Inspector Morse - The Transcendence of Art

[The second of a series of posts which bind my twin loves - philosophy/theology and TV detectives - for no reason whatsoever. Previously: Broadchurch - By Grace Ye Have Been Saved. Up next: Sherlock Holmes - The Aragorn Complex. Upcoming: Foyle's War and moral absolutes.]

“Your aesthetic sense seems to be causing you no end of trouble, Chief Inspector,” says one suspect in the enormous body of Oxford-dwellers under investigation by Inspector Morse.

Anybody that has known me more than a week or two will probably tell you that one of my nerd obsessions is British detective shows. But my standards are high. While your average chalk-and-cheese buddy-cop mystery show is fun, I get bored unless it starts to take a stab at something deeper (see Midsomer Murders, Elementary).

Inspector Morse, at first glance, doesn’t seem to do this. Morse is a broody intellectual with odd habits. Sergeant Robbie Lewis, his partner, is a cheerful, ordinary family man. It’s the Formula. 

But Morse is more than the sum of his eccentricities (as, for instance, Hercule Poirot has become under the subtle grooming of David Suchet.) Morse doesn’t just like good things because they are commonly accepted as Good Things, but because they are genuinely excellent. And while the show has shot Oxford’s homicide rate into the stratosphere, its mystery doesn’t really center around death, but around life, and the longing for something transcendent.

Like Evelyn Waugh (a comparison I'll justify in a minute), Morse has a rather cantankerous view of the modern world, accompanied by a nostalgia for one that is passing away. In his novel Brideshead Revisited, Waugh personified the new age as a shallow young lieutenant named Hooper (he could have been the prototype for happy-go-lucky Robbie Lewis). As described by his Oxford-educated superior Charles Ryder:

Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry--that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the child and the man--Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on St. Crispin's Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon--these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

Morse and Lewis could easily be Ryder and Hooper transported to a 1980’s police station. Morse is a romantic, burying his regrets from a sad childhood and unsuccessful love life in soaring Wagnerian operas. He’s frequently irritated by Lewis’s grating banality, and takes it out on the poor sergeant by mocking his grammar, education, and practically everything else.

Lewis doesn’t deserve this (it’s in these moments that the relationship is more like the pre-ghost Scrooge and Crachit), because while Morse is a romantic, he’s also a misanthrope and a snob.

There’s a seemingly insurmountable difference between the world in Morse’s head and the daily deluge of sordid tales he encounters as a police officer (he is, after all, “a good detective but a poor policeman.”) His usual mental defense against this gap is to look down on ordinary people and venerate artists, intellectuals, and beautiful women as “something different.” He has a gourmet taste in ale, music, and cars. Even his view of women is idealized and old-fashioned. While this leads him to be pretty sexist at times, it also makes him treat women, and the ideal of femininity that they symbolize, as a race apart, something high and sacred.

He is quick to recognize sehnsucht, the inexplicable longing we find in beauty and purity.

C.S. Lewis defines it so:

That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan,” the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.

But though Morse builds his entire ethos around this passion, there are times when it fails. I think that’s what I like the most about him: he reveres the sacred echo in beauty, yet he feels its limitations.

Inevitably, if we hold up people or things as an end, they will wither (if that sounds like an appeal for God, it is), especially living in the age of Hooper. Artists and art are both meant to be means, not ends. 

Morse’s most vulnerable moments are when his ideals break down, and he’s dragged down to join the rest of humanity. 

Take this scene from Twilight of the Gods, when, at the end of the case, Morse is contemplating the ignoble personal life of a beautiful opera singer:

It’s the first time he’s ever asked Lewis about his family.

Lewis isn’t such a bad guy, after all. He is kinder and more principled than Morse—he has a family, a decent, albeit somewhat dull, life. Lewis has an emotional center, while Morse is eternally lonely. But even with all his flaws, I prefer Morse’s snobbery to Lewis’s routine. Lewis seldom takes a stand on his middle-class doctrines, and when he does it stems from convention, not conviction. Morse is at least decisive, and his spiritual skepticism has more integrity than Lewis’s wishy-washy conformity.When Lewis is asked about God, he shrugs and retreats into English embarrassment. Speaking to a slightly buffoonish canon about devil worship:

Lewis: How can someone so bright believe in all that stuff?

Canon Appleton: I believe in an historical figure who made the lame walk and the blind see and who raised himself up from the dead. Or don’t you believe that, sergeant?

[Lewis looks embarrassed.]*

Morse, on the other hand, later engages the canon in a more lengthy, nuanced discussion on evil. He refuses to resort to clichéd, cookie-cutter atheism. He’s a cynic about organized religion (with all the corrupt churchmen he’s encountered in Oxford, who can blame him?), but ideas of justice and penance resonate. Another factor is the constant reminder of his own insufficiency in his empty love life, dead-end career, and academic failures. (If he wished to forget the last, a long parade of suspects employed in Oxford's thirty-nine colleges continually rub it in his face.)

There’s one scene in my favorite episode, Promised Land, in which this is demonstrated. The story is a melancholy one (though interspersed with some of the series’ funniest moments)—a tale of miscarried justice, a never-ending cycle of reprisals, and the impossibility of human redemption, set with great irony in a paradise of independence and prosperity. Even in this moral morass, Morse keeps a hold—tenuous as it is—on his ideals. He cares more about justice than process, but justice fails him, and he certainly fails himself. After some morose rambling about Pascal’s wager, he says:

Morse: A real gambler will always choose life over death, Lewis.

Lewis: What do you think…about God and that? Do you think there’s a God?

Morse: I think…there are times when I wish to God there was one. A just God. A God dispensing justice. I’d like to believe in that.

That humility and insecurity, an appeal to a power outside himself, is easier to respect than snide, certain atheism (or for that matter, snide, certain faith). Morse loves beauty and ideals, but he feels the inadequacy of these things in the face of human depravity and failure, and he’s honest enough to at least wish there was something behind the beauty. He even admits the possibility.

We shouldn't be left with a picture of a romantic, virtuous seeker after spiritual truths: Morse is an imperfect hero. His flaws are dramatic and obvious, he’s a bully, a snob, socially inept, nearly an alcoholic, a sexist, a corrupt policeman, arrogant, self-centered. But he never pretends to be anything else. Much of John Thaw’s magnificent portrayal of the character comes down to the fact that he wears his heart on his sleeve, in all its passion, sensitivity, sinfulness, and brokenness. It is this obvious shortcoming (and his awareness of it) that grants him both unusual vulnerability and an endearing humility.

As Morse said about Wagner, this show was about “…the important things...Life and death…regret.”

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
    Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless under ground
    Falls the remorseful day.
~A.E. Housman

Watch the series for free on Hulu.

Want something good to watch? Check out my full list of British detectives, here.

Trailer:

Longish

*It’s notable that Lewis’s shallow faith is uprooted the instant he loses what is dear to him (I’m thinking in particular of events between the end of Morse and the beginning of Lewis.)