Deadloch - Is it Woke, Wacky or Wow?
What do we call a show about grotesque serial murders that makes you laugh out loud? Creators Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan call Deadloch a feminist noir comedy. Vanity Fair slips in the word parody. The show’s oddball characters in a small town setting put it in the category with Twin Peaks, Broadchurch, Mare of Easttown and Fargo. But this show doesn’t content itself with fun portrayals of quirky locals – it’s hilarious social satire, a feat few crime dramas manage.
Welcome to Deadloch, a tiny Tasmanian town with a lake that turns even the name into a joke: Deadloch Lake literally means ‘dead lake lake.’ The show’s pretext responds to the question: what’s the ultimate glass ceiling for women? CEO? Done. President of the USA? Coming? How about serial killer with trademark mutilations and a gender-flipping victim profile? Arrived in Deadloch. When one mutilated male victim after another turns up, male town residents start to panic and female residents fall under suspicion. It’s not just toilet water that swirls the other way ‘down under.’
Deadloch is like a layer cake of sociocultural history. We’ve got indigenous Australians, owners of the continent since around 40,000 BCE but now mostly displaced by white settlers who began arriving in 1788 with the first shipload of exported British convicts. Then there are the large landholders, the ones who, with the aid of laws that encouraged concentration of holdings, became the rural power brokers. The rest of the town is filled with blue collar workers and small business owners.
But Deadloch’s cake has an extra layer, a recent influx of lesbians. The town now has a female mayor and the tiny police department has a female detective. The rich guy died so his widow is now the town’s insufferable owner-of-nearly-everything. When mutilated male bodies start showing up, the men in town get understandably upset and accuse female officials of being incapable of finding the perp. This is political correctness territory, but Deadloch lampoons everybody. By keeping viewers laughing, the story manages a tongue-in-cheek exploration of what could happen when women get ‘too much’ control.
Of course crime fiction’s glass ceiling started cracking at least since PD James published An Unsuitable Job for a Woman in 1972. Most fictional female cops and PIs prove they’re as tough as the guys. They’ve succeeded so well and become so ubiquitous they get to take on the flaws used to complexify male characters like alcoholism, PTSD from past acts of violence, broken relationships – wonderful signs of equality. Some commentators opine that we’ve entered the era of ‘postfeminism’ where women have attained parity or near-parity with men, so there’s no need to focus crime fiction on women attaining positions previously denied to them. Others say that’s a delusion of the affluent who walk around in rose-tinted Ray-Bans. There’s plenty of virulent backlash out there to the neoliberal program of sex equality, not to mention more reasoned critiques. Despite all this, murder mystery victims remain predominantly female. What does it do to mystery plotlines if men are the target and women investigate?
A major theory of humor says that we laugh when we perceive something incongruous, something that violates our expectations. When the burly male townies climb on a bus in a panic, fleeing town in terror for their lives, screaming at the female police detectives that they’re not doing enough to protect them, try not to laugh. Deadloch also takes the bold step of lampooning lesbians. In this era of cancellation-terror who would risk satirizing anyone on the LGBTQ+ spectrum? But Deadloch’s lesbians endlessly partake of ridiculous mutual-support activities like staring in groups and create artwork like a four-hour film entitled ‘Poseidon’s Uterus.’ The ‘cis’ types aren’t spared either. The straight woman detective wears the same silly outfit for three-quarters of the series, uses the f-word several times in every sentence, gets drunk and falls off a bar stool. This is Jonathan Swift teleported to 21st century Australia and given estrogen.
After a zillion small town serial killer stories, can the trope still entertain? Golden Age mysteries helped people survive two world wars and a global economic collapse. Cozies are still there for those moments when readers need to escape to an idyllic world of happy neighbors and happy endings. But to keep the murder mystery genre alive and relevant to an apocalyptic century, it must confront the issues that are threatening survival. One way to do that without scaring off readers tired from another long day at a precarious underpaid job is to make ‘em laugh by making fun of all our troubles. Deadlock is a riotous lesson in how to do that.