What evil lurks

Last night Law and Order: Criminal Intent ripped Ted Haggard from the headlines.  Then they had a scientist who I guess was part Richard Dawkins, part Stephen Jay Gould, and part Sam Harris, murder Haggard's wife by throwing her down a flight of stairs.

Tom Arnold played the Ted Haggard character.  He was very good in the part and for some reason I wasn't the least bit surprised.  I can't find anything in his IMDB filmography, though, that would have prepared me to be unsurprised.

The character was called Reverend Cal Riggins.  Note the three letter first name and the double g.  Ted, Cal.  Haggard, Riggins.  Cute. Arnold played him with a suggestion of emotional stuntedness, as if he was trying to hide the fact that he was really an overgrown boy, which seemed right for a man who thinks he can lead a double life in public. Does Arnold have a lisp?  He lisped a bit as Riggins.  Not a stereotypical effeminate lisp to suggest closeted homosexuality.  A little boy's missing a tooth lisp.

Even though Arnold was the biggest name guest star and the biggest name guest star is usually the murderer, I knew the writers weren't going to make Riggins the killer.  That would have been piling on.  The motive would have been too obvious too.

I knew it wasn't Michael Nouri, who played Riggins' business manager, either.   He was pushed forward too soon as a suspect.

That left the gay hooker and the scientist as suspects.

I guessed the scientist, although I was at first disappointed.  The Riggins character and the scientist have a road show together.  They go from city to city "debating" the existence of God.  The scientist is a prosletyzing atheist like Dawkins and Harris.  The only reason I mentioned Gould as a possible model is that Reg Rogers, the actor playing the scientist, has a thick thatch of dark hair like Gould used to have when he was young.  No mustache though.  And Gould was in his less flamboyant way a professional debunker like the scientist in the story.  The reason I was disappointed when I realized that the scientist was going to turn out to have done it is that, first, I knew his motive would be so convoluted as to be absurd---Criminal Intent's mysteries are often dependent on the real mystery being not the murder but the mind of the murderer and that leads to some very tortured psychoanalytical analysis in place of an actual solution---and, second, I didn't like the obvious irony.

"Oh look.  The professional man of reason turns out to be irrational!  How about that?"

But as the show went on and it became more certain that the scientist was the killer I began not to mind the irony and then not to see it as an irony but as a continuation of the show's long-running theme.

Of course the man of reason turns out to be irrational in this episode because that's how it turns out in almost every episode.

In the universe of Criminal Intent, no one is rational.

No one is rational because no one is immune to pain.

When the show debuted, the emphasis was on Bobby Goren's brilliance as a detective.  Goren was a present day Sherlock Holmes, and Vincent D'Onforio's portrayal of Goren owed a lot to Jeremy Brett's hyperaware, hyperactive, neurotic to the brink of hysteria Holmes.

But the show was also an homage to Columbo.

Goren was the weird, distracted, persistent but ingratiating detective the murderers both underestimated and, despite themselves, came to like---or came to want to make like them.  And in those shows the killers were shown going about their business of killing and covering up their crimes without any attempt to fool the audience about their guilt because the fun was in watching how Goren/Columbo was going to trick them into tripping themselves up.

Back then, motives were usually simple and base.  Money was often the root of all evil, and when it wasn't money it was sex.

Over time the emphasis shifted from the crime and the criminal to the intent.  And when that happened the mind of the killer became the mystery and Goren changed from being a brilliant detective to being a brilliant, although manipulative, psychoanalyst.  The denoument of many episodes wasn't the solving of the case but the solving of the criminal when Goren finally maneuvered him or her into letting the cat out of the psychological bag.

When this shift occurred, the show became far more sympathetic to its criminals.   The point was sympathizing.  Goren solved his cases by sympathizing and identifying with the killer.  He felt their pain because it was like his pain.  Goren himself began to grow edgier, darker, and more neurotic, and more of his personal life began to sneak into the scripts.

This season his personal life has come front and center, with the appearance of Rita Moreno as Goren's crazy mother, who, although dying of cancer, still has the strength and lunatic intelligence to torture and torment her guilt-ridden son.    

Having her on the scene has helped bring Goren's character back from the edge.  For a little while, starting last season and continuing into the beginning of this one, it looked as though the plan was to write Goren out of the show by having him crack up.  Now Goren has to keep himself together in order to be there for his mother.  We'll see what happens when she dies.

Goren's, and the show's growing sympathy for the killers, was an interesting mirror of what was happening on the original Law and Order, where more and more the scripts were tending in a Fry them all! attitude towards all their perps.  As the original has grown more authoritarian, Criminal Intent has grown almost too forgiving and therapeutic.

Almost every murderer turns out to have been psychologically murdered, or at least assaulted to the point of permanent crippling, at some point in their past, even Goren's longtime nemesis, the apparent embodiment of Evil, Nicole Wallace, we've learned, was sexually abused by her father.

Lately, Goren, and Logan, haven't been such brillaint detectives.  They are less like Sherlock Holmes and Lt Columbo than like Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, who doesn't solve his cases, he reports on them as they unfold and the criminals come to their inevitable bad ends.  Archer goes from character to character, listening to their stories, until at last he manages to be on the scene when all the stories tumble into each other like dominoes and the last story, the killer's story, is forced out of him.

Goren and Logan wander around, listening, following the stories more than the clues, until they find themselves in the position of witness to the telling of the last story as the murderer's already unraveling psyche comes to its final thread.

The scientist turned out to have done it and his motive was convoluted to the point of absurdity.  He did it because he was trying to hide the fact he had a developmentally disabled teenage son, he did it because he was ashamed of his son, he did it because he was ashamed of being ashamed, he did it because he was in love with the minister's wife and she'd betrayed him, he did it because he hated the minister, he did it because he didn't believe in God so he could do it, because without God all things are permitted, just as Ivan Karamazov said, and he did it because of God, he did it because he was angry at the God he didn't believe exists, angry at Him for not existing.

He did it because he was angry and in pain and he lost his head.

The professional man of reason acted irrationally because he was a human being and human beings aren't rational, they are only conditioned to act as if they are rational.

What we think of as our own good behavior, as the result of our own clear-headed thinking and the rational choices we have made, is really forced upon us by habit, societal constraints, and irrational and unconscious motivations that are the effects of causes we don't remember or can't admit happened.

The scientist, last night's show implied, was more likely to act irrationally than the preacher, because he didn't believe---not in God but in his own irrationality.  The preacher has no defenses against his own biological compulsions because he doesn't believe in them.  He believes only in sin, which is to say he believes he is rational and capable of making choices.  If he makes the wrong choice, if he chooses to sin, it's either because he's weak or he's been tricked by the devil.  But even so he does believe in his own capacity to commit evil and to a degree that protects him.  It keeps him on his guard.  The scientist was defenseless against the evil inside himself because he saw life as a matter of making rational choices.  He hates the preacher's religion and idea of God as prime mover because they get in the way of people's being rational.   Having rejected religion and God, he's decided that he has cleared his own mind.  He is a rational man, and therefore he has nothing to worry about, nothing inside himself to guard against.

At the end of day, none of us, not even Bobby Goren, knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men and women of reason.

______________________________________

Related reading, as if this is school and you need homework:  The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris.

Selected works of Stephen Jay Gould.

The best of Lew Archer.

Comments

[charlie]

Lance -- great post.

The CSI style openings are really turning me off from CI. They erase some of the humanity wiht the blurred shots.

I agree with your point about the detectives becoming worse. I think Logan falls more into your model of just watching the crime come together, and that could provide an intersting contrast. Goren was getting too brilliant at times a few years ago so they had to take that down, but at least they didn't make him too self destructive (aka SVU).

L&O generally is getting too right wing for me.

[Ken Houghton]

Fairness note: Tom Arnold is actually good in True Lies.

[CJColucci]

Do you think Lt. Columbo is embittered because he never made Captain? There's probably a made-for-TV movie in Columbo's last case (I suppose the killer has to be Patrick McGoohan), his retirement, and his reflections on his career.
By the way, I always love how homicide cops seem to be authorized to "ignore" witnesses' lower-level illegalities in the pursuit of the greater crime. I wonder if real cops work this way?

[Chuck]

I remember Arnold being pretty good in Happy Endings even if the movie itself was mediocre. Wish I'd watched that episode--sounds interesting.

[Falstaff]

CJColucci:
...I always love how homicide cops seem to be authorized to "ignore" witnesses' lower-level illegalities in the pursuit of the greater crime. I wonder if real cops work this way?

I'm not sure how this works in most places. But, growing up in Portland, Oregon, I recall my father (who was a policeman for thirty-plus years, including time as a homicide detective) remarking how the rulebook often phrased its directives in terms of An officer may, and only rarely ventured into An officer shall, giving the individual cops plenty of leeway to judge situations for themselves. The exceptions were, as I recall, if a crime is committed right in front of one's eyes, or domestic violence. Stuff like that.

[David W.]

The scientist turned out to have done it and his motive was convoluted to the point of absurdity.

Talk about your set-ups now... :-p

[Lynesse]

Interesting. I've never seen anyone analyze L&O or its spin-offs. They don't, to me, seem to reward analysis of the literary/thematic sort since the writing can be clunky and heavy-handed, and there's a re-set button at the end of every episode. SVU in particular is kind of cracked out.

I haven't watched much CI, but I do agree that there hasn't been much actual detection going on lately. The detectives are spectators more than agents.

[Jim Teacher]

Great analysis of a great show. When I first saw L&O: CI, I couldn't watch it, not only becuase it was a sharp break from the rigid formula of L&O Classic, but also because of Goren himself: The way he lumbered through scenes and upsetting their inhabitants, invading people's spaces. Like you note about the show's criminals, I eventually came around.

[Kate Marie]

I've only ever seen Criminal Intent in reruns, but I've liked it -- particularly Goren and his partly sympathetic/partly psychologically sadistic persona.

I will add that, for me (and, I'd argue, for someone like Dostoyevsky), the problem with hyper-rationlists is not only that they believe in their own rationality, but that they believe the rational is synonymous with the good.

[Njorl]

I really wish that the L&O people would only rip a story from headlines once. The Haggard story was done by original L&O.

On a barely related note...

I saw a commercial for an SVU episode with someone saying "Elliot would never murder someone". That's ridiculous. The Elliot Stabler I've been watching is certainly going to either start murdering suspects or kill himself. He can't cope with the stresses of his job, and he can't accept help.

[Bill S]

At first, I thought you were referring the the Broadway Singer/Actor Sam Harris. I was a little disappointed when I realized you were talking about the other one. :)

[Lance]

CJColucci: There's probably a made-for-TV movie in Columbo's last case (I suppose the killer has to be Patrick McGoohan)

Yes! Exactly! I has to be McGoohan. Good trivia question, though: After McGoohan, who made the most appearances as a murderer on Columbo? I vote for Roddy McDowell.

[Jennifer]

I'd say Robert Culp.

[vernonlee]

I have a post up about some backstage wrangling vis-a-vis the show:

http://vernonlee.blogspot.com/2007/02/law-order-requiem-for-criminal-intent.html

[HairlessMonkeyDK]

Kate Marie said:

"I will add that, for me (and, I'd argue, for someone like Dostoyevsky), the problem with hyper-rationlists is not only that they believe in their own rationality, but that they believe the rational is synonymous with the good.".

First of all, what the hell is a "hyper-rationalist"?
Second, I've never met anyone, terming themselves rationalists, who've claimed that Rationalism automatically = Good. Perhaps they've called it "good", but not "Good", if you catch the difference.
Third, I have, however, come across many religious people
who believe either: 1) That because they are "saved", anything goes, or, 2) That they can do what they want and seek absolution afterwards.

Sure, everyone can be arrogant, no matter their religious beliefs or lack of same, but purely as a matter of -thinking-, I can't see how superstition would ever beat out that oh, so dreaded "hyper-rationalism".