“We’ve seen this before.”
“Really?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
The above conjugal discourse recurs quite regularly in the Quinn/Tucker household. The time is eight-ish. Speakers’ roles are interchangeable. We’re well into the hopefully delicious (but often not so) dinner, prepared by the male partner. A grizzled woebegone midlevel Detective, nettlesome to all his or her familiars – up (his or her supervisor), down (inept rookie subordinate), and sideways (buddy, colleagues, bedmate) – faces mortal danger, having – by luck, pluck, and grudgingly acknowledged genius – stumbled (finally!) on the identity of the fiend who committed this bloodcurdling (and quite incredible) crime. The Detective, not to put the point too nicely, is in deep shit. Jane and Carll are on the edge of their chairs – or recumbent against pillows – in the half-light, slackly uxorious, and…
“We’ve seen this before.”
“Really?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“You may be right.”
“So who did it?”
“I can’t remember.”
… and the cozy couple continues to attend the colorful developments on their blackboard-wide screen.
Do we diagnose dementia here? Amnesia? Indifference? Intellectual sloth? I’d argue not (again hopefully). This (presumably) not atypical duo has seen this thriller before, plus or minus, with characters sporting British, Finnish, Scottish, Brooklyn, Navajo, and other accents, but always, more or less, the same plot: an estranged hard-bitten Detective faces complexity, hostility, and jeopardy achingly alone, prevailing against all odds. Way to go, Detective, but oh, how sad!
Whence, you might ask, this Detective trope? Why its evident popularity (for they keep making these streamed series, at no small expense)? What does our addiction tell us about ourselves (for all stories are – at least subtextually – about ourselves)?
Wiki will refer you to Edgar Allen Poe, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and – the big kahuna! – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – then Agatha Christie, et al., with maybe a backward glance at Oedipus and some Sanskrit dude, for the form’s origins. For going on two centuries, we’ve been bingeing on this scarcely plausible protagonist. Why?
Community has been the cost of modernity. Villages cared for their own; everybody from Mayor to scoundrel had their place. They belonged. In the City we’re transients, anonymous, at risk of nonexistence, for how can we exist if known to none? Where everybody’s a stranger, anybody can be an axe-murderer. The Detective is both a victim of modernity and our heroic defender against invisible but ever-lurking stalkers. Praise be!
Grownups no less than children repeat stories to allay our fears. Kids don’t know from detectives: their monsters are disrupters of the family unit. Estrangement is their dread, not erasure.
Grownups these days fear non-existence. Subtract me tomorrow, would anybody notice? Loved ones, friends, membership organizations safeguard our identities: I exist because I belong. Reading this sentence, you make me matter in my own perception. Who would I be otherwise!
The Detective stands between us and annihilation. A trend in these stories is the cold case. Some stiff was slain ages ago and nobody cares! Who doesn’t shudder at such an outcome? Would anyone go digging for me if I vanished!
The Detective’s dedication to our discovery restores our human worth. So what if we’ve seen this story before? It’s nice to be reminded we matter at least a little, that gone we’ll be recalled, however briefly, that we were not just roadkill.
Only humans need stories because only we cherish individuality: I matter, not just we. Puppy Henry doesn’t dread extinction because he can’t imagine it. He’s intent on surviving, like any creature, but if he doesn’t, eh, there will be other dogs.
I’m counting on a Detective to collar my killer and salvage my story.