Also see my followup post at 5:45 pm 2/19/14 in which I amend my opinion about Lady Mary]
I
just learned last night that Julian Fellowes, of course the mastermind behind
Downtonmania, was the screenwriter for Gosford
Park, Robert Altman’s award-winning 2001 venture into the English
country-house murder genre. I also just learned that Fellowes originally
conceived of Downton Abbey as a
continuation of Gosford Park, a
factoid which transcends Maggie Smith’s formidable presence in both
productions.
The
reason I came upon this info---and why you should care, if you’re a fellow
Donwtonmaniac--is because of a chat I had with a fellow Downtonmaniac
yesterday, whom I hereby thank profusely for getting me started down the long
and winding road of literary sleuthing that led to this post.
She didn’t
know she was doing this, of course, she was merely expressing her dissatisfaction
with the idea that Bates would actually go to London to murder Green, the evil
varlet & rapist, given the risk that something could go wrong with such a
risky plan. How could Bates, our favorite early 20th century Job, do
such a thing? After all, if all did not
go perfectly, and he was discovered, it could ruin all future hopes for
happiness for him and wife Anna, who was of course the victim of Green’s brutal,
sadistic attack. Hadn’t she (and he, for that matter) suffered enough?
At
first I took the other side, suggesting Bates faced a moral Catch-22, since inaction
on his part would be equally horrible—it would likely have the effect of Bates
standing helpless, watching & allowing Anna to continue to suffer each and
every time Green’s master, Tony Gillingham, happened to visit Downton, which
seemed to be practically every episode this season, as Tony continued his
relentless, aggressive courtship of Lady Mary.
But
my persistent opponent in this friendly debate then landed a telling point—how could
Bates know for sure that it really was
Green who raped Anna, given that no one who knew the truth (Anna, Mrs . Hughes
and Lady Mary) had actually told him so. Even though Bates felt he knew for sure, who did he think he was, Patrick Jane, the
Mentalist? After all, as Jane Austen
taught us, “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure;
seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little
mistaken.”
For
example, Anna’s extreme distress in Green’s presence could quite plausibly have
originated from a nasty, but non-criminal beginning: first we have Green, the egotistical,
sexually provocative jerk, flirting with Anna, a married woman, right in front
of her husband, practically daring Bates to react; then we have Anna, surprisingly
oblivious of the jealousy she is raising in Bates—but, like Desdemona, she is
so confident of the solidity of her love with Bates, she believes he cannot be
jealous, so she responds to Green’s flirtations with indiscreetly positive
vibes; and then, finally, after the rape, Anna realizes the tragic role she has
so inadvertently played, and feels intensely guilty about all of this. Then,
when she is attacked by an intruding stranger, she really suffers, because she
knows Bates will never believe her that it is not Green, so now she must
constantly worry that Bates will take revenge on the wrong man. From Bates’s
point of view, if he can somehow be objective, that would be a pretty
plausible, even compelling alternative explanation for his wife’s particular
reactivity vis a vis Green. How, indeed, can he be sure?
That’s
when the light bulb went on in my mind for the first time, and I had a Mr.
Knightley moment about Julian Fellowes’s authorial machinations. I.e., I began
to suspect him of some major-league double
dealing in leading millions of viewers down the garden path of uncritically assuming
that Bates had to be guilty of murdering
Green, a crime he would have committed only after first assuming Green’s being
guilty in the first place!
Wheels
within wheels! That’s when I learned of Fellowes’s screenwriting pedigree; and
when the recollection of the murder mystery of Gosford Park went through my mind with the speed of an arrow, the
Shakespearean subtext that Fellowes had been hiding in plain sight in Downton Abbey came into clear focus before
my eyes, and this post was born! It’s not short, but if any post I’ve ever
written has a payoff worth a few extra words, this is it!
WHO (REALLY)
DONE IT?
Who (other than Bates) would also have had opportunity,
motive, and M.O., sufficient to induce a reasonable, level-headed viewer to
suspect him or her of having created some fresh Soylent Green under a London
double-decker bus? I’ll give my answer
before the end of this post, but I think it’ll be more fun for you if you don’t
skip to the end, but instead follow me down my very good faith garden path, so
perhaps the answer will occur to you before I give it!
Opportunity:
Who besides Bates was in London at the time of the murder and could have gone
off alone to find, and then kill, Green, before returning to the company of
others?
Well,
in addition to Bates, that includes (believe it or not) five other cast regulars! Lady Mary, Anna,
and Tony Gillingham are the three who should immediately come to your mind.
But
there are two others, whom you probably did not think of at all, even though,
when you do reflect on it, they both could easily have passed through London
that fateful day----I’m referring to Lord Grantham and his temporary valet for
the Earl’s American excursion, Thomas Barrow.
So
now we have a pool of potential suspects, let’s see how they fit the rest of my
criteria.
Motive:
Who besides Bates had a motive to kill Green?
Anna,
for two powerful, mutually inciting motives: wanting to get rid of Green before
Bates could do it and get himself hung; and wanting revenge for herself. And
who knows how long Anna was gone while Mary sat with Tony asking him to sack
Green?
But
also, Lady Mary, whom we witnessed being deeply shocked by Anna’s revelation of
Green’s guilt not long before. She could
feel enormous guilt over having been the reason why Green was in Downton in the
first place, and, even worse, had returned repeatedly. Mary is still recovering
from the devastation of Matthew’s tragic death, and is in a very volatile state
of being very persistently courted by two attractive suitors. She says to
Edith, in another context, something
like “We must face life’s challenges”
–maybe she experiences Anna’s shocking news as such a challenge, requiring bold
action from Mary, who more than anything seeks to return to the helm of her own
life, which ran aground on dangerous rocks after Matthew died.
In
contrast to Anna and Mary, Lord Grantham would appear to be utterly unconnected
to Green, and so would Thomas—does anyone recall any interaction between him
and Green during Green’s previous sojourns at Downton? I don’t.
And
finally, Tony. When Mary asks him to sack Green, he does respond to Mary saying
he did not care for Green, a curious thing to say—why wouldn’t he have fired
him long ago, in such a case? And Tony certainly would have been the one among
this group of five in London who would have had every reason in the world to be
right next to his own valet! But is a vague dislike a motive for murder? Certainly
not, unless that expression of vague dislike was a cover for some much deeper
enmity which Fellowes has concealed from
the sight of the viewer until a big reveal in Season 5.
M.O.:
Again, it is Bates’s M.O., of which the viewer is incessantly reminded, as a
man who, like Raskolnikov, believes
himself to have the right to exact personal justice after holding his own
private trial of Green’s guilt. Plus Bates has the skill set—the wits, the
resourcefulness, the boldness-- to execute any plan of that kind that he might
conceive. Plus, he can get very very angry.
Whereas
Lady Mary, Anna, Gillingham, and Lord Grantham all pale in comparison as
suspects on this point-none of them has any particular penchant we know of for
behavior outside the pale of the law in a civilized society that does not
condone taking an eye for an eye.
And
Barrow? Well, he is certainly amoral in a number of ways, but his M.O. is not
murder, it’s blackmail, it’s fraud. His attacks are virtual, not physical.
At
this stage of my analysis, I checked in the Message Boards for Downton Abbey at IMDB and found a thread
started right after this last episode, on this very same question of who might
have killed Green besides Bates, and, sure enough, among the possibilities
brought forward were Tony Gillingham and Anna. Nobody made any suggestion about
the other three suspects on my list.
I
will now inject a very limited SPOILER for those reading this post from the
American side of the Pond, who have not yet seen the so-called Christmas Special which actually was the
true finale of the English Season Four. So if you are extremely scrupulous
about not wanting to know anything about what happens, or doesn’t happen, in
that Special Christmas episode (which
I haven’t seen, but which I read about yesterday, because I just had to know
what happens in it before I see it on Sunday), you may wish to stop reading
this post now, and wait till after this Sunday’s U.S. airing to read the
rest.
But
for the rest of you….
SCROLL
DOWN
SCROLL DOWN
SCROLL
DOWN…
…for
the “punch line” (or more aptly, the punch page)
of this post, in which I will reveal what I realized immediately after I had my
Mr. Knightley moment. That’s when I knew that Julian Fellowes had, in the above
described episode, coming after nearly four seasons of episodes, sprung a
delicious mousetrap on his viewers, which he may well have planned going back
to Season One, and which, it is clear from the absence of clear revelation in
the Christmas Special, he will not
explicitly reveal until Season Five!
And
how subtle the mechanism of Fellowe’s’ mousetrap, that very few viewers have
even noticed they’re caught in it yet! I will in the remainder of this post,
reveal how Fellowes has done a splendid job of emulating Agatha Christie and
all the other great murder mystery writers, indeed has emulated his own
screenplay for Gosford Park, and has
in a metaphorical sense revived the country house murder motif which is central in the 2001 film. And, as my
Subject Line teased you, there’s Shakespearean tragedy at the heart of
Fellowes’s practice upon the trusting minds of his millions of viewers, which I
will invoke repeatedly in the remainder of this post!
Further
cuteness and suspense would be entirely inappropriate at this point, so I will
now reveal to you that my #1 suspect for the murder of Green the Evil Varlet,
is none other than……Thomas Barrow, the Iago of Downton Abbey!!!! And actually,
as I will demonstrate, Fellowes—who perhaps you will think of as the Iago of Downton Abbey the series (as opposed to
the fictional estate) has quite clearly had Shakespeare’s great marital
tragedy, Othello, in mind as he
masterfully constructed this dramatic sleight of hand!
Here’s
the tipping point, that sends the viewer down the path which I think Fellowes is
going to take us down during the first few episodes of Season Five. Everyone is
thinking that the murderer must have been someone who wanted Green dead solely
because of what Green may or may not have done to the murderer, or to someone
the murderer cares about.
But now
think outside the box---what if (and a mystery buff could probably name a
hundred novels, stories, and tv episodes which use some variation on this theme
I’m about to set forth) Green was merely (and ironically) an innocent victim of
a plot as to which he was NOT the murderer’s principal target? In other, less cryptic words, what if Green’s
being known to Anna, Mrs. Hughes and Mary, and suspected by Bates, of having raped Anna, was of no
particular concern to the person who actually murdered Green, other than as an
opportunity for his murderer to “murder” (the reputation) of his true target, a
man who hates Green-i.e., Bates?
Just
recall how Iago, wishing to destroy Othello, does not physically attack
Othello, but instead drives Othello insane with jealousy of Cassio, so that Othello
will destroy himself and Desdemona, and almost destroy Cassio as well? And
further to that goal, Iago falsely frames Cassio as an adulterer with
Desdemona? You must see where I am going, as Barrow has, in effect, cast Bates
as Othello, Anna as Desdemona, and Green as Cassio—and since I had to miss two
of the prior episodes of Downton Abbey
while traveling, I would not be surprised to learn that prior to the rape,
Barrow had been bantering with Green,
suggesting to him (with a broad, leering wink or two) that Bates, the old man
with a limp, was not able to satisfy his young, sexy wife, and maybe she’d be
more than receptive to Green’s advances?
Let’s
revisit the three key points that would make Barrow a character a prime
suspect:
Opportunity:
Barrow came back from America that same day of the murder with the Earl, and
surely passed through London on the way back to Yorkshire from Southampton
(where the ship from the US would have landed, that’s where Titanic sailed
from) which of course is south of London. He could easily have obtained, from
the Earl, permission, after a long trip abroad, for an hour or two to see an
old friend or the like, before heading back to Downton. And the first thing
Barrow would have done once he was alone would be to telephone Baxter, and ask
her for news about Anna and Bates.
And
doesn’t my theory put Barrow’s obsessive interest in Bates and Anna’s
relationship, and in particular the circumstances that led Anna into such
obvious distress, in an amazingly clear light? He’s looking for intelligence
that he can exploit. He may even have identified Green as a sociopath during an
earlier encounter at Downton (it takes one to know one, after all). And so,
imagine Barrow’s excitement if Baxter, fulfilling her duty as spy, without understanding
to what use her info might be put (think about how much she would then be like
Emilia, Iago’s wife, when she unwittingly seals her mistress’s fate by her role
in the fantasy of the handkerchief which is the final straw in convincing
Othello --mistakenly, of course-- of Desdemona’s adultery with Cassio) ,
revealed to Barrow the rumor that Bates believed Anna had been attacked by
Green, who was at that very instant back in London?
Barrow
would have perceived this news as a providential gift from God, an opportunity
to do to Bates what Bates’s first wife had done to Bates only a few years
earlier, i.e., to frame Bates for a
murder!
Motive:
Who wants revenge against Bates more than anyone on the planet? Barrow, of course! He hates Bates, and has
never stopped hating Bates, because of what happened in Season One. For those
who don’t know or recall, here’s Wikipedia’s synopsis, in relevant part:
“Thomas
remains extremely annoyed that he had been passed up for the position of Lord
Grantham's valet by "Long John Silver", which is what he calls John
Bates when talking with Miss O'Brien about the new valet. He is always at odds
with John. Bates catches him stealing wine and threatens to tell Mr Carson,
unless Thomas stops insulting William. Thomas and O'Brien attempt to get him
fired for theft by planting one of Robert's snuff boxes in his room, but Anna
warns him, and he replaces it without informing on them. They later try
accusing him of being the one who has been stealing wine. He and Ms O'Brien get
Daisy to lie to Mr Carson. But Daisy feels guilty and admits that she lied, and
then later when Molesley sees Thomas "replacing" Carson's wallet,
that he found, back into his jacket, Carson tells Lord Grantham, and they agree
to fire Thomas.”
Nothing
need be added to demonstrate Barrow’s compelling mens rea. Fate would seem to have given Barrow the means of
destroying Bates the way the Greek tragedians destroyed their tragic
protagonists. To Job, add Oedipus, then, as a second ghost haunting the tragic
soul of Mr. Bates. Unless Barrow’s scheme can be foiled—and of course, I
believe that is exactly what will happen, or Downtonmaniacs will riot in the streets
till Fellowes gives us the resolution we all demand! ;)
And
think of even more learned subtext that Fellowes’s has slid in here. Much
scholarly analysis of Iago’s motivations has focused on an unmistakable
homosexual component in his character. Does Iago secretly love Othello and is his “murder” of both Othello and
Desdemona, by turning them all into his puppets, the result of Iago’s jealous
rage? And of course Iago’s other more
obvious motive for destroying everyone
other major character in the play is his
rage over being denied advancement, being cheated out of the elevated position
he believes he has fairly earned. Well, hello! Isn’t that exactly how Barrow
feels about Bates having been given the
plum position of valet to Lord Grantham, instead of Barrow? And wouldn’t
Barrow’s acute sense of aggrievement be at its peak at the very instant when he
returns to England with his master, knowing
that before the sun sets, they will be back at Downton, Bates will be
back at his role as valet to Robert, and Barrow will, like Cinderella, have
turned back into a lowly footman , downstairs, being treated (as he sees
it) like dirt.
That would be exactly the desperate moment when Barrow would
be tempted to cross the line into physical violence---but (being the Iago that
he is), he’d murder Green the way Iago murdered his first gull, Roderigo, as
mere collateral damage, in order to get to his real victim, Bates, whom
he’d “kill”, bloodlessly, by remote
control.
M.O.:
Earlier in Season Four, Barrow and Edna (the sneaky maid, remember her?) tried
to frame Anna for something bad that happened at Downton, but failed. Barrow is
the quintessential sleazy weasel, we know that. As I said before, his M.O. is
blackmail and fraud. Well, perhaps when
this brief window of opportunity opened for him when he returned to England
from America, he decided to seize the day, and so (as one IMDB poster wittily
put it) threw Green under the bus, for the purpose of destroying Bates once and
for all! He would be like the insane Bruno in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, committing a murder on behalf of someone
else! But of course, Barrow’s motive would have been revenge on Bates, whereas
Bruno turned blackmailer of the hero Guy for a murder he didn’t commit, only
after Guy refused to return the favor to Bruno by murdering Bruno’s mother!
A
CRUX….OR A BRILLIANT STROKE?
Now,
if you’re really paying attention, and in full Columbo /Miss Marple/Mentalist
mode at my side, you have probably noticed the weakest link in my otherwise
very strong chain of inference, which is the coincidence of Barrow arriving in
London at precisely the moment when he would learn about Green’s rape of Anna, but,
even more so, the coincidence of Bates leaving Downton for that entire day,
thereby losing an otherwise ironclad alibi.
How
could Fellowes have been so clever in constructing this masterfully veiled
reenactment of Othello, with
plausible motivations at every step of the way, but then has to rely on Bates’s
coincidentally taking a trip alone away
from Downton Abbey, thereby making himself vulnerable to being framed by
Thomas?
It
was in asking myself that question that the answer occurred to me, and it is
really the piece de resistance of
Fellowe’s’ authorial craftsmanship, truly inspired. What we have here is the
final potentially tragic irony-i.e. what if Bates’s secret mission to London
was not prompted by anything anyone said to him, but was out of his concern
that Anna, while in London accompanying Lady Mary, might take some desperate
action against Green (after all, she was also at the table in the Downton downstairs,
when Green revealed the Gillingham residence address)?
Bates
would have gone to London precisely because he knew that Anna was afraid he’d
get himself hung or imprisoned for life for murdering Green, so Anna actodually
had a third motive for murdering Green, beyond the previously stated ones of
revenge and guilt-this third motive would be to risk her own hanging or
imprisonment, in order to prevent Bates from getting to Green first! And
Baxter, when Barrow called her, would of course have informed Barrow that Bates
had gone off on a day trip, giving Barrow the idea to act right then and there!
BUT....
Today,
seven hours after posting my first version of this post at 3 AM, I awoke and
realized that I needed to amend this post, to add more possibilities, because
Fellowes’s densely interwoven web of mystery, his serpentine garden path of
storytelling, actually has another, equally plausible outcome , besides Barrow
as Iago-like murderer, which I have now only seen as I revisited my imagining
of Bates’s imaginings about Anna in London.
Let’s
start, then, with two (mercifully) final questions.
First,
if Bates feared Anna would murder Green
while in London, would Bates have imagined that Anna asked for Lady Mary’s help
in this scheme? I.e., would he think Anna, on the train to London, thought it
all through, and explained everything to Lady Mary, and proposed that together, they could pull off the
“accidental” death of Green, with Mary keeping Tony occupied long enough for
Anna to do the deed?
So
now, you see, just before the finish line, in justifying my interpretation of
Barrow as Iago having pushed Green under the bus, I have established the equal
plausibility of Anna, assisted by Mary, having done audaciously done Green in!
Because
I’d really like to think that Anna really did murder Green, and that Mary really
did help Anna in this! It would be such good karma for both of them, women who
both had spent a very long time after an emotionally devastating, life-altering
event, feeling utterly powerless. They both knew
by this climactic point in the story that there was only one option open to
them for removing an evil sociopath from the world, a man they knew was guilty, and that was to just
get rid of him once and for all, by taking proactive steps….toward a man, Green,
standing at a bus stop in Piccadilly, that is!
But then,
a final question---if I am correct as to either Barrow OR Anna/Mary having
murdered Green, then, if Bates really
did come to London, and I think he did, then….did Bates observe the murder? Or,
if he did not, did he only learn of the murder when he returned to Downton at
the end of the day? In either case, if
he thought Anna had done it, that would explain his oddly inscrutable smile
back at Downton, talking to Anna about
their respective long days, because he’d
be the only one (other than the murderer) who’d know the identity of the
murderer!
So…
in Season Five, will Thomas attempt to blackmail Bates, because he can prove
Bates was not in York as Bates told everybody? Or, will Bates expose Thomas as
the murderer?
Or…..final
turn of the mentalizing screw……will Fellowes cross everyone up, including yours
truly, and reveal that Green is not really dead at all, but it was a case of
mistaken identity? I.e., just a
monstrously clever Red Herring constructed by Fellowes?
All I
know is that now I really can’t wait for Season Five to find out! And that’s
where I’ll leave you, my indulgent readers, hanging until….Season 5 reveals
what Fellowes had in mind---or maybe, he hasn’t decided yet! And I, for one, will not be guilty of any
assumptions about which option he will ultimately choose!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAusten
on Twitter
P.S.:
For those who might’ve wondered why my Subject Line includes “Donwell” as in
Donwell Abbey, the country estate of Mr. Knightley in Jane Austen’s Emma, well, that’s my final “Gotcha!” in
this post, because there is a startling resonance between my claim that Barrow could
have attempted to frame Bates for the murder of Green, on the one hand, and my
claim one week ago….
….in
which I suggested that Mr. Knightley may well have murdered Mrs.
Churchill, for the purpose of framing,
and then blackmailing, Frank Churchill into actually entering into an engagement with Jane Fairfax, under
the terms of which he will give her the Churchill family jewels, but ultimately
Jane will not have to marry Frank!
Think about Emma sketching a portrait of Harriet and then giving it to Mr.
Elton to go get it framed—was Jane
Austen, mistress of wordplay, suggesting by the means I described in the above
linked post, that Knightley similarly and sinisterly, had framed a
“portrait’ of Frank as murderer of his aunt, thereby making Frank too “tall”
(i.e., macho)?
I
do believe that Fellowes was inspired as much by Emma as by Othello in his
grand design of the Mysterious Death of
Green the Evil (and Vile) Varlet.
