So it seems that James Corden is in line to take over for Craig Ferguson in CBS’ late-night lineup after Stephen Colbert steps in to replace David Letterman. Many readers here will know Corden from his appearances on Doctor Who, but let me also recommend his BBC 2 series The Wrong Mans, which you can watch for free on Hulu.
As Alan Seppinwall describes it:
The title evokes Hitchcock, and the story is very much in the “North by Northwest” vein of an ordinary man mistakenly sucked into an extraordinary situation. It just happens to be about a pair of guys for whom “ordinary” might be an aspirational adjective.
This is, as I said before, one of my favorite movie plots. The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, North by Northwest, Silver Streak, High Anxiety, The Man With One Red Shoe … I like this story every time.
I won’t call this a guilty pleasure, but I do have to admit that admitting my affection for this particular plot involves … an admission. I’m susceptible to the appeal of this story, which is based in part on the flattering notion that its every-person hero is just like me (and you, too). At the beginning of the story, this hero — your surrogate and mine — is adrift with unrealized and unrecognized potential. But then fate intervenes and by the end of the story, with a bit of luck and pluck, our hero is a hero indeed.
The insidious appeal of that is to reassure us that we’re not necessarily the unsuccessful under-achievers we may otherwise appear to be. We’re just waiting for that twist of fate that will force us to rise to the occasion, proving our worth to the world.
The conceit (in more than one sense) is something like what Walker Percy described in The Last Gentleman:
What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war — or the end of the world. … In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of one’s own.
The Wrong Mans calls attention to this aspect of this thriller plot, highlighting the stunted and stalled lives of its two man-child heroes. That’s why it’s not quite right when the disclaimer on Hulu before each episode says “The following is intended only for mature audiences.” The audience is expected to identify with those heroes, and they’re far from mature.
But, as in all the best versions of the innocent-person-suddenly-embroiled-in-deadly-scheme plots, the initial immaturity of the heroes in TWMs is meant to be inspirational — to challenge the viewers to realize that we, too, are capable of doing more, attempting more, being more. It’s unlikely that a case of mistaken identity will ever lead to our being unexpectedly mixed up with Russian spies, gangsters, smugglers and nefarious corrupt figures from a shadow-government conspiracy, so we shouldn’t sit around waiting for that to happen.
We could see this as a dividing line between good versions of this story and bad ones. The good ones are inspirational and challenging. The bad ones are merely flattering, encouraging complacency. The good ones celebrate the extraordinary potential of all ordinary people. The bad ones console us for our ordinariness by telling us we possess a hidden specialness that others just won’t be able to see until some imagined some day when fate will intervene and the possible will become actual through no doing of our own.
From that angle, The Wrong Mans counts among the good ones.
Of all the versions of this story I mention above, I think my favorite is probably The Lady Vanishes. In most of the others, we’re seeing the game played, as John Scalzi put it, on the lowest difficulty setting. Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest is just some average guy — except not really. He’s a wealthy, white male executive (who also happens to look like Cary Grant). As a lone man up against a gang of dangerous international MacGuffin smugglers, he’s still the underdog, but it’s the lowest difficulty setting of underdog. Contrast that with Margaret Lockwood and Dame May Whitty taking on the Nazis in The Lady Vanishes. Lockwood’s character, like Grant’s, is wealthy, but she still has far more to overcome than he did. Roger Thornhill never gets condescendingly dismissed as a “hysterical” woman.
(The complete movie of The Lady Vanishes is available, for free, on YouTube, by the way. You’re welcome.)
I think those earlier Hitchcock thrillers also had something going for them that his post-war pictures didn’t have — the urgent reality of the actual war going on in real life. The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps, and especially Foreign Correspondent were made for an audience for whom war had already made the extraordinary actual through no doing of their own.
Anyway, hang on to that Walker Percy quote. We’re coming back to that shortly.
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