committed adultery (bad) with a Muslim (badder).

OK, so basically, in the real world the killer and his pastor will be arrested and put behind bars. But not in Law & Order! Ya see, the killer claims he has visions from God and has a psychiatrist prove that his brainwaves change while he's under prophecy and the judge accepts this proof to say that the killer can't be held guilty while he's acting our prophecy.

Uh, yeah. Sure. Why is this even put on television? Well, after the regrettable few years of Fred Thompson as the Manhattan DA, the ultra-liberal writers are able to explain over and over that Americans hate Muslims so much, and love Christian wackos so much, that anything Christians do - especially violence against Muslims - will be considered acceptable to a Manhattan jury.

Maybe, maybe, if the show were set in Lubbock, Texas I'd have an easier time accepting that premise (as well as the huge yearly body count). But not in Manhattan. And you can say that I'm taking this too seriously. I am, I guess, but only because I watched it with my own eyeballs and I'm taking out vengeance for it's insult to my cranium. However, the response to people who accuse me of 'too seriously'-ism, you have to answer why fiction should be allowed to be not only stupid and incoherent (which I can basically live with) but also to teach bad moral lessons? To suggest that the world is actually much more of a hateful place THAN IT ACTUALLY IS.

I remember my reaction to the horrid little film "Wag the Dog" which indicted all Americans as credulous and easy to fool. Some even have put the proof of this movie on the Iraq war, to say that we bought those lies just as the movie predicted. NO! People bought the Iraq War's lies because (a) we had just been attacked on 9/11 and so people were jumpy about enemies, especially known psychopathic ones, (b) the government made the case using false information that Iraq was both responsible for 9/11 and that Saddam was preparing nukes against us... and the Press helped pass along these lies, (c) when the lies became clear (in 2005 or so), the nation moved firmly against the war (cf. the 2006 & 2008 elections).

Wag the Dog was evil back in 1997 because of the mean-spirited lies that it claimed were truths; for the accusation that people are scum. Law & Order, in its worst episodes (they're not all bad, only in the last few years when they ran out of ideas), does the same thing.

In the above episode, the court case proceeds against the pastor and - luckily enough - the police are given hours of incriminating videos of the organization which just happen to have been taped by one of the pastor's camp-counselor. Ya see, the pastor has been running a Christian-style madrassa that teaches 8-13 year old kids to fight a war against Muslims (even showing the kids in camouflage clothes and camo face-paint). And two kids went along with the killer and helped stone the mother to death. And in the full court the pastor starts screaming about how holy-war against the Muslims was necessary and that he agrees with what the killer did.

Yet he's acquitted. Why? Because Americans hate Muslims because Americans are so totally Christian. Proof? One of the jurors was caught reading the Bible for help in the deciding the case and he's dismissed as a juror!

The lessons learned are infuriating and insulting. Accept better.

Update Postscript: It's this same misanthropy that makes me also hate "slasher" horror films. The whole genre just hates people, and so do shows like this.

And I had a spare moment and found the name of the cruddy L&O episode I tore apart above: "Angelgrove." And to show you what I'm up against, here's the comment of some doofus IMDB member:

the story of a boy stoning his mother was compelling. I knew the Christofascists had Jesus camps in this country, but I never suspected that we could have Islamofascist-type Madrassas to indoctrinate the youth into killing for Christ. One would have to be completely clueless to suspect that a jury would convict in this case. Of course, the prejudices of the average juror would compel them to let this wacko go.

Sigh.