Cops in Culture #7: Prime Suspect
by Clair Quentin
[Content note: sexual violence, sexual abuse of children, violence towards sex workers, transphobia, homophobia, suicide]
Vera Reynolds stands on a cabaret stage. She is dressed as Marlene Dietrich and she is lip-synching to "Falling in Love Again". The scene is cut back and forth with the scene of a body going up in flames along with the rest of the contents of someone's flat. The body is that of adolescent sex worker Connie Jenkins, and the flat is Vera's. Vera is played by Peter Capaldi. You are watching the introductory sequence of Prime Suspect Series 3, the third (and, from her pen, final) outing of Lynda La Plante's institutional-sexism-defying Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, famously and brilliantly played by Helen Mirren. You are watching some of the best police procedural drama ever made for TV.
It is also some of the most deliberately and pointedly political police procedural drama ever made for TV. Series 1 of Prime Suspect foregrounded sexism and misogynist violence, Series 2 was about racism, and Series 3 is about ... well, it seems to think it is about homophobia and The Gays. But, this being the 1990s, The Gays in Prime Suspect 3 are at once a narrower and a wider category than they are now. All are played by men, and some of the characters (like Vera and Connie) are people whom we would now think of as trans women. There are no lesbians (cis or trans), there are no trans men (gay or straight), and Vera and Connie's transness is figured not as a gender identity but as the expression of a sexual preference for straight men as opposed to gay men.
Vera and Connie lie at the heart of the story, so to the modern eye it isn't really a story about homophobia and The Gays at all. It is a story about trans girlhood and womanhood. And this is just as well because the cis gays come out of it atrociously. There is a straight-passing and largely positively-portrayed gay member of the police force, but he is a minor character who seemingly exists only to show that the homophobia he encounters at the hands of one of his colleagues when he comes out is bad. So in his case liberal assimilationism is no doubt the right path. The rest of The Gays, however, are members of a paedophile ring that picks up provincial runaways as they get off the train at King's Cross or Euston and tortures them for kicks.
So the less said about them the better. What then of Vera and Connie? Well there are aspects of the way these characters are handled that seem extremely clumsy. For example, in order to make Vera's explanation of Connie's transness a big final reveal from a narrative perspective, everyone uses he/him pronouns for Connie including (implausibly) Vera herself. And yet at the same time the modulating use of pronouns for Vera is an element of a carefully-written journey on the part of DCI Tennison in her understanding of trans womanhood.
At first Tennison's perspective is one of pitch-perfect liberal centrist transphobia: "I know what he is", she says early on, when she queries why Vera has been brought in (Vera's deadname, he/him pronouns, and "Mr Reynolds" peppering the dialogue), "but there isn't a law against it". Vera herself, however, seems to see herself validated by Tennison, at one point saying "I've always liked you, how you speak to me, not like the others". And this is reflected in the fact that Tennison, while she misgenders and deadnames Vera with her colleagues, does indeed speak more softly, more gently to Vera than to the men that she speaks to in her inquiries, and calls her "Vera".
Towards the end Vera realises that Tennison has just been playing her. Terrified that she is going to be convicted of Connie's murder, with the consequence that she will be sent again to a men's prison where she has previously experienced relentless sexual violence, she asks to be escorted to the toilet. Tennison (who has by this stage begun deadnaming Vera to her face) indicates a male officer, and Vera asks Tennison if instead she will take her to the ladies. Tennison looks vaguely disgusted, and Vera, completely broken, is escorted to the gents by Sargeant Otley, Tennison's misogynist nemesis from Series One.
There is, however, an immediate reversal. In the toilet, Vera slits her wrists, and in the resulting rush of action, Tennison, finally recognising Vera's womanhood, says "she's losing a lot of blood". Congratulations Vera, you pay a very high price for it indeed but through your self-administered blood sacrifice you are at last admitted into the sacred bower of oppressed womanhood. That said, though, old school sexist Otley had already placed you there: while you were slitting your wrists in the cubicle, he was outside impatiently but validatingly shouting "come on, love".
This being the 1990s, Prime Suspect 3 resists closure. They do not (with apologies for the spoiler) get their man. Connie's murderer, a well-connected children's services exec, landlord and paedophile, walks free. Things aren't all bad, though. DCI Tennison does get the promotion she was angling for. Indeed rather than exposing the rampant internal corruption she uncovers in the course of her investigation (it turns out that a senior police officer was a member of the paedophile ring) she exploits what she knows to ensure that she gets the promotion. I would not go so far as to characterise Prime Suspect 3 as abolitionist, but its narrative runs diametrically counter to the idea that trans liberation can be achieved through girlboss feminism within violent state institutions.
*
Underneath the series-by-series takes on the politics of oppressed and marginalised groupings, there is (like all the best British TV) a constant undercurrent of concern with class in Prime Suspect; not class as a social stratification around the ownership or non-ownership of income-generating assets, but class as a culture of social stratification. Indeed this is one of the things that makes the show so good - an extraordinary resonance between La Plante's writing and Mirren's acting as they tell the story of an ambitious working class woman's progress through a working class institution constituted to protect bourgeois interests. The modulations of Tennison's accent alone would have been enough to merit Mirren the BAFTA she won for her performance.
And while we are on the subject of accents, the show casts an implacably judgmental side-eye into the future at those who, today, associate the realisation of trans rights with the concerns of a metropolitan elite. Some of the children in the show, preyed upon the moment they get off the train and spending their teens doing survival sex work on the streets of London, have accents which we would now associate with the "Red Wall". Those who suggest that concern for trans rights is costing Labour the votes of the "traditional working class" might do well to consider whether they are reinforcing a culture which makes queer working class kids - kids fictionalised in the persona of murdered adolescent trans sex worker Connie Jenkins - unwelcome in their own homes and unwelcome in their communities.