Political theory and practice

Beck (1999+ )

TVDB meta-data is runtime 90 minutes each in 42 episodes, rated 7.4 by 4232 cinematizens. 

Genre: Police procedural. 

Verdict: Low key.

Good cop, bad cop, and many others.  Martin Beck is slow and careful while his off-sider is mercurial and trigger happy.  Sounds clichéd because it is, but it works in small doses in this long-running series from Sweden. How many Swedes are left after the body count in each episode? The first I watched had six deaths, and a lot of guns.  More violent and gruesome than I like, but low key in that the characters to do not yell at each other, as is so common in Yankee krimis, mistaking noise and guns for drama.  

There is usually a lot of out and about in Stockholm for eye candy, and a lot of use of drones.  My two brief visits to Stockholm consisted mainly of hotel rooms, conference tables, meetings, and reports, leaving me with little idea of its geography of the many islands and bridges.  

The plots involve biker gangs, Russian mafia, immigrant vendettas, corporate corruption, and the usual vices of screenwriters: drugs, money, and prostitution.  That dearth of narrative originality is offset by the production that makes much use of expensive location shooting (from public parks, pleasure boats, old churches, bars clubs, glitzy corporations, and more) and nearly everyone in Sweden appears on camera as an extra.  However, the repertoire company of leading actors from Sveriges TV is so small I recognised a good many of them from other roles.  Still, the acting is superb, especially from the inner circle of coppers. A flicker in eye, a purse of the lip, a twitch of the shoulder tells much in these intense productions. No Yankee yelling is needed, nor any of the sanctimonious speeches common in Brit TV. Instead Beck sighs, and moves on.   

There is some light relief from Beck’s intrusive, genial, and persistent neighbour, Grannen who gives Beck the benefit of his advice on alcohol, women, sports, dining, travel, and more when they meet in the elevator, hallway, lobby, or adjacent balconies of the apartment building. As part of a mandatory staff development exercise, Beck was once required to write down the names of three people who mean a lot to him. The first two were easy: his daughter, and grandson, but it took him all day to realise the third was Grannen – the look on Beck’s face when he wrote that down is a treasured memory. Grannen is a Beck-opposite: extravagant, thoughtless, carefree, flamboyant, intrusive, daring….    

Beck is played so low key at times he seems to be catatonic, whereas the hyperactive Gunvald is always ready, willing, and able to kick in a door, even if it leads to the toilet in police HQ. The man knows how to make an entrance. Beck, on the other hand, seems to suffer from low blood pressure and move ever so slowly. Indeed he has brandished a weapon only once in the ten episodes I have seen to date.  He didn’t shoot…because Gunvald did it first — no surprise there.  

Beck’s talents lie in managing the team of detectives and in interrogation where he is a hard man to fool. Don’t play poker with this man. He reads the tells very quickly. (If you don’t know what a ‘tell’ is, then don’t play poker with anyone.) 

The stories are interesting but the resolution is often magic, making it more trip than arrival.  However, they are strong on the motivations of characters and what a mystery that makes us to each other.  

Some of the earlier episodes come from one of the ten-novel sequence of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965-1975) whence Beck originated (though many other characters from the novels are omitted, notably Lennart Kollberg).  But many of the episodes are not derived from that source, just as well, because I found the last five or six Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels suffocatingly preachy with ideology supplanting humanity as the soapbox came out and human interest waned.  But speaking of soap, I have to say that the episodes after Gunvald was written out have tended toward soap operas with the backstories taking over in continuing and endless, pointless melodramas: Will Emma leave Oscar? Will quiet Jenny get a new hair style? Will work-alcoholic Ayda take a day off? Will loquacious Claes ever shut up?  Stay tuned for these and other equally trivial problems.    

Equally, in the latter episodes the boy toys get bigger and more prominent. Every five minutes Beck calls out the SWAT team to knock down doors, blow up rooms, and swarm over a place, usually too late to find anything.  But the SWAT members put on a choreographed show.  

Other films have been made from the novels, including an earlier Sveriges production Beck (1993) in nine episodes with a different cast, and also the feature films The Laughing Policeman (1973), The Man on the Roof (1976), The Man Who Went up in Smoke (1980), and Roseanna (1967). This last film was based was the first novel of the series and is a personal favourite out of the ten books. The film version of The Laughing Policeman is set in San Francisco with Walter Matthau as the Beck substitute and loses everything in the transition, while The Man Who Went up in Smoke is an English production with a woefully miscast Derek Jacobi as Beck.  

Aloys (2016)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.4 by 1,853 cinematizens.

Genre: PI.

Verdict: Enticing.

Set in contemporary Switzerland with nary a cowbell in sight, the depressed, dreary, downcast, and dull Aloys goes about his business of spying on people.  Jealous wives hire him to videotape their husbands’ suspicious activities.  Worried parents put him onto adolescents who may be using drugs. Insurance companies wanted evidence of deceits about disabilities. Deans want dirt to lighten the payroll. (Well, they do.) The work sounds more interesting than it is.    

Aloys is robotic, though Robby had more personality than does he. His only friend, his father, just died, and he is now even more lonely, but, no, he does not vicariously live on his subjects. Indeed, he is strictly professional in his all his dealings. He is all but silent as he mopes around the tower residences where many of his subjects live, and where he himself lives when he is not riding buses through the Alpine mists.

He does catalogue and review his vast collection of surveillance tapes, and that seems to be his only pastime when not out filming more. He doesn’t enjoy it or do it for pleasure, but he does it obsessively, because there is nothing else to do. This is not a man looking for human contact, quite the reverse. In an elevator car at his residential tower Aloys pretends not to  be there, or shrinks in on himself, when someone else enters.  

This ordered, monotone world is interrupted with a suicide attempt by one of his neighbours, and then begins a game of telephone tag with a woman who is neither client nor subject.  

It doesn’t sound like much but it works.   

The actors are so ordinary, the set is so drab, the weather is so miserable that almost anything would be a relief.  Yet in a way it is uplifting and positive by the end.  I came across it by chance on SBS On-Demand when I was looking for, but not finding, Real Humans Season 2.  Films from Switzerland are scarce and I had just read a solid krimi set there so I was primed, and I liked the enigmatic summary, so I took a look. 

I found the four commercial breaks annoying, and they put me off further viewing on SBS On-Demand for a while. 

Real Humans (Äkta människor) (2012) Season One. 

IMDb meta-data is twenty episodes of 60m, each rated 7.9 by 6,067

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict:  Cogent.

In a contemporary Sweden android Hubots are the norm for simple repetitive jobs, companions for the elderly, and counter staff to deal with the idiocracy.  The Hubots are very, and I mean very, life-like but their programming is limited, however, there are hackers who for a price can breach those limits. Got it?  Even the Asimov Laws can be hacked down!  

(Think of this marketing pitch: Get your own Hubot look-alike and program it to attend budget meetings with the dean, insufferable training courses on nuclear waste disposal and playground safety for professors, and Department boards dominated by the least productive individuals. Where do I get mine?!)

Some people ignore the Hubots, others object to them, and still others find them threatening, while most happily benefit from the services they provide without a second thought. In this world we meet several individuals and families who cope with and react in different ways to the Hubots they encounter. A warehouse store-man fears losing his job to a doll, an estranged wife finds a Hubot a better companion than her alcoholic and volatile husband, a career woman finds a Hubot has unlimited energy and patience in dealing with her children, a teenage boy wonders if the Hubot maid is fully functional, an elderly man finds the Hubot carer assigned to him is a nag about diet and medication and with which he cannot bargain, a pensioner grows so emotionally dependent on his old model Hubot that when it breaks down he grieves without end, a pastor sees them as another example of God’s children but her flock does not….  While others despise these PacMen and Women.   

We also meet, and we meet them first, a band of ferrel Hubots with their leader Leo, who judging by his Hollywood shadow, is a human.  We also encounter two police officers who specialise in recovering erratic Hubots, tracking down ferrel ones, and arresting illegal hackers who re-program legal Hubots to satisfy paying customers in a thriving blackmarket. There is not much of a problem and the police work is slow and methodical.   

The Real Humans are a loose group of anti-Hubots who stick decals on windows, shout slogans, wear red hats (oops just made that up!), and some arm themselves with rocket launchers and automatic rifles against the day when….?  Well, who knows, but it is always comforting to have a bazooka under the bed in case agents of the deep state come to haul one back to the looney bin.    

And all is not what it at first seemed to be.   

It is uncompromising in presentation, so pay attention. Unlike painfully didactic Yankee television designed for the attention-deficit audience of Pox News, there are no internal summaries when one character explains to another what is happening, nor any labels of time and place, or title cards to focus, or recaps with each new episode.  Nor is there any of the sanctimonious preaching so predictable on Brit TV.  Little is explained as the narrative unfolds, but it seems that in due course all questions will be answered for those with the eyes to see.  

I have seen the ten episodes of season one but cannot lay hands on the next ten from season two with English subtitles.  Little help, please.