Robin Tunney and Simon Baker in The Mentalist.
My wife Sharon is a fan of police procedural shows, which means she has most of network TV to choose from (J. Edgar Hoover must be smiling somewhere, having innovated with newsreels and so effectively propagandized for the good guys in the Big G).
One of the shows she likes, and which I must watch with her, is The Mentalist (renewed Wednesday, according to CBS, though she’s not happy about losing Eleventh Hour and Without a Trace). The Mentalist stars the fine Australian actor Simon Baker, and this is a cute show because he’s good and so is the ensemble of actors he works with — though he was much more interesting on a far better show, The Guardian, a few years back.
Be that as it may, the plot of the season finale Tuesday night turned on the return of Red John, a psychopath who killed the wife and daughter of Baker’s character, Patrick Jane, a mind-reader who works with the California Bureau of Investigation. I despise hackneyed plots like this, with returning super-criminals presenting the big challenge to our hero; it’s lazy and stupid.
But the worst part was the plot development, when Jane goes to visit a blind woman (Alicia Witt) at her home, and learns that she knows Red John, though of course she’s never seen him. (Another cheap gag.) And what do we learn about this mysterious killer, this freak who haunted the whole first season and doubtless will do so in the second?
He loves classical music.
And we learn this as Witt’s character plays the familiar C major Prelude from the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
Not all that long ago on another cops show, Criminal Minds, a master serial killer played by Keith Carradine, who thwarts the dedicated FBI profilers, is described as a lover of Beethoven.
What is the deal? Why is elite criminality associated with a love of classical music? Surely it’s just more lazy scriptwriting, in which writers can easily telegraph to the audience that this is a criminal to be reckoned with, simply by summoning up the idea that he listens to string quartets.
In a way, I suppose it’s a complimentary stereotype: If you love classical, you must be a brainiac. That’s certainly not true; classical music is just music — of a different genre than others, but still music.
I guess the thing to do is research the musical tastes of the world’s biggest criminals and find out whether Mozart was or is on their turntables, CD players, or iPods. I’ll pass on this, since it would be gory, depressing research, but I’ll wager a guess that their musical tastes would vary widely, and classical probably wouldn’t be right up there at the top.
But maybe someday one of these recurring creeps can be enamored of a completely different kind of music. They wouldn’t be any less scary, and Bach wouldn’t have to be besmirched in the process.
4 Comments
May 22, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Interesting post! May I quote you and put a link at my site to this? It does seem that shows do this more frequently than I might like. (But then I did just read about a real killer who loves classical music! Uh-oh.)
Hope you don’t mind this random comment & question at your blog.
May 22, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Patty:
By all means, quote and link away.
Maybe someone else has another example, too.
May 22, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Thanks! I’ll be posting this tomorrow morning.
May 23, 2009 at 9:02 am
[...] I read it here. [...]