C6 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020
THE FIRST THINGyou notice about David
Tennant in “Des” is the hair, a helmet-like
thatch armoring his forehead. Then, just be-
low it, the glasses, oversized aviators that
nail the early-1980s period and, with the
hair, give Tennant a remarkable resem-
blance to the man he’s playing, the necro-
philiac Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen.
Those aren’t the only ways in which
“Des,” a three-part British mini-series that
begins Thursday on the streaming service
Sundance Now, tries to fill in its picture of
Nilsen. There are also the cigarettes, an om-
nipresent prop and indicator of something
— Nilsen’s edginess, or emptiness, or his
need to connect with the interrogators and
jailhouse visitors he cadges smokes from.
Nilsen picked up, brought home and
killed at least 12 men and boys from 1978 to
1983, keeping their corpses around awhile
for company before butchering them, some-
times boiling off their flesh and stowing
their remains around his apartment or
flushing them down the toilet. His victims
were vulnerable, often homeless, and the
London police had no idea he existed until a
plumber found bones and flesh in the drain
of his apartment building. (Tenants — in-
cluding Nilsen — had complained about the
plumbing.)
The natural inclination in dramatizing
Nilsen’s story would be to show him in ac-
tion, however luridly or soberly you chose
to play it. The creators of “Des,” Lewis Ar-
nold (who directed) and Luke Neal (who
wrote two episodes), avoid that route en-
tirely. They begin with the plumber, and
they don’t flash back. The show takes place
largely inside police stations, jails and
courtrooms, with occasional side trips to
collect evidence or conduct interviews.
The abiding question is “Why?,” not
“How?,” and the search for an explanation
for Nilsen’s actions is carried out by a pair of
audience surrogates: Peter Jay (Daniel
Mays of “Line of Duty”), the lead detective
in the case, and the writer Brian Masters
(Jason Watkins of “The Crown”), whose
study of Nilsen, “Killing for Company,” is
the screenplay’s source. They take turns, as
interrogator and interviewer, sparring with
the glib, smart, narcissistic Nilsen, trying to
pull from him the names of his victims and a
reason for their deaths.
It’s not a requirement, in that setup, that a
drama definitively answer the question it
poses. We accept, in the end, that there is no
answer — Masters, in his book, cites the “es-
sential unknowability” of the mind, and
Tennant has called playing the role an effort
to “illuminate the unilluminatable.”
But “Des” needs to give us something,
and for all of its intelligence, superior crafts-
manship and conscientious performances,
it doesn’t really deliver. At the end of the
show’s two and a quarter hours, Nilsen re-
mains as opaque as he is when the police
first knock on his door.
Which brings us back to Tennant, and the
hair and glasses and cigs. His portrayal is
technically flawless and, moment to mo-
ment, absorbing, but it feels completely ex-
terior. This is partly, maybe largely, a func-
tion of the script, which in its determination
not to be sensationalistic errs on the side of
vagueness. (If the point is that Nilsen was
just an empty shell, it’s not made in a way
that I found very compelling or particularly
chilling.)
But it also has to do with Tennant, who’s
been wonderful playing showier villains in
“Jennifer Jones” and in the British TV mov-
ie “Secret Smile” but doesn’t get under the
skin of the more prosaic serial killer here.
Tennant’s gift, from “Doctor Who” to Shake-
speare, is for cerebral theatricality, not the
nuanced banality of the Dennis Nilsen that“Des” presents. In keeping with the overall
tenor of the production, Tennant keeps
things under wraps. That may accurately
reflect Nilsen, but for the sake of the drama
you wish there had been a way for him to let
it rip at least once.
Enjoying “Des” — well, appreciating
“Des” — has to do with its details, which in-
clude the seamless, highly capable ensem-
ble work among Mays, Watkins, Tennant
and Barry Ward (as Jay’s right-hand man),
and the appropriately musty evocation of
the period by the production designer Anna
Higginson and the cinematographer Mark
Wolf.
The case plays out against the backdrop
of the Margaret Thatcher years in Britain,
and the series weaves in connections. The
police are strapped for funds, and Jay can’t
get his hands on a word processor, let alone
the personnel he needs to track down leads
on missing persons. One of the central dra-matic tensions is his push to identify all of
the victims before the higher-ups shut down
the investigation to save money.
There is also the theme, touched on fairly
gingerly, of the particular vulnerability of
young gay men at the time and Nilsen’s cal-
culated exploitation of them. When Nilsen
opts for a diminished-capacity defense at
his trial, his gayness subtly complicates the
government’s effort to prove that he’s sane.
These threads, however, along with the
elements of standard police-procedural
work and courtroom drama, are all second-
ary to the psychological puzzle at the center
of “Des.” Masters, the biographer, and Jay,
the cop, offer various tentative answers:
Nilsen’s needs for attention and control, a
Freudian link in his youth between love and
death. The real answer the show seems to
be offering, but is too polite to put into
words, is that some people just don’t know
when to stop.MIKE HALE TELEVISION REVIEWWhat Necrophiliac Depravity Looks Like
David Tennant stars in ‘Des,’
about a Scottish serial killer
who preyed on men and boys.
David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen in “Des.” The mini-series avoids the lurid as it searches for an explanation of why Nilsen chose to go on a killing spree in the late 1970s and early 1980s.SUNDANCE NOWDes
Sundance Nownovel of the same name by the Black writer
James McBride.
Part satire, part historical fiction, both
versions are told from the point-of-view of
the fictional character Henry Shackleford,
who introduces himself after telling us that
Brown rescued him from slavery as a boy.
Mistaking him for an adolescent girl, Brown
calls him Henrietta or, more often, by the
nickname Onion, and they travel together
throughout the United States and Canada
on Brown’s antislavery crusade, culminat-
ing in a raid on a military arsenal in Harpers
Ferry, Va. (now part of West Virginia) on
Oct. 16, 1859.
For McBride, the story of John Brown
shaped his childhood. “I remember my old-
er brothers talking about John Brown try-
ing to start some kind of provisional govern-
ment,” McBride said. His church still sang
“John Brown’s Body,” a 19th-century march-
ing song popularized by Black Union regi-
ments during the Civil War and sung in
Emancipation Day festivities and later
adapted by professional choral groups of
the era, like the Fisk Jubilee Singers. (The
author ultimately felt comfortable with two
white men adapting his book partly because
“Mark was a Southerner, and he really un-
derstood Southern things,” he told The New
York Times Magazine. “He understands the
familiarity between whites and Blacks in
the South.”)
Hawke, on the other hand, spent his early
years in Texas “hearing he was a nut,” he
said of Brown.
It’s a common divergence. These differ-
ences in a collective memory, in which John
Brown appears either as a martyr who will-
ingly sacrificed himself and his family to
end slavery or as a madman who violently
murdered his fellow white Americans, have
traditionally been divided along racial lines.
Like McBride, I was raised to believe
Brown was not just a hero but an exception:
a rare white abolitionist who not only be-
lieved that African-Americans should not
be enslaved but also that they were his
equal.
This is the version of Brown that has been
depicted by some of America’s most ac-
claimed Black artists, like W. E. B. DuBois
in a 1909 biography and the painter Jacob
Lawrence in “The Legend of John Brown,”
his series of 22 screen prints from 1941. One
of the most urgent such artistic works ap-
peared in 1931, when the writer Langston
Hughes published “October the Sixteenth,”
a solemn poem that both recounted Brown’s
foiled attack and also urged his fellow Afri-
can-Americans, now “many years free” and
multiple generations out of slavery, “to re-
call John Brown.”
A few years later, Hollywood began ce-
menting Brown’s image as an uncontrolla-
ble maniac. In the 1940 film “Santa Fe Trail,”
based on the biography of the Confederate
officer J. E. B Stuart, the actor Raymond
Massey played Brown as wild-eyed, ir-
rational and impulsive. In his essay “Black
People’s Ally, White People’s Bogeyman,”
the historian Louis A. DeCaro Jr. noted that
upon the movie’s release, one of Brown’s
grandchildren unsuccessfully tried to sue
Warner Brothers for “vilifying misrepre-
sentation.”
Strangely, 15 years later, Massey played
Brown again, a bit softened and only
slightly more sympathetic, in the movie
“Seven Angry Men.” In the 1971 comedy
western “Skin Game,” a chest-length-
beard-wearing John Brown appears so
crazed that any gains to be made when he
disrupts a live slave auction are under-
mined by the ensuing chaos that he
produces in the town.
Hawke prepared for his role by reading
the letters Brown wrote from jail in the
week before his execution. “They’re not the
scratches of a lunatic,” Hawke said.
“They’re the writings of a person with a
cause, somebody who has something to die
for, and somebody who’s not confused that
we’re all made from the same creator.”
In order to externalize Brown’s own emo-
tional reality and character growth, Hawke
focused on the beard, which Brown origi-
nally grew as a disguise but which artists
often portray as his defining feature.
“I got obsessed with the beard because I
knew that iconography of that Noahesque
beard,” Hawke said. “So I came up with this
idea that I’d start being clean-shaven and
then just grow the beard throughout. I hope
to show he’s becoming John Brown, and
that he’s not finished when we meet him.”
Hawke’s own fascination with John
Brown began in 2015 while shooting on set
in Louisiana for Antoine Fuqua’s “Magnifi-
cent Seven.” While there, a cameraman sug-
gested that Hawke read “The Good Lord
Bird” and that he should one day consider
playing Brown. After reading it, Hawke be-
came an evangelist for the novel.
“I shared that book with everybody,” he
said. “It is so painful to talk about our past in
this country that we just don’t like doing it
— we want to move on.
“But I thought that McBride pulled off a
magic trick, which is that he told the story
about slavery,” Hawke continued, “with so
much love, and so much wit, so much silli-
ness, human stupidity and human folly.”
Part of what makes the story compelling
is also McBride’s irreverent depiction of
icons like the abolitionist Frederick Doug-lass, played in the series by Daveed Diggs
(“Hamilton”). The renowned orator, who in
real life posed for at least 160 images and
was perhaps the most photographed Amer-
ican of his time, is presented as an image
obsessed Black Dandy who lives with both
his Black wife, Anna, and his white mis-
tress, Helen. Not since Jewell Parker
Rhodes’s 2002 novel, “Douglass’ Women,”
has the messiness of Douglass’s domestic
life been so cheekily depicted.
“We had fun with the Frederick Douglass
character,” McBride said. “We don’t mean
any disrespect to him and to the many thou-
sands of historians who revere him and
then the millions of people who revere his
memory. But his life was rife for caricature.
“He is considered almost godlike in terms
of what he has done for the African-Ameri-
can and American community,” McBridecontinued. “But what about the man who
gave his life and whose one act changed the
course of American history? If Harpers
Ferry hadn’t happened, there’s a good argu-
ment to be made that the Civil War would
have been pushed back 10 or 15 or 20 years.”
Brown’s raid, of course, did not end up be-
ing the slave-rebellion-igniting spark that
he envisioned. After briefly taking the ar-
mory, he and his 21 men were overwhelmed
and 10 of them, Black and white, were killed.
(Sixteen people were killed in all.) Two of
Brown’s sons were among the dead, and the
man himself was arrested, tried and pub-
licly hanged. In “The Good Lord Bird,”
Henry is able to reveal his true self as well
as express his eternal debt to Brown, right
before the old man’s execution.
Today, an unassuming stone obelisk
stands at the site of Brown’s raid at Harpers
Ferry to commemorate the stand he took.
But, instead of offering an image of Brown,
its facade is blank, making it possible for
people to project onto it their own interpre-
tation of him and the different hopes and
fears he represents for different people and
races. But the lack of imagery also makes it
far easier for us to forget Brown the actual
man — and to a certain degree, the myth.
Hawke challenged himself to erect a dif-
ferent monument to Brown’s life. Not one
that is stoic or static, but rather a moving
image that aimed to present Brown as un-
bridled in his pursuit of justice for all.
In his 2005 edited collection of essays,
“The Afterlife of John Brown,” Eldrid Her-
rington, a professor of English, wrote, “John
Brown’s body revives whenever the United
States shames itself, when the body politic
bears wounds, when it imprisons citizens
without trial, or prosecutes an unjust war in
an unjust manner.” In other words, John
Brown reappears at peak moments of peril
as a warning, and to help us find a way
through it.
Originally, Showtime planned to debut
“The Good Lord Bird” in February but
ended up pushing it back first to August,
and then October, without specifying why.
I suspect it did not premiere in August out
of concern for how its depiction of violent
dissent would land during a time of social
unrest. But given that this past summer wit-
nessed more white Americans participat-
ing in racial justice protests than ever be-
fore in American history, its arrival now
makes it an even more urgent, more inspir-
ing — and as Hawke hopes, more indispens-
able — model of interracial activism and an-
tiracist organizing.
“He wasn’t liberating Black America,”
Hawke said. “He was a Christian, and he did
not see Black America as living in sin —
white America was.”
“His real mission was to wake up white
Americans,” he added. “To what they were
doing, what they were participating in.”John Brown, Madman or Abolitionist Martyr?
AMY SUSSMAN/GETTY IMAGESW. E. B. DuBois was among the
influential Black thinkers who
wrote about John Brown, in a
1909 biography.James McBride, whose novel
“The Good Lord Bird” won the
National Book Award, grew up
hearing the story of Brown’s
raid at Harpers Ferry, which he
described as an act that
“changed the course of
American history.”‘It is so painful to talk
about our past in this
country.’
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