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Commentary on the TV Series Intelligence, Episode 2
There is a lot going on here, with the various characters and plots and locales springing up. I’m going to step back a bit, squint my eyes, and think about how all this might be seen on a larger canvas. There are levels upon levels appearing, making this series worth watching 2 and 3 times, and more. It’s like my copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which is dog-eared and falling apart. I always go back to it when I have run out of other things to read, and the richness of it never palls. Like that novel, there are themes evident in Intelligence underneath what is going on between the individual characters and their organizations, which are both legal and illegal and often a mixture of both. In Proust, the themes are art, time, and society. In Intelligence, the absence of certain components are themselves ongoing motifs. These have “incredible negative capacity” as Annie Hall says in the movie of the same name.
Firstly, there is the disconnection from nature. The stunning West Coast scenery is repeatedly rushed through and ignored, as if the characters were all blind and deaf, and the viewers are participants in this throwaway of priceless bounty, the only true bounty that we earthlings possess. Women, and the role of mother, is likewise devalued in this milieu. Like the earth, the role of the female mother, in this series Francine Reardon, played with hurricane force by Camille Sullivan, is disrespected, and unsupported. She is stressed and suffering, is repeatedly treated with contempt, and figuratively spat upon over and over again. All the characters, on both sides of the law, are consumed with enlarging their own territory, gaining more power and money, but to what end? As we learn more about Jimmie and Mary we see that their lives are singularly hollow, loveless, and colourless, and are likely to get more so, as the present course continues. They have walled themselves off from the treasures of the earth, which are natural beauty, nature itself, and for mankind, love.
Continuing with the Earth motif, the names of characters provide some Rorschach clues – Mary Spalding – Mother of God….car tires ruining the earth. Teddy Atlas, Atlas supporting the sky on his shoulders, and now, the newer dictionary entry for the word Atlas – a U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile.
Yes, the characters are really creatures of the city landscape. But so be it. As representatives of greed, power mongering, manipulation and intrigue , they are great. Best to understand these characters as much as it is possible to understand disordered minds. They are so sharp and these minds cut. This is no world for mamby pamby mommies. On the other hand if they gentled down, they would probably be sucked into some kind of vorex of intrigue. Just like grannie said , “No rest for the wicked”.
I wonder about the viewers, myself included, who begin to relate these machiavellian characters and barely blink an eye when some poor guy gets bummped off. Why the fascination? Anyway, I dont think anyone could keep up the pace of Jimmy Reardon. Yes, he is wound up pretty tight and driven but they action is kind of head splitting.
I am not as big a fan as you but I agree that this is an important work that gives a view into an Orwellian World that is beginning to devour Canada. Cops have a dark side and criminals have a good side. But throw in the technology of spying and the international manoeverings and the whole thing starts to spin out of control. Who is pulling the strings? Or is it eveybody pulling the strings in a mad circus?
#1. Posted by Bev Ross in Port Alberni, BC on July 6th 2009 at 11:14am
Intelligence might be looked at as a paradigm of the world. It’s a pared down version. If we cut away the propaganda, the duplicity, the mindless consumerism, the apathy, the numbness, the blindness of the world around us, it would look like what it really is - the cut-throat, conscienceless, lying, earth- destroying world portrayed in Intelligence. This numbness in the face of death, starvation, homelessness, and now torture, is already here in our daily lives. So how is it really so different from Jimmie Reardon’s world? Canada sends troups to Afghanistan knowing full well that hundreds will be killed, as well as civilians in that area. The maimed and the mentally destroyed soldiers we don’t talk about at all. We walk right past homeless and hungry people every day. Some of them are found dead on the coldest winter nights. Do you hear any outcry? When a culture no longer will support motherhood, in this case Francine Reardon, it is a dying culture. On a larger scale, when the inhabitants of earth only exploit and destroy nature for their own greed, humanity itself is doomed. Intelligence is like a newer version of the novel 1984. There is a deeper truth here than what you are reading in your daily newspaper.
#2. Posted by Madeline Bruce in Nanaimo, B. C. on July 6th 2009 at 10:03pm