In 2018 Netflix, created a four-hour mini-series called “Collateral,” as in collateral damage, I guess. The cast is an amazing ensemble of acting talent. In our household, we watched it recently – for me for a second time, at least for the first two episodes. Having now watched it to the end, I’m glad I persisted. Almost.
There’s no guessing about the writer – the name David Hare features prominently in the credits, and let’s give credit where it’s due. Hare is a writer I admire and envy. He’s also someone I want to mistrust, though I’m not sure of the reason. Maybe this review will help me work out why.
He is Sir David Rippon Hare, as Wikipedia tells us, a prolific playwright in an age when getting new works into theaters is difficult; winner of eight Olivier Award nominations and two prizes, as well as Drama Critics awards in London and New York. And more.
He wrote and directed the fascinating trilogy of films for the BBC starring Bill Nighy, with Rachel Weisz and Helena Bonham Carter (Page Eight in 2011, Turk & Caicos in 2014, and Salting the Battlefield, also 2014). I highlight these works because I kept expecting Nighy’s character in the series to show up in each episode of “Collateral,” prompted by the looming menace known in Britain as MI5.
It’s that looming menace that bothers me. Spy stories seem to demand an evil. “Collateral” has two: A former senior Army officer engaging in people smuggling, and a manipulative secret service agent, who’s not stupid but simply blind to anything to do with morals.
But every categorical evil seems to require an unqualified good, so there’s a detective, six months pregnant who feels fakery. Played as convincing clever by Carey Mulligan, she pisses off her superior officer and underling, guesses her way into evidence, and in so doing eventually undermines the machinations of the evil-doers. Almost.
And there’s the rub. Hanging on the good-evil dichotomy is an Army captain – a 30-something-year-old woman, recently returned from fighting in Afghanistan where “something” happened. She wants to serve her country. She wants to do the right thing. She wants to kill terrorists. Bullied at the base by her paper-pushing, lascivious commanding officer, she is drawn into supporting the people-smuggling ex-Army senior officer now operating a travel agency in a once infamous part of London, known as Pimlico, as a front for his business.
The stark dichotomy signals that there are things worth defending here – “here” being Britain, yes, and Western society at large, but they are not directly archetypes of Britain or Western society:
One is the eight-month-pregnant illegal alien, one of two sisters smuggled into Britain and carrying in her womb the baby of a rapist somewhere in the Middle East. After her presence discovered through the investigation, she is sent to a detention center to await deportation.
Another is an asylum-seeker whose sister is pregnant. He is assassinated early in the series while trying to earn money feed by delivering pizzas, the incident that sets the plot in motion.
A third is the detective, recently promoted to inspector. She’s constantly fending off entreaties from her superior that she should not be at work at all. Her domesticated husband waits patiently while his child-to-be accompanies its mother through three largely sleepless days and nights of rooting out evil.
Almost. Evil is not defeated, not irradicated. The little fish are caught, sure, and a sense of closure accompanies the final five minutes. Almost. But the big fish – the king of the smugglers – and the slimy one – the MI5 operator – elude the retribution that plot, character development, and interplay of ideas about good and evil all demand.
This is captivating production. It stimulates viewers to think about the nature of society, the value of the state, where sovereignty resides, and the meaning of borders. You can come away from it wishing that good could prevail, and skeptical that it can as long as the military and secret service can pervert not just the justice dished out by law enforcement, but also justice in a human, moral sense. “Collateral” veers through the dramatic into the polemical.
The good-evil dichotomy heightens the drama, making this a troubling story, one we want to believe is true. A little too much? Is the concept of evil a cop-out, ideological, an excuse not to think about motivation?
Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt (2012, p. 16) say that ideological narratives “by their very nature, are always stories about good and evil. They identify heroes and villains, they explain how the villains got the upper hand, and they lay out or justify the means by which—if we can just come together and fight hard enough—we can vanquish the villains and return the world to its balanced or proper state.”
By that measure, “Collateral” is a good show. Almost.
Graham, J., & Haidt, J. (2012). Sacred values and evil adversaries: A moral foundations approach. In M. Mikulincer & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), The social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil. (pp. 11-31). Washington: American Psychological Association.
I'm a David Hare fan, too, Donald. And like you, I was a bit confused and disappointed by his Netflix mini-series, Collateral, especially in the wake of the brilliant BBC trilogy [Page Eight, Turks & Caicos, Salting the Battlefield] which--as you mention--had been stocked with most of the top tier of recent British acting talent and masterfully anchored by Bill Nighy, whose world-weary intelligence officer embodied Hare at his best, but perhaps also John Le Carre and Graham Greene at their best. What defines Hare at his best? His grasp of the cold, fatuous, inhuman power at the heart--the nexus?--of British [and American] governance, espionage, AND business/finance and his willingness to express this perspective with forthright intelligence and crackling drama. But there's something else that Hare and his world-weary characters embody at their unique best--a sad but accurate sense of liberalism's fatuous self-flattery and its endless and dangerous misinterpretation of human nature. We see this perspective in his best plays, e.g., Plenty, Skylight, The Vertical Hour et al. We saw little of it in Collateral, although its hints were there. The main problem, I think, with Collateral is that it represented Hare's attempt to do a basic, TV friendly police procedural, which never quite gelled with his actual sensibility. But with the brilliant Carey Mulligan and others involved, it was certainly entertaining and involving. No harm, no foul.