Happy Valley is violent. So is real life
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Version 0 of 1. Debates about the representation of violent crime in books, TV and film are almost as old as the genre itself. In the 1930s there were watch-committees anxious that Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were glamming up American gangland. In the 1970s, it was Jack Regan giving the bad guys a kicking on derelict London waterfronts that was a cause for concern. But in 2014, this argument has taken another turn. Given the threat posed to women by violence and abuse, do we really want graphic depictions of women being attacked and abused in drama and fiction? The latest in a long line of controversies centres on Sally Wainwright's BBC1 series Happy Valley, which Mediawatch-uk and some newspapers have suggested crosses the line into gratuitous violence against its female characters. In the fourth of six episodes, shown last week, police sergeant Catherine Cawood, played by Sarah Lancashire, rescues Ann, a kidnap victim, but then endures a prolonged and savage beating by Ann's psychopathic rapist captor, and is left for dead, her bleeding body slumped in the street. There is, happily for Wainwright, no argument about how good Happy Valley is; the viewers are gripped. Nor is there any dispute that this is dark and edgy TV. Images of women being bound, gagged, beaten and killed are inevitably going to cause controversy. In response to the criticism the writer herself has eloquently addressed these concerns, but this argument will go on. Before Happy Valley, dramas such as The Bridge and The Fall, about a serial killer who likes strangling women to death, were critically acclaimed but denounced by David Hare, Helen Mirren and others for extreme levels of violence against women. The problem for those of us who write about crime in a fictional form is that all crime hurts. It can take years to recover from the trauma of being burgled. The sense that the burgled feel of being violated, together with the fear and insecurity that comes after, can be difficult to get over. And of course rape, violence and abuse are direct and terrifying assaults on individuals themselves. It's hardly surprising that those who have either experienced these crimes or fear doing so (which of course is most women) are sensitive to how they are portrayed in fiction. No one wants such experiences turned into entertainment and many are understandably suspicious of the motives of those who watch or read it. But it's because the fear and experience of these crimes are so pervasive that people want to read about them, both in their fictional and true-life form. It touches nearly all of us personally. My female friends were the ones telling me to watch Happy Valley. There's a very good reason why Martina Cole's novels are so popular with working-class women – it's because they resonate so much with their own experience. The argument is complicated by the difference between visual and textual images of violence. Novels tend to get a freer ride from criticism than TV and film, which are far more closely monitored. In fact books, where the reader has to build on the work of the author with their own imagination, can often be more disturbing than film and TV. A good crime novelist knows how to make the reader do some of the work. It's also true that it's difficult to portray terror without showing characters being terrified. An effective war film will show scared young soldiers being driven to extreme behaviour by the environment in which they find themselves. An effective crime thriller may well show a woman being terrorised by a predatory man. The rational response from viewers would be that war and sex crimes posed a mortal threat to society and needed to be stopped. Perhaps it's special pleading, but it may be time to give crime writers a break. As John Mortimer used to point out, those who are really into gratuitous violence might want to head along to the RSC and catch some Shakespeare. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is pegged on two murdered women, while much ancient Greek drama was hardly pre-watershed material. Societies have been different throughout history – but they've all had art and they've all had violence. |