Miss Marple? The Version Matters!

A central Christmas present for us, from Monique and John, was a Blu-Ray DVD which gave us access to streaming—from Netflix and others. A byproduct has been exposure to the turmoil in streaming. What up to now we’d barely have noticed is now Big News, thus, for instance the following web headline: Netflix is Yanking These Movies and Shows on February 1. Evidently a source’s list of titles is not a permanent but a dynamic sort of thing. Our access to Netflix in this new format gave us the means to see, again, the original Miss Marple series, 1984-1992, in which Joan Hickson is the lead character. That version, you might say matters. It is by every measure the very best. (Joan Hickson, incidentally, quite resembles my Mother in her advanced years).

This series was then followed by Agatha Christie’s Marple where first Geraldine McEwan (2004-2009) and the Julia McKenzie (2009-2013) have the leading role. This second presentation illustrates how current culture, let us call it, can bend, twist, and deform a traditional body of work, that body being the 12 novels Agatha Christie actually wrote with Marple its main character. This series has 23 episodes in 11 of which Marple is, as it were, forced into other Christie plots by the latter-day dramatizers. Not only that. The plots of virtually every episode are updated by introducing new story lines, sometimes changing the “who done it,” and peppering up the characters so that, as carriers of the new political correctness, they will presumably appeal to more sophisticated modern viewers.

If we view these as three series, the Miss Marple figure is played by ever younger people. Hickson was 78 when she began Miss Marple in 1984, McEwan 72 when she began playing Marple in 2004, and McKenzie 68 when she took up the role in 2009.

There is here also a seemingly deliberate effort to “lighten” the mood of the series, loosening the manners, and making characters young—with the net effect that some do not fit the times that Christie was actually writing about.

If we wait long enough, Miss Marple will eventually morph into an actual (if probably digital) cartoon—in which she’ll be a teenage sleuth brandishing the most recent devices and apps to bring the crimi to justice.

The version matters. Check your birth certificate before ordering the stream—or the disk—if there is still a disk to be had. The older you are the more likely you’ll be to like he original series. Which, incidentally, will stop streaming from Netflix on February 1. Shame, shame, and double shame.

Slogans

We saw one of those series (on library rental CDs), series that I suspect arise within one of the regrettably advanced cabals of the BBC aimed at the “education” of the lower classes. In one of the episodes the crime to be solved by our politically correct Chief Superintendent involves heinous behavior by one of BBC’s favorite targets, the C of E. In one scene we are outdoors at a church, having been inside to glimpse both soaring architecture and sinking degradation, when the camera “significantly” pans over a stone column inscribed upon which are the words GOD IS LOVE. The context is not, as it were, to assert the truth of that phrase but, rather, to point to the hypocrisy of clergy and believers—because, by listening to the dialogue between the PC CSI and his laudably lower class DI (that’s a detective inspector for laughably naïve Americans) we already know how we are supposed to view religion generally—thus as something below the salt, but that phrase, in turn, would not be seriously used because another favorite target of such shows is the nobility or anything even resembling it. And a third one, of course, is anybody engaged in trade. But, alas, we wouldn’t use that phrase either because that’s another dismissive slogan used by upper classes of yore. Therefore “trade” today means big business with showy wealth on display.

Now, mind you, in fairness to the BBC, it is more like the civilization itself and not uniform in its ideology. Advanced cabals are opposed to others that frequently succeed in bringing us better entertainment. In addition to CSI WhatsHisName, we are also treated to Miss Marple. Indeed she has been brought us by faceless BBC folk I heartily approve of (BBC-sage, let’s say) and, later also by the cabal I’ll gladly do without. In the first series Miss Marple, who has a very dark view of humanity indeed, is shown as she was written (manner of speaking). In the second and later version, she is made to seem younger, lighter, and always seemingly with her tongue in her cheek. Her dark side has vanished. The cabal must have shuddered at the first Miss Marple; lordy; Marple might actually teach the lower classes something that might be called “morals.” Double-shudder. This would not do, would not do.

BBC-sage has also brought us Ruth Rendell—and done in the clear. And Ruth Rendell, while a woman of our time, wears a very serious expression on her face; she has an unfailing eye for the fallen state of humanity—any class—under, lower, middle, higher, or the highest. We none of us escapes that dark vision, one that speaks of other and these days rarely publicized aspects of God we’d best keep in mind as we slurp our life with all the gusto that we can.

Meddling

Among the consequences of narrow materialism are certain interventions by experimenters into the medical arts. Today the New York Times brings us a story of scientists able to erase memories selectively in mice and rats using a drug called Zip, suggesting that people’s traumatic memories, drug addictions, or anything else currently thought unpalatable may in the future be removed from the behavioral menu by zip-zapping their memories. I pity misbehaving school boys in the future; come to think of it, I already pity them; they’re already targets of Big Pharma. George Orwell’s imagination evidently failed to disclose the sophisticated means whereby Big Brother in the future will show how much he loves us. By coincidence—a meaningful coincidence, perhaps—just yesterday I finished reading an Agatha Christie novel quite unusual in its subject (Passenger to Frankfurt). It projects a crisis in the world (resurgence of anarchy and Nazism) dealt with by the deployment of a wonder-chemical, the invention of Project Benvo, which compels those who’re dosed to display benevolence for the rest of their lives. The unexpected consequences of modern discoveries are another sub-theme of this novel.

Now glancing at my own reaction I’m reminded of the story of the two old ladies in church listening with great approval as the fiery preacher in turn thunders against greedy merchants, seductively dressed women, and adultery. Each time he reaches a crescendo, the old ladies nod and say “Amen, Amen.” But when the preacher next turns to excoriate those who indulge in the consumption of snuff—then the two ladies look at each other. And they say: “Now he’s meddling!”

Consuming, as I do, seven different medications, I’m not exactly abstemious when it comes to pharmaceuticals and hence only, at best, passively resist such “interventions.” Indeed, without interventions, I probably would have said my farewells and adieus in 1995. But there’s a limit.

When it comes to mind and memory, we know too little. When it comes to medicating people to control behavior—done to minors mercilessly and their parents yielding to Big Brother (or Sister) like shy primitives—I draw the line. We know too little. And our governing model is not at all persuasive to me. What is that model? It is that pure chance, thus Bertrand Russell’s “accidental collocation of atoms” produced all living things including brains. There is neither meaning nor purpose in this great process and therefore intervention is permitted by definition if only you can get “the parents,” as it were—the public—to agree. Whoa! I for one would like to zap the Zip before it reaches adulthood and it becomes politically correct to get a memory tune-up especially, perhaps, after adulteries or divorces.