Downton Abbey

There is a great deal that's wrong with this show; its often nauseating sentimentality, its pretenses at questioning class structure while ultimately upholding it, its extremely problematic sexual politics, but there are also many things about it that are a delight. It can be claimed that novels or movies encourage us to think of characters as static, while shows have the potential (which they very rarely take) of showing change, or rather, different perspectives. Downton Abbey does this extremely well, and most of the time it doesn't seem like forced 'character development', but as if they are allowing the viewer over time to see each character from different sides, and each side is perfectly consistent with what we already know. Some of the most interesting shifts (I thought) were centred not on the main characters, but on the minor ones, such as Mr. Mosley, who starts out as a somewhat pretension and annoying butler shirking the war and ends up as an enthusiastic and kind teacher. I didn't get the sense that he had 'changed' in some fundamental way, I think he would still have shirked the war at the end of the show, had it come then, the positive and unsavoury sides of his character are allowed to co-exist. I really enjoyed the fact that the show often refuses to deliver final moral judgement or condemnation, as in the case of Rose, who has an affair (I assume it's an affair) with a married man, sneaks off to visit nightclubs, and is also kind, enthusiastic, understanding, and ends up married, settled and happy, with no scene of 'repentance' or promise to mend her ways.

Watching this show was for me a lot like reading a George Eliot novel because I hated all the characters that I was supposed to like and loved all the ones that were being terrible. I have to say that Lady Mary is one of the most delightfully awful female characters I have ever come across. She's emotionally manipulative to a devilish extent, a horrible mother, a serial and almost professional heartbreaker, powerful, assertive, scheming, seductive, eternally cool (I don't think she had a hair out of place during the entire show), she even cries like she's doing it as a social duty. Her sister Edith is nervous, inclined to be literary, attempting to make her way in the world, desperate and sad and of course, Mary walks all over her. I can't express to what extent I was on Mary's side. She does and says the most horrible things to Edith, and I was just cheering her on. I had absolutely no sympathy for Edith, and wanted Mary to get everything. There's absolutely no reasonable explanation for it, but Mary is so utterly magnetic and dominating, I found her to be one of the most satisfactory female characters in any show, film or book. Maybe it's because she so skillfully manipulates the system she is in to assert her authority; she plays the ideal wife, mother, daughter and socialite, while in reality, one has the sneaking feeling that all she cares about is money, status, and playing games with people's lives for her own entertainment. And she completely gets away with all of it.

While cinematically, the show is rather unremarkable (if not to say completely formulaic), there was one scene that really shook me up. Robert, the family patriarch, gets a burst ulcer in the middle of a formal dinner, and suddenly starts not just coughing blood, but spouting it, and it feels like we're suddenly in the middle of a horror movie and he's possessed by the devil. After five seasons of accumulated impressions of rigid formality, decorum and control, seeing something like that was such a stunning change of mood that my heart turned over with terror and I felt sick for three days. In one second, the show completely shattered the atmosphere it had been building up for years, and it was such a bold and shocking move and so stylistically well-executed that even though I almost had a heart attack and did not enjoy it at all, I applaud the director for it.

Oh yes, and the costumes were lovely.