Broadchurch : the detectives behind the detective Noémie Tosser To cite this version: Noémie Tosser. Broadchurch : the detectives behind the detective. Literature. 2017. dumas- 01765729 HAL Id: dumas-01765729 https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01765729 Submitted on 13 Apr 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives| 4.0 International License 1 Table of content Acknowledgements...........................................................................................................4 Introduction.......................................................................................................................5 I – The archetypical detective in literature and Alec Hardy..............................................8 1 – Definition of the archetypical detective.................................................................8 a – History of detective stories in literature............................................................8 b – Establishing the corpus and the archetype......................................................11 c – Common points and disparities.......................................................................14 2 – Mental portrait of the detective in Broadchurch..................................................19 a – Alec Hardy as an egocentric character...........................................................19 b – A not-so-nice detective....................................................................................24 c – Desire for solitude...........................................................................................29 d – Before Broadchurch........................................................................................32 3 – Professional and physical description of the detective........................................35 a – Alec Hardy as a professional detective...........................................................35 b – The detective's physical appearance...............................................................39 II – Adaptation: the evolution of detective stories...........................................................44 1 – From book to screen.............................................................................................44 a – The appeal of adaptation................................................................................44 b – Screen over books............................................................................................47 c – TV shows..........................................................................................................51 2 – Detective shows and their narrative architecture.................................................54 a – Popularity of detective shows..........................................................................54 b – What to find in a detective show......................................................................56 c – Modern variations brought to detective shows................................................59 3 – Broadchurch as a different detective show..........................................................62 a – Broadchurch is not a “série nodale”..............................................................62 b – Lack of spectacular elements..........................................................................64 c – A different narrative........................................................................................67 d – Importance of the personal background of the detectives...............................70 III – Construction of the story in Broadchurch...............................................................75 2 1 – Narration techniques in Broadchurch..................................................................75 a – Filming technique and the editing...................................................................75 b – Themes, symbols and references in Broadchurch............................................79 c – Comic touches in a tragic plot.........................................................................82 2 – The investigations................................................................................................84 a – The victims......................................................................................................84 b – The murderers.................................................................................................87 c – What happens after the investigation?............................................................92 3 – The community....................................................................................................96 a – Importance of the community and secondary characters...............................96 b – Parenthood as a main theme...........................................................................99 c – The media, a third narrative arc....................................................................103 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................111 Table of Appendixes......................................................................................................113 Appendix 1: Alec Hardy's loneliness through editing.....................................115 Appendix 2.1: Comparison of the number of episodes aired on the three main channels in France per day*............................................................................120 Appendix 2.2: Comparison of the original country of shows aired on the three main channels in France per week*.................................................................121 Appendix 3: Olly Stevens and the social media..............................................122 Bibliography..................................................................................................................123 3 Acknowledgements As I was told that I would have to write a dissertation this year, I never thought myself capable of such a thing. Yet here I am. First and foremost, I would like to thank Mrs. Hélène Machinal, who agreed to become my research supervisor. None of this work would have been possible without her. I would forever be grateful for her help and also the many things that I learned during this year thanks to her. I would also like to show appreciation to Marianne Colbran, who presented her book Media Representations of Police and Crime: Shaping the Police Television Drama in Brest during the year. Exchanging with her about Broadchurch and reading her book provided me with many aspects to think about during the writing of this paper, but also to have a better understanding of a subject that I did not know much about, that is to say police television drama. I could not write these acknowledgements without mentioning my friends. First, Léa Marzin and Marie-Joshua Huet, with whom it was a delight to talk and work for hours on our respective papers, packed up in a room of the size of a cupboard. I would also like to thank my high school friends, who have been there for me for over seven years now, and with whom it is always a delight to talk about different things around a drink. Finally, I would also like to thank my family, who were the first to believe in my capacity to deliver such a work. Even though they never really got what was the point of writing this research paper, they never failed to encourage me. 4 Introduction "To be sure – Broadchurch is everything you can hope for from a whodunit: it's gritty, dark and never, ever loses sight of the ultimate goal-to find Danny Latimer's killer. It's almost like watching a particularly gritty Christie whodunit directed with the finesse and perfectionism of a Wes Anderson."1 The whodunit is something that has been part of narrative fiction for a very long time now. The interest of an audience in getting involved in an investigation has been the same from the early detective stories of previous centuries to today crime TV shows. Even though the implication of the reader is not the same as that of the spectator, both of them are waiting eagerly to find out who has been responsible for the crime and the explanation for why he/she did that. As a puzzle, a detective story or a crime series manages to trigger the mind of an outside person, spectator or reader, and plays with it until the very end. Giving that people enjoy this game implied by the detective genre, it seems obvious that the developments inside the genre, in books and on screens, are quite important. Indeed, it would be a very long and hard work to run a study of every piece of fiction which is part of the detective genre. In this dissertation, we are going to propose an inter-medial analysis, thus we had to chose between the immensity of instances in the genre. As far as literature is concerned, we chose to work on three detectives. Our choice was mainly based on the popularity of these detectives, who are Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and