Remembering Law & Order: Criminal Intent: "Anti-Thesis"

It would seem that for a variety of reasons Law & Order: Criminal Intent left rather less of a pop cultural footprint than other shows in the same franchise. Still the show, which did in the end manage to air nearly two hundred episodes over its ten seasons, had some notable features. One was that in contrast with other L & O series', and especially the "mothership," its principal Detective Robert Goren was conceived not as, for example, another Lenny Briscoe, but rather a Great Detective in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. As is also the way with Great Detectives Goren had his nemesis, with the Moriarty to his Holmes--and I suppose, also the Irene Adler to his Holmes as well (his nemesis also the one who would for him always be "The woman!")--one Nicole Wallace.

The two first met up in the second season episode "Anti-Thesis," which title had a double meaning in Wallace being the criminal "antithesis" to Detective Goren, while also evoking the academic milieu in which Wallace had established herself--Wallace a Professor of American Literature at the go-to campus for the Law & Order universe's writers, the imaginary "Hudson University," where the episode opens (prior to the discovery of the body and the cut to the credits of the L & O formula) with a confrontation that, as is so often the case with the series, incorporated material "ripped out of the headlines" in obviously allusive fashion. In this case said headline was obviously the battle between then-Harvard University President Lawrence Summers and then-Harvard Professor Cornel West, with here "Professor Franklin Winthrop" chewing out "Professor Roland Sanders" for, among other things, having recorded a rap album that Winthrop, like Summers, held to be "an embarrassment" to the institution.

As this being Wallace's debut suggests, this episode really isn't about them, or about the Summers-West conflict, and indeed that is pretty much it for these two characters, but there does seem something to be said of how the episode presented the stand-ins for these two well-known public figures. The writers certainly do not flatter Summers--Winthrop coming off as at best narrow-minded and overbearing. However, I dare say that Cornel West got the worst of it, this stand-in for him presented as a swaggering thug, a mere gangster with tenure, with the far from subtle effort to make the impression underscored by the way he pointedly set the very rap album Winthrop chewed him out for playing in his office after saying his piece as Winthrop went on standing in front of him.

Of course, writers have evoked stereotypes such as this as a way of subverting them--presenting the image and then showing its falsity. In our time, however, it seems that the consensus view is that that particular technique is no longer acceptable, even if a progressive intent clearly lies behind it. Consider, for example, Frank Norris' classic of American naturalism McTeague. In that book he presents the most appalling Anti-Semitic stereotype in Zerkow (the caricature so over the top that after encountering it I wasn't sure that I cared to read much more of the book, feeling that I was holding something repugnant). Yet we see later that the thoroughly Nordic McTeague, in similar circumstances, ultimately conducts himself in the same (horrifying) manner, driving home very effectively the view that contrary to the fashionable theorizing of his day "race" is irrelevant, human beings regardless of heritage acting the same way in the same (destructive) circumstances. Yet, rightly or wrongly, today's reader of Norris is unlikely to acknowledge the book's using the caricature to such effect, only the caricature's unacceptability. And whether or not one would see this as having given them an excuse, the writers of "Anti-Thesis" gave no impression of having such an intent, just evoking the racist stereotype for the sake of a "red herring." Distasteful then it would seem less acceptable now; the more disappointing given that they had often displayed a measure of liberal conscientiousness in comparison with the "hardhat" politics to which the police procedural inclines; and perhaps reflective of how what we call liberal is apt to prove more centrist than anything else, with all that implies for their attitude toward a Larry Summers and a Cornel West, respectively, and how ready they are to play less than fair with the latter as they treat the former with a gentleness he does not deserve no matter how the economy-wrecking, poors-hating Friend of Epstein disgraces himself.