Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Great)

[BigJake]

This topic actually comes up for me via a couple of recent movie rewatches (Eastern Promises and No Country for Old Men) and the game Deadly Premonition. The kind of stories -- otherwise fine stories -- where at certain points you find yourself shouting at the screen because you figured out who the murderer was or how to catch them at least half an hour ago and the master sleuth onscreen is still labouring through it.

It's the kind of thing that makes one want to vent... or is it just me? If it's not just me, feel free to add your own. If it is just me, feel free to reassure me that I'm not crazy anyway. That kind of ego-boost does wonders for crazy people.

My picks in this category:

Spoiler: Sheriff Bell in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

He makes a fine Greek chorus, but as a law enforcer he has apparently never heard of canvassing a neighbourhood, a technique which would have run the large, foreign, menacing and memorable Anton Chigurh to ground inside of a day. The frustrating "What do we circulate? Looking for a man who has recently drunk milk?" scene was what inspired this post.

Spoiler: Vincent Hanna in HEAT

Yes, he's driven, brilliant, courageous and charismatic. He also has astonishingly bad judgment. Faced with the possibility of having to settle for misdemeanor charges on an armed robbery crew already known to be murderous, does Hanna bite the bullet and settle for getting the killers off the street for a few months and disrupting their current schemes? Hell no, not sexy enough. He cuts them loose... and later tries to take them down by opening fire on them in the middle of a crowd of civilians during a bank hold-up, a decision that leads to a running firefight with multiple police and civilian deaths -- including, incidentally, Hanna's partner, for whom he expends exactly zero seconds of on-screen mourning -- to two of the robbers getting away with their money anyway... and to a spate of further murder and mayhem as he tries to chase down the crew's mastermind Neil. Totally worth it, Vince.

Spoiler: Nikolai Luzhin in EASTERN PROMISES

One has to have mad respect for Luzhin, and for Viggo Mortensen's performance; there could be no more harrowing undercover assignment imaginable than infiltrating a gang culture as savage as the Vory v zakone. But it's nevertheless very noticeable that Luzhin takes a huge, needless risk -- having a single girl extracted by the police from one of the gang's brothels -- at one key point in the story that comes very near to scuttling his entire operation. It comes out in his favour... but only after he comes within a hair of being assassinated.

Spoiler: Special Agent Dale Cooper in TWIN PEAKS

It may seem kind of unfair to put David Lynch's Twin Peaks on a list like this, since the point of a Lynch work is obviously not to deliver a typical police procedural. But I nevertheless came to feel like a lot of what allowed the show to draw out as long as it did was just that Cooper's quirky and intuitive investigative methods just didn't have a hell of a lot to recommend them.

Spoiler: Special Agent Francis York Morgan in DEADLY PREMONITION

The game obviously borrows heavily on Twin Peaks for a lot of its style and subject matter, and Agent York is clearly a riff on Cooper (though with his own distinct style). But Lynch could leave things genuinely indeterminate in a way that it's harder for a game to get away with, and as a result the mysteries in Deadly Premonition have to be (under all the hallucinatory trappings) rationally solvable, kinda. This unfortunately means that it's possible to figure out certain things -- like what the "inverted peace sign" really represents, who the killer is, and who the real Big Bad is -- many, many, many hours before York is allowed to get there. Which ultimately just makes him look a little bit slow.

What are yours?

 

[Gaith]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

I love the fact-based movie Zodiac, but while it provides a fine story climax for the Graysmith character, when one thinks about it, it does totally defy belief that Det. Toschi would never have noticed that Arthur Lee Allen shares a birthday with the date "Z" allegedly made a call to Melvin Belli's office and mentioned it was his birthday. (In actuality, that call was made on a different day, and was proved to have been a hoax, whereas the movie treats it as probably authentic.)

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

I don't think No Country and Twin Peaks are good examples. Sheriff Bell was short on backup and Chigirn was smart enough to pick unpredictable locations and alert enough to see law enforcement coming. Had Bell been more vigilant he wouldn't have survived. And Dale Cooper looked at the physical evidence before entertaining his intuitions. He discovered quickly where Laura went the night of her death and with who but there was no link between the killer and the crime scene.

 

[BigJake]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

(In actuality, that call was made on a different day, and was proved to have been a hoax, whereas the movie treats it as probably authentic.)

That detail did bug me in Zodiac, actually. I didn't know this, thanks!

Sheriff Bell was short on backup and Chigirn was smart enough to pick unpredictable locations and alert enough to see law enforcement coming. Had Bell been more vigilant he wouldn't have survived.

Was Bell really short on backup? Texas didn't seem to be that short on law-enforcement personnel, the one thing that preserves Chigurh is that (mostly by happenstance) he only ever has to deal with one at a time (Bell included when he takes it on himself to go wandering off after Moss alone).

All Bell had to do to have the entire state on the maniac's ass was to go and talk to the manager of the trailer park and get from her the description of the huge, weird, sinister furriner who came looking for Llewellyn Moss and obviously broke into his trailer with the same kind of instrument he'd recently used to kill a guy (Bell in fact recognizes that signature when they first arrive at the scene). By that point Chigurh is already a known cop-killer and multiple murderer, there's no way there isn't a massive manhunt.

[And Chigurh is badass and all, but not badass enough to shrug off having the entire constabulary of Texas to contend with -- bolstered by a citizenry that knows his description -- alongside the Mexicans, his erstwhile bosses and Moss.]

Could be I'm being too hard on Cooper from Twin Peaks though.

 

[J.T.B.]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

All Bell had to do to have the entire state on the maniac's ass was to go and talk to the manager of the trailer park and get from her the description of the huge, weird, sinister furriner who came looking for Llewellyn Moss and obviously broke into his trailer with the same kind of instrument he'd recently used to kill a guy (Bell in fact recognizes that signature when they first arrive at the scene). By that point Chigurh is already a known cop-killer and multiple murderer, there's no way there isn't a massive manhunt.

There probably is a massive manhunt on for Chigurh, as the DEA and Rangers have taken over the drug deal shootout investigation and the suspect in the deputy's killing is connected with that. How much of a description the deputy passed along before his death is not clear. But Sheriff Bell checks out of the main investigation fairly early on. It's part of his central existential crisis, but he focuses on saving Llewellyn, whom he knows personally. And he also knows that there is likely more than one faction after the money. Which is correct; ultimately Chigurh was not the cause of Llewellyn's demise, so finding Llewellyn rather than Chigurh seems like a sound strategy.

Plus it's a good story and has to come down to a very personal level, with Chigurh more a primal force than a real human. There is a lot of logical, procedural stuff sacrificed in favor of a good story even in the best movies/shows, but if the story is well-told and entertaining I generally go along, so I don't tend to remember the "holes" very long.

 

[BigJake]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

Oh I'm mostly there with you, J.T.B.. The only reason the "looking for a man who has just drunk milk" scene really sticks for me is that:

Spoiler: Not sure if I need spoiler tags but just in case

...they specifically bring up the procedural issue (his deputy says "we gotta circulate this!")... and then the most obvious and logical option somehow never comes up. Because the single unavoidable no-brainer basic-as-hell answer to Bell's "what do we circulate?" is "let's ask around." Angst-ridden or not, it's striking that Bell can't summon the gumption to do even that much. And it's a huge fail, as the possessor of the most detailed description of Chigurh anyone living is likely to get is sitting in a trailer a little ways away from them, probably still wondering who that weird Spanish man was.

In greater fairness to Bell, he is really not designed as a sleuth, he's more of an observer and commentator on the carnage -- a "Greek chorus" as I call him in the OP. Which I can roll with most of the time; he's just tired and doing the best he can bring himself to and it's in his compassion for Moss that any of his "heroism" lies, he's not at all supposed to be an ace lawman. It's just that scene is like... well, is he any kind of lawman?

 

[flandry84]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

For my sins,I read that"No country..."book.Yeesh!

The sherrifs role was less about actually doing police work and more about moaning about the disintegration of modern society.Ad nauseum.
Actually none of the protagonists were overly endowed with the smarts IIRc.

 

[the G-man]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

Post-Crisis Batman is still called 'the World's Greatest Detective." However, unlike the golden-silver-bronze age Batman (where pretty much every comic book involved the caped crusader piecing together clues from a crime scene), the modern day incarnation relies on high tech gadgets and/or tips from Oracle (pre-Nu 52) to encounter crimes as they happen. Basically, at this point, he's no more a detective than is Tony Stark.

 

[BigJake]

Re: Fictional Heroic Detectives (Who Actually Kind of Weren't That Gre

Post-Crisis Batman is still called 'the World's Greatest Detective." However . . . the modern day incarnation relies on high tech gadgets and/or tips from Oracle (pre-Nu 52) to encounter crimes as they happen. Basically, at this point, he's no more a detective than is Tony Stark.

Yeah, I noticed this with Nolan's Batman from the films, too; the "detective" business has largely been dropped and he's more of a science-ninja-hero.