Love Is Like Oxygen

Oxygen is the cable-TV junk-drawer for true-crime programming.  Stories about murder are the only thing on it.  Oxygen's tagline is:  True Crime 24-7.   I watch it all the time; it is the background-music for just about every mindless activity I do.  Even just taking a nap; I call them "Snapped naps," because Snapped is the ultimate Oxygen iteration.  In its 30th season, the show brilliantly and cheaply deconstructs murders by ladies who lose it, and each hour-long episode proceeds from back-story to the dirty deed to the courtroom drama and so on.  It is the formula that soothes you.  Also the cheapness.  It looks like it's shot on somebody's phone, with a lot of repeated shots of blurry reenactments, blurry  presumably so they won't have to pay actors a lot of dough to show faces.  Crime-scene photos are often used too, but most of the time there's not any footage to use, or the Snapped makers just didn't feel like shooting anything, so they use beautifully eerie blank images of empty courtrooms and interview-rooms.  

Spooky and funny and low-cost all at the same time, each Snapped episode has its own aesthetic through-line: chain-link fences and weedy backyards and crappy little ranch-styles.  It's Wal-Mart cinema verite, the collapsing lives of usually low-income folk put not on a pedestal but on a filing cabinet in some non-descript office area.  The juxtaposition of blood-soaked towels and blood-shiny kitchen-floors and big plastic tubs full of cut-up body parts with that sad cool index-colored door to the interview-room or the faded maroon vinyl of jury chairs in a small-town courtroom -- that's what gives Snapped its power over you.  You are hypnotized by what's already there, and then slammed in the face with the violence underneath it all.

All that makes for a good nap for some reason.   

But what really snaps everything into place is the voice of the narrator:  stiff, starchy, Karen-like, full of both outrage and cynicism but then also a sort of meanspirited magnanimity as each lady who loses her shit and kills her boyfriend/husband/kids/mother/father/girlfriend/sister/brother finally faces her moment of reckoning. That Karen-voice is so perfect I sometimes wish she was narrating my non-murdering life, just walking me through my days, telling me what to do, what to be outraged about, what to look out for.  When to watch Snapped.

Snapped is a poem and doesn't know it.  However, Landscapers, the HBO-Max miniseries starring Olivia Colman, definitely knows it is working with the mechanics and soulfulness of poetic license.  It's a true-crime experience that occupies some of the same Oxygen oxygen, but also finds its way into transcendence without being treacly or lofty.  And there are moments in it of bliss that almost outshine the desperate sadness.  And "desperate sadness" really is its atmosphere and currency.  The true story follows Susan and Christopher Edwards, a married couple who are eventually convicted of killing Susan's parents.  It starts fifteen or so years after the homicide, with the couple struggling to stay afloat in an apartment in Paris, self-exiled there by their action and also their hearts.  Both are terrible sad-sack romantics, collectors of movie memorabilia, writers of letters to movie-stars, and truly their odyssey of crime almost seems to be in service to their starry-eyed fandom:  patricide and robbery because of an intense Gerard-Depardieu fetish.

Written by Ed Sinclair and directed by Will Sharpe, the series intermingles whimsy with venom, victimhood with predation, love with ennui.  But above all, the tone is melancholy, and it's mainly through the consciousness of Susan, who is played exquisitely by Olivia.  She inhabits the character with a sense of tragic connectedness and also a savvy abandon.  Susan is complicated in ways no one will ever understand, but as written she's a Tennessee-Williams concoction kept anchored to earth by her love for Christopher, played with the same kind of exquisiteness by David Thewlis.  The first episode gives us the stakes and the aesthetics in one fell swoop:  the decision to return to England to face consequences yields a long journey into night on a train, and you see both Christopher and Susan snuggling with each other, almost optimistic about their doom.  Because it's over, this part, and they are practicing the story they will be telling, going over what they did, who they are, and the counter-shot is the police waiting for them at the station, anonymous, grim, not giving one shit about what's about to happen to them and their made-up little world.  They just want an arrest.

That side-by-side informs the whole story:  no one, outside of the couple, seems to give one shit about the couple.  And in their loneliness and dedication to each other you can feel the need to empathize expand into a fantasy of what it means to be a murderer but also what it means to be yourself.  The final episode finally kicks over into full-on fantasia, as the inevitable trial happens, and Susan's imagination flares up with a Western motif:  she and Christopher on the lam on horses in a beautiful forest.

Landscapers could be labeled black comedy in the same way Fargo has been, but I think there's something more than blackness in the comedy and something not so funny about the blackness.  It quietly kills you.  Landscapers is true crime pulled away from cheapness and salaciousness and offered to us as elegy to people who may not deserve to be remembered, but also who do somehow deserve it.  They are human after all, and Olivia's eyes give us that connect to who both Susan and Christopher actually are:  all of us, doomed and scared but also strangely at peace with it because there isn't anything else we can do.