A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story
When I heard they were making a miniseries about the last woman executed in England I decided then and there that there would be no way I would watch this series. It would be too depressing. And then I decided to drop my BritBox subscription. I will never let a single day go to waste with a streaming subscription so I started to look for short shows to fill in this two week gap. After exhausting all the Agatha Christie I hadn't yet watched and hearing rave reviews about A Cruel Love, I caved. I blame Bessie Carter. I can do four episodes of about anything so I should have been able to handle this. Well, I should have stuck to my gut instincts. This was beyond depressing. A sort of fever dream of domestic abuse filmed with an almost Lynchian glamour of a woman battered and bloody and bruised. Yet there felt like there wasn't any grounding in reality. They just showed little vignettes of Ruth's life and her love affair with her "victim" David Blakely. Though I think "love" is a stretch. There was no love, cruel or otherwise here, it was people colliding into, using, and destroying each other in whatever way they could. The show seems to be wanting to say that it was the unspoken rules of society that Ruth dared to breach by aiming to better her life that lead to her death, which, while partially true, in that it lead to her being railroaded at trial, doesn't take into account her upbringing at all. She was raised to believe that all she deserved from life was abuse. She suffered at the hands of her father and then all her lovers, even the one "good guy" who basically turned this broken woman into a killer. And yet this is all told elliptically. In little flashes. The horrors of her childhood are mentioned in a throwaway line from her sister, who it should be noted was another victim of men having been raped and impregnated by their father. I just felt like this REAL LIFE STORY has something so important to say. It changed the law, as she was the last woman executed, and within a decade the death penalty was abolished. And yet the weight isn't there. It's more snippets of her degradation while still looking glamorous. There's no real history, what history I read about was thanks to the internet, and seriously, someone has to get onto how Ruth's mother was connected to the Cambridge Five. Now that's a true crime show I do want to watch. But this. This was a woman whose life was destroyed by men and her story is told and controlled by men. She doesn't really factor in until the end. She's about an eye for an eye and a stiff upper lip and not showing how her repeated abuse, her trauma, is what led her to this desperate act. She doesn't want to be seen as a victim and that is exactly how abusers get away with their crimes. They make their victims carry the blame and shame. Only at the end does she realize that she was sticking to a morality the others weren't playing by and by then it's too late to save herself. But maybe that's what makes this work, on some level, at least in the eyes of the reviewers who raved, because it was men who controlled, ruined, and then ended her life, and therefore, it's not really about her, it's about the patriarchy. Personally, I think it should have been about Ruth. But maybe I'm alone in this assessment.
Holding is Ireland's answer to a procedural show that is Broadchurch meets Ballykissangel. It's nice and pastoral with crimes that are comfortably in the past even if their shadows are now finally being felt in the present. Everyone is on a spectrum of "hot mess" from secretly binge eating in their car to drunkenly heckling bad karaoke singers to shagging in an abandoned ambulance. Yet somehow everyone is OK with just plodding along. The show is based on Graham Norton's first fiction book and while the show does keep you engaged over it's four episodes you could tell by the very structure that he is a first time author. How you might ask? Well, the ending is just too convenient. When you set up a decades old crime and then in the present have one of the characters dying of Cancer, well, to make the killer the Cancer patient, that's too pat isn't it? Life isn't that simple. Life can't be tied up in a nice little bow that quickly heals the community. Nature being the bringer of justice not to mention the whole "maybe guilt brought on the Cancer" is just lazy. Just because you have quirky characters and a pastoral setting doesn't make this charming. In fact, there's one aspect that skeeved me out so bad that it tainted the entire show. Evelyn Ross is in her thirties and has never gotten over her true loving abandoning her after he beat her to a pulp and she miscarried on the night of his wedding to another woman. Of course his is the body that was discovered. Evelyn, to numb herself, is having an affair with Stephen Chen. Stephen is seventeen and the son of Evelyn's sister's partner. At least they kind of call out the "incest" but they never really call out the whole pedophile aspect of this relationship. So yes, he's technically of the age of consent. But that's a technicality that doesn't get ride of the whole creepiness of it. Plus they are having sex in an abandoned ambulance. How is this sanitary!?! I mean, I just can't on so many levels. And here's the thing, consent is more important than ever and how we talk about power dynamics in a relationship, and if there's anywhere in the world more associated with pedophiles than Ireland, strictly because of the Catholic Church, I don't know where that would be. Therefore to be telling this story in Ireland at this time, I think it needed to be done more sensitively. Just by having the woman being the older of the two doesn't make this OK, just look to Mary Kay Letourneau, may she be singed for an entirety. But what adds insult to injury is when Evelyn apologizes at her sister's wake to Stephen saying that what she did was wrong and him then saying to basically forget about it because he loved every minute of it... Excuse me? He's a child, he might think this way now, but what about when he gets older and realizes that their relationship was actually abuse? It's not cool or sexy or anything to be in this kind of relationship and Holding didn't real emphatically say otherwise. Therefore I can do nothing but look back on this series with a kind of creepy regret. It could have been something, but it was out of touch and unoriginal. 
A Swirl of Shadows by Andrea Penrose
