Post by Capo on Jan 3, 2010 17:39:26 GMT
What is the appeal of CRACKER?
I just finished watching the final one-off episode (2006), which from a cultural studies point-of-view was of much interest in showing technical changes in the British television industry, and certain aesthetic trends. The first episode ever (1993) was directed by Michael Winterbottom, shot on film and looking very austere and of its time (though what doesn't?), but in some way it seems visually more enduring than the 2006 episode, which shows an inclination towards fix-it-in-post methods, digitalisation and fashionable stylistic ambiguity, like building 'meaning' ( = 'sense of place', perhaps) through montage without any direct narrative link, or cutting to a nice, self-consciously beautiful shot of 'Greater Manchester' - I put it in quotation marks because it's a visual shorthand more than a genuine sense of topographical honesty. Really, Manchester is the 'London of the North' in England, and Cracker in almost every one of its episodes makes it seem like a little village, and this in spite of, not because of, good police work.
'Shorthand' becomes more and more predominant as the series develops, and in the 2006 episode - titled simply "Cracker" - you see many of the story elements on display in The Street. I think the finale in this way remains interesting only in relation to the rest of the series - it gains much from having as its protagonist someone we already know so well, in Fitz the criminal psychologist (played superbly by Robbie Coltrane, though again as the series evolves he has less and less to grope at, becoming more prone to 'shorthand', risking self-parody and caricature). In itself, the finale might grate.
It's largely brilliant, though. "To Be a Somebody", the first episode of the second season, is excellent. Robert Carlyle plays a football fan so traumatised by the events of Hillsborough, he makes the conscious effort of conforming to the complacent, insulting media's reportage of the incident and turns to murder. It's probably the best episode, worth seeing in itself.
Each episode resembles every other episode in narrative pattern, but what I found very refreshing was that as it went on, the crime case was almost cast aside (this is not a police procedural) so as to allow the writers to deal with the recurring issues in Fitz's life - his gambling, his drinking habits, his marriage problems, his inability to cope with life without resorting to a psychological breakdown of every little detail.
The cast is brilliant; Ricky Tomlinson steals most scenes he's in.
I like its compassion. The way it accounts for criminals' behaviour, and in doing so from a psychologists' POV, it shows the limits too of policing a rigid legal system.