Ugly “American”?

Sarah Caulfield (Genevieve O’Reilly) promises Lucas North that he’ll be the first to know if she discovers anything about the group claiming responsibility for Harry Pearce’s kidnapping in Spooks 8.1. My cap.

Did Lucas North and Sarah Caulfield (and by extension Richard Armitage and Genevieve O’Reilly) have chemistry? Given how Sarah’s plotline turned out, were they even intended to? If they were supposed to and didn’t, whose fault was it? Did failures of writing, characterization, or performance right from the start prevent audience members from granting the Spooks 8 storylines a sufficient willing suspension of disbelief us to accept this romance in any guise, even in the deceptive one eventually revealed by the plot? Though I haven’t been surfing around to get the exhaustive panorama of other fans’ answers to these questions, the stuff I have seen leaves no doubt that many viewers felt confused, disappointed or angry about this relationship. (Indeed, the negative comments about O’Reilly pushed me to watch it the series well ahead of my plan to wait for the DVD, for fear I’d eventually lose all possibility of viewing it with a neutral perspective.) Though Spooks 8 offers us some beautiful lines, stunning moments of truth, and great performances (happily, many of them Hermione Norris‘s), I have to admit that re-watching this series didn’t alleviate my confusion on the relationship issue.

As many of the people who wrote comments on blogs and newspaper articles noted, a chief problem lay in the scripts and the way Sarah Caulfield was written. The challenge, though, lies in figuring out what exactly was wrong with the scripting of “Lucas and Sarah.” It’s not enough to say “the script was bad, the character was written poorly, the relationship was not credible”; we have to think about why we have those reactions. And I think we have to be fairly subtle in our analysis. Spooks 8 was, in my opinion, a failed attempt at an interesting project. The Spooks 7 script was a tightly wound spring that proffered each new piece of information selectively and seductively to the viewer, allowing her to turn it around from all sides before fitting it into the puzzle. Rewatching pays off, as you wonder why you interpreted a piece of evidence in one way when the other now seems so obvious. In contrast, Spooks 8 was not nearly so deftly and economically crafted, even if I found myself very much drawn in by the way that every episode seemed to deal with an essential moment in the characters’ history and relationships, and much more moved overall by the complexity with which the show’s ongoing themes of sincerity (and how lack of it affects relationships) and the dilemma of protecting groups vs. individuals were treated. Given the greater ambitions of series 8, I think we have to ask ourselves how the Lucas / Sarah relationship was impacted by a script that showed a great deal more ambition and edginess than it had in the previous season, and perhaps a corresponding portion of incoherence.

Because we know and love Lucas, fans seemed to have placed much of the blame for the problems in the performance of “Lucas and Sarah” on O’Reilly. Given that I don’t think she was the exclusive source of the problem, or that everything would have been just fine if only another actress had been case in the role, what I write on this topic will probably sound like a defense of her work. That’s an effect of this style of analysis, not a personal goal of mine. Indeed, given the prevalence of the view among fans that O’Reilly caused the problems in “Lucas and Sarah,” it makes sense to start our inquiry with the question of why of Sarah / O’Reilly didn’t work out for so many viewers of series 8.

First, I will disregard some options at the outset. An observer of the occasional excesses of  Armitageworld might wonder if his infatuated fans would have found any actress acceptable in this role. Maybe I am wrong, but while I’m sure some Armitage fans would never accept any romantic partner as good enough for “our Richard,” given the widespread fan support of the actresses who played Margaret Hale and Marian, I firmly believe we would have gone for a villainous love interest for Lucas had the character been right. No question that Armitage fans would have changed a long list of elements had they been writing the script; for a light-hearted take on this question, remind yourself of the delightful ideas expressed by Natalie and Phylly3 in SFR 6. (Pop over and give Natalie some love.) The problem was that the automatic and predictable pre- and early-series hostility toward what we knew about the character stereotypically (“no one is good enough for the noble Lucas” / “aargh, not another willowy blonde CIA agent”) was fulfilled when the character turned out to be so wrong. (If you are one of those fans who feel that no one can be good enough for Lucas, though, you might want to consider collaborating with Skully in developing her Lucas North merchandise collection, a picture of which we see above.)

Second, I am discarding as unserious the argument that the character as written was correct, but that O’Reilly was not an actress of high enough calibre for the show and / or that decisions she made independently for her performance made the character unworkable. Her professional credentials, particularly on the stage and in movies, are certainly on a par with Armitage’s. Though of course it lies in the canon of professionality to do so, Armitage spoke well, unprompted, of her performances when he could easily have remained silent; Ian Wylie quoted him as saying, “You’ll fall in love with Genevieve O’Reilly, who plays Sarah. She’s brilliant.” The sort of roles she gets do not indicate that she’s being cast just because she’s a pretty face. And were I the Spooks cinematographer, I’d insist just for ease of shooting that a relatively tall actress be cast against Armitage.

Certainly, O’Reilly got the accent all wrong –so wrong, indeed, that I wondered whether the mistakes were somehow a part of the characterization of Sarah, i.e., that our first clue to her villainy was supposed to be that we couldn’t really tell where she was from, and our second, that she didn’t know Ben Franklin had never been president of the U.S.–, and this matter deserves further discussion, as does her or the script’s rather reckless deployment of U.S. grammar and usage. But I think –as some viewer comments I saw acknowledged– that U.S. viewers’ anger with such issues is out of proportion, given the ways in which “foreigners” are misscripted and misplayed on U.S. television every day. Moreover, with all due respect to the talents of the actors involved, we hear plenty of lousy foreign accents or mispronunciations of foreign languages on Spooks. The obvious point is the matter of the Russians. Though I’m no expert, I’ve spent enough time in the U.S. and Germany around Russian Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union to hear it when Paloma Baeza‘s (Elizaveta Starkova) and Stuart Wilson’s (Arkady Kachimov) Russian accents in English falter, and to notice that the English actors who deliver Russian lines achieve performances of variable quality (for example, in Spooks 7.8, in the scene where the Russian team is preparing to hunt down our heroes.) Does a large group of fans somewhere complain that Jonathan Phillips as Rustam Urazov doesn’t sound authetically Tazbek, and that as a consequence, his credibility as a villain is destroyed?

No. In the case of O’Reilly, then, I conclude ire regarding the accent, about which so many cruel comments were made, became a focal point for expressing more general problems with the character and the script. But because the accent was so obviously O’Reilly’s contribution, it also made it seem as if she were causing these problems. I share the annoyance about the accent but I don’t think that these sentiments really get at the root of the problems with the character. Rather, in terms of what I understand to be her performance, I hypothesize that O’Reilly was actually playing key parts of the character as scripted and quite probably as directed, and that this compliance created problems upon problems for her performance. The script had too many strands, a series of “too muches” and indeterminacies that overwhelm both actor and interpreter. 

It’s going to take me awhile to unpack all of this, but if I were asked today to propose a general thesis about Lucas and Sarah for what looks like it will end up being another series of posts, I’d say in light of the bewildering array of things happening in the script, both Ms. O’Reilly’s and Mr. Armitage’s performances complicate our understanding of what’s going on between them rather than clarifying it. In particular, the shared scenes between Sarah and Lucas often appeared as discrete units that hung in space as opposed to connecting to a larger arc in their relationship. Instead of the effortlessness we are accustomed to in an Armitage performance, in scenes crucial to our understanding of the relationship, we intermittently see each actor acting, and we find ourself uncertain as to how to view them when they themselves still seem to be trying each other on for size. 

Indeed, this queasiness was perhaps unconsciously evident in some of the things Mr. Armitage said about the plot line even before the show aired, as, for example, to Ian Wylie: “The first sexual encounter between them is very much about Lucas taking control of her, being manipulated by a very attractive woman who’s using her sexuality as much as anything else to get him to do what she wants.” Which is it, taking control, or being manipulated? Manipulated into taking control? Taking control after having been manipulated? From their performances, it’s not clear that Armitage and O’Reilly could always have answered a central question when defining the hierarchy of desire –who loves more, and who is pulling away?– for any given moment in the script, or defined where that hierarchy fell on the control/manipulation spectrum. But real couples understand this calculus and negotiating it is a constitutive element of any romantic relationship. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not blaming either Armitage or O’Reilly for this problem; however, some of their scenes together appear to leave both of them at sea and us with them. Their encounters are so potentially overdetermined that it becomes difficult for the viewer to interpret or explain them. The factors that influence that overdetermination are at the base of the ideas I’ll be trying to develop in whatever I write about this.

I admit that I haven’t drafted this sequence to the end, and while I’ve got plenty to say about it (what don’t I have plenty to say about?) it’s not really central to the blog’s purpose. The next piece will go up tomorrow, and I’ve got chunks of a third section together, and I’m not feeling plagued by any personal qualms in publishing this, so I’ll try to keep it appearing in chunks that don’t overwhelm the reader, as long as my interest in continuing the topic lasts.

~ by Servetus on June 24, 2010.