The Killing: Death as Surprise, Death as Interruption

If you’ve watched enough episodes of Law & Order, you know how to react when you find a body.

You’re just a regular guy, going about your day in the heart of Manhattan. Maybe you’ve got a friend or coworker with you, chatting about some B.S. you’ve gotta deal with at work, you know? All of a sudden, there’s a glimpse. A foot poking out from underneath some trash bags. The corner of a torn sleeve on the other side of a bush. Or even the sick white of mortifying flesh. You hesitate, then approach …

And then we cut to our series regulars.

While Law & Order had its formula, it’s unfair to pin the entire police procedural genre on its dark blue uniform. NYPD Blue, NCIS, JAG, CSI, Homicide: Life on the Street and other American shows all have their recipes for disaster. The Brits have The Bill and Prime Suspect. The format works like a sonnet: all the imagery you like, and on any theme, provided it runs for fourteen lines, each of a certain meter, and ends with an envoi.

So what can AMC’s new series The Killing bring to the table?

The pilot episode (S1E1, “Pilot”) begins with our hero, Detective Sarah Linden, jogging through a forest trail.

It’s a tranquil scene. Sure, the POV moves along at a sprinting clip – pity the Steadicam operator who had to keep up with her – but the background is lush greens and blues. Besides, Linden’s face is center frame throughout. She’s a steady, calming presence.

Unlike …

… this screaming teenage girl, sprinting through an overgrown field at night! The only light is a bobbing flashlight fifty yards behind her.

Not exactly peaceful, but not unsettling given the show we’re watching. It’s a police procedural. It’s a murder mystery. Hence, we need a murder. And what better way to humanize the victim – thus making the killer all the more monstrous – than by showing her final hours?

Back to Linden on her jog. Our perspective on Linden is straight ahead. She is coming right at us; in fact, her gaze meets the audience as the camera crosses frame. The road turns into a vanishing point behind her.

Contrast this with our victim, who crosses left to right both times. Linden’s face is clear and identifiable; the victim’s face is shadowed and indistinct.

But now Linden’s running left to right, too. And in the next shot, our victim’s face is clear, while Linden’s obscured from the hips up.

These match cuts have gone on long enough for us to start wondering about the relation between these two. Is Linden flashing back to the night before? Is she reconstructing a chase scene in her head? Perhaps the young girl and Linden are the same and this is a nightmare from her past (a la Agent Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs). Whatever the case, we know there’s a connection.

Our victim gets a moment to rest: catching her breath behind a tree, biting at her fingers in terror, until the bobbing flashlight tells her that her pursuer is nearby. Linden keeps running throughout.

Back and forth, on and on, the music building and pounding throughout, until both Linden and the victim come to the bottom of the hill. We lose the victim at this point – literally – but stay on Larsen. In the distance, on the shore, she sees something.

It’s so close in frame that we can’t focus on it. But it’s gray, bloated and irregular. It doesn’t look pleasant. And the full stop that Linden gives it, plus the hesitant approach, tells us it has to be a dead body.

Because we all know what it is. The language of film has been telling us what it is for the last minute and a half. We’ve followed the victim through the fields, into the woods and down the hill to the shore. And we’ve followed Linden all that way as well. Now the victim’s path crosses with our hero’s. And so begins a twisted tale of murder and betrayal that will lead Sarah Linden to …

Oh, wait, it’s a dog.

Roll credits.

It’s not until after we come back from credits that we finally discover our crime scene. The call Linden took on the shore brings her to a depressing industrial landscape. It’s raining in Washington, like it does sometimes. We get a glimpse of the Seattle skyline in the background, but these ugly crane towers dominate the scene. The subtitle: DAY ONE.

Police tape blocks off the scene. A uniformed officer greets Linden (Detective Linden) at the door to the plant. He runs down the details of the body with the ease of someone who does this every week: “homeless guy found her a couple hours ago. Jane Doe; no ID, wallet …”. Linden takes it all literally in stride, not pausing in her walk as she approaches the building. The officer lets her in, directs her up the stairs, makes some small talk, and then closes the door behind her.

Linden pauses on the stairs a second, torn between checking to see why the door was closed and not wanting to waste time with silly questions. Then she presses on. The plant’s all but unlit from the inside. She pulls out a flashlight, but wouldn’t you know, it barely works.

Sarah follows a dank passage alongside a metal ramp. Bloodstains spatter the walls. Small animals scurry in the distance. She swings the flashlight around, poking tiny beams of illumination that barely bring any more detail to the shadows around her. She finds bloody clothing at intermittent points. The music builds to an ominous pitch, with those plucked dissonant strings that signify madness.

And then she finds it.

And we know we shouldn’t be scared, because it’s not like a corpse can attack her (at least not in this AMC series), and it’s not like the cops would let her go into the building alone if it weren’t secure, so no one’s going to jump out and stab her or bite her, so the worst that can happen is the corpse looks weird and maggoty, or maybe a rat jumps out of the corner and startles her, or maybe the corpse is someone she recognizes, or it falls off the hook in a big bloody mess just so we jump, all of which are things we’ve seen before, so we’re tense with anticipation but not uncertainty, because there’s only a set number of things that can possibly happen now …

Oh, wait, it’s a blow-up doll.

What the hell is going on here? We were promised a murder mystery, right? So far we’ve had two total fakeouts. Who the hell does this Veena Sud think she is? Jerking us around like that.

Who says it’s a fakeout?

Well, come on. Finding that dead dog on the beach instead of the girl’s body.

People find dead animals all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.

And following her through this spooky plant, only for the “corpse” to be a blow-up doll.

People throw surprise parties for departing coworkers all the time. So what?

Yeah, but … you know what I mean.

You thought Linden was going to find the body?

Yeah.

Why?

Well … the shot placement. And the way the cuts were edited together. And it’s almost five minutes into the episode now and I’m still not sure we have a body. Much less who got killed.

So?

Hmm.

Eventually, the director stops leading us by the nose and we do in fact get a crime scene. It’s presented in the most off-hand way possible. The lieutenant stops by Linden’s desk, as she’s cleaning it out, and asks if she’ll run down a call. At the scene, Linden and her replacement – the skeezy-looking Detective Holder – find a bloodstained sweater and a discarded bank card.

We meet the owner of the bank card, Stan Larsen, in our very next scene. He’s a gruff blue-collar type, arriving at an Arabic butcher shop of some sort to collect a delivery. Seems normal enough. But they always do. It’s that placid exterior that hides the soul of a killer.

Our senses get jacked up to alert when Larsen gets a phone call. “Stan. You need to get home. Right now.”

So the cops must be at his house right now. They’re grilling his wife. Or else she knows something the cops don’t – like why Stan’s bank card might be in an undeveloped field in the middle of nowhere. Is she worried? Is she mad? Has Stan’s double-life as a murderer/rapist been exposed, forcing him to …

… fix a broken sink.

All right, seriously? What the hell? What sort of show am I watching? Right now there’s about as much darkness and deceit on The Killing as on an episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County. The director and the writers have given us three clear lead-ins to a crime scene – the shore, the plant, the suspect called home – and each time they’ve backed off. All we’ve got so far is a woman quitting her job, her douchebag replacement, and some minor domestic trouble. Doesn’t Veena Sud know how a police procedural is supposed to work?

Actually, she does.

The Killing is a police procedural for people who know police procedurals backward and forward. In the pilot, it plays to all the tropes we expect. Nubile victims being chased through the woods by flashlight-wielding killers. Tired cops who’ve seen it all before. Working class suspects. The Killing lays out every scene that we know should be coming. And then it screws with them. Not just once, but three times. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times (to quote Ian Fleming) is enemy action.

Why is Sud rattling our expectations like this?

For one, it sends us a message. While the language of a TV script tells a story with the words characters say, the language of film tells a story as well. Shot placement, editing, pacing and soundtrack all communicate a particular message. You wouldn’t shoot our hero cop walking through an unlit warehouse the same way you’d shoot a tired mother coming home to a surprise 40th birthday party. You wouldn’t cut as suddenly from a character receiving a tense phone call from his wife if it were a teacher imparting a lesson to a student in need. The subject matter dictates how the the story is shot.

But Veena Sud (and the director – Patty Jenkins, in the case of the pilot) is framing The Killing like a police procedural, yet at the same time breaking all the rules of police procedurals. If film has a language, then what is the message of this show so far? Abandon your expectations. Put aside your notions of what a police procedural should be like. Take nothing we show you for granted. Your eyes are lying to you.

Sud could have given us this same message in other ways. She could have put it in the mouth of a character: a seasoned old veteran, perhaps, who warns the cocky newcomer that “a real crime scene ain’t like what ya see in the movies, kid.” But she didn’t. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with that – hundreds of acclaimed series have done it in the past. But only when you see it done onscreen, and with such obvious intent, do you realize how much richer a well-shot teleplay can be.

The second reason Sud does this is more sinister. She’s doing it to create tension. It’s hard to scare someone with a police procedural, partly because the format is so well known. But playing with the tropes of the genre shakes up our expectations. It puts us off balance. We’re not really scared. But our senses are more alert. We can no longer tune out between one scene and the next, because the scenes aren’t ending the way they should. We have to keep paying attention, or else we’ll miss something.

Finally, Sud toys with the audience this way – dangling the death in front of us, like a string in front of a cat – because she wants us to reconsider the death. In a police procedural, death is the MacGuffin: the object that makes the plot go. Our protagonists can’t restore the dead person to life with their efforts. Once you’ve watched enough episodes of Law & Order, the deaths all become interchangeable. Last week it was the ambitious architect; this week it’s the jealous hairstylist; next week it’s the racist landlord. They are not people, but objects: lumps of tissue to be examined by coroners and grieved over by next of kin.

But if that’s not what death is supposed to be, then what is it?

On a metaphorical level, death is an interruption. Rosie Larsen is a bright young girl. She plans to go to college, evidently a point of contention in the Larsen household. But her encounter with a murderous stranger interrupted her plans. Death, despite being the one certainty in life, is almost never planned, and murder even less so.

Death is also the reason for the events of The Killing to transpire. And in this context, death also functions as an interruption.

What do Jerry Orbach and Ben Bratt do between murder cases on Law & Order? Apparently nothing. They don’t exist until a dead body summons them, at which point they appear like Furies and descend upon the unrighteous. But Detective Sarah Linden has a life outside of casework. It’s a life she’s leaving, in fact. She’s packing up, ready to quit her job in Seattle PD and move to Southern California with her fiancee. And then her boss asks her to check on a bloody sweater found in a field. Death has interrupted Linden’s routine.

Death interrupts Stan Larsen as well, who gets a phone call notifying him that his daughter’s missing. His normal routine would probably consist of making deliveries or pickups similar to the one we saw. Death interrupts his wife Mich’s routine, too; she has to ask a family friend to pick the kids up from school. Death pulls Rosie’s closest friend, Sterling, out of class to be interrogated by her principal.

In case the meaning isn’t clear enough, the pilot episode distracts us with literal interruptions as well. Watch Linden when she gets the clue that leads to Rosie’s body. She’s standing in a field, the same field where Rosie’s sweater was found. The police have swept this field and the surrounding woods all afternoon. Her intuition tells her something’s there, but her logical faculties haven’t put all the pieces together yet.

Her partner wants to go, so he keeps leaning on the car horn.

Her cell phone rings. It’s her fiancee, who’s flown ahead to California without her. She’s still going to be on that plane tonight, right?

She’s got a map in her right hand.

Oh, and there’s a barking dog.

Linden has four different stimuli competing for her attention. And it’s clear, looking at her face, that none of them really matter to her right now. Her real focus is on the puzzle: if Rosie Larsen was here, where did she go?

If Linden could do her job without all these distractions, there’s a good chance she could get out of here on time. She wouldn’t have to miss her flight. But she can’t. She keeps getting interrupted. She has a blizzard of different things blowing in to distract her. A lesser person might choose to focus on any one of those: yelling at her partner, placating her fiancee, asking someone to shut up that dog. But Larsen doesn’t. She concentrates and sees something we don’t.

Why don’t we see it? Because we’re distracted. The camera keeps jumping from one stimulus to another. Our POV keeps getting interrupted.

And this is what it’s like to have your world overturned by a violent crime. It’s not a perfect simulation, obviously: the confusion of a senseless loss has little to do with the confusion of smash cuts and a jarring soundtrack. But it’s an approximation by degrees. It shows that Sud (and the other producers of The Killing) are trying. It’s important to them to convey the loss of balance, the disorientation and the interruption that a tragic death can impose on someone’s life.

Why? Because this isn’t just any death. This isn’t just the murder-of-the-week to keep the series going. You need to pay attention.

Time to drop the impartial critic act: The Killing impressed me more than any pilot I’ve ever seen. I think Mad Men is the best thing going on television right now, and even Mad Men struggled in its first episodes. But straight out the gate, The Killing has shown more craft and intelligence than most movies I’ve seen. It’s TV that eats like a movie. I say that because The Killing uses the language of film – techniques of cinematography, sound and pacing – to impart a sophisticated theme. That theme: forget what you know. Discard your preconceptions. Pay attention to everything.

And that’s just the pilot. If you haven’t seen the rest of the series to date, you’re missing out.