Zentrope

Wire in the Blood

A week or so ago I watched all the episodes of Wire in the Blood, a British police procedural series running from around 2005 through 2009. The core of the show is a psychologist/profiler who is spooky-good at his job. Sometimes, though, it feels like he just states the obvious: “Your perpetrator is a white male control-freak between 18 and 54.” When you consider the show’s setting, Northern England, this sort of “help” is more like exposition for the Amish. Regardless, in dramatic terms, Tony Hill, the profiler, focuses the team and provides needed lateral thinking.

What’s interesting about watching a lot of this show all at once is how affecting the violence and its aftermath often is. Easy to get through if you’re reasonable saturated, culturally, to these kinds of things, maybe not so easy when you watch four episodes in a row.

Even so, it’s not the violence that’s so disturbing, it’s the elucidation of the motivations behind the violence. Wire in the Blood is about serial killers. The plot of each each episode is a slow revelation of a whole new pathology. As you watch, you become a participant in its unfolding, a profiler by proxy. You don’t put together profiles based on the clues before Tony Hill does (as one might try to solve a murder before the detective), but you end up understanding the killers having been lead through their psyches step by graphic step. The cliche about profiling is that the profiler has to become the serial killer, to think like them, inhabit them like method actors might their characters. To a certain extent, this show produces that same effect in you. Like the profiler, you start to get a little crazy. Your inner reality slides around a bit.

And then it causes you to turn that profiling mentality onto yourself.

If you’ve any memory of your younger self, you’ll begin to see how each little quirk or flicker of pain you’ve experienced with your parents, or other aspects of your childhood and adolescence or current state-of-being might play into a psycho-pathology under the obsessive-compulsive gaze of a Tony Hill. You’re a bomb just waiting to go off, waiting for that “trigger” so many of the killers experience before starting down the predatory path. None of them seemed to want to become what they became. They just did. Anything, the show seems to say, could turn anyone into a monster even decades after the causes have taken root. We’re just a small step away from full-scale savagery. The ticking time bomb. We’ve all heard these themes before, but when a show makes you feel them, the cliches — like the awful lyrics set to a great tune — come alive.