'Presumed Innocent's Biggest Mystery Was its Victim

Similar to dead girl stories, dead woman stories proliferate the murder show space. It’s a mystery why she died, but many times the woman herself is a mystery. I personally find this approach obnoxious more often than I find it interesting because it feels like a very old-fashioned and outdated idea that women are somehow unknowable mysteries. If you ask me, this women-are-mysteries thinking is a giant feint to avoid engaging with women as human beings. What do they want? Why do they want it? Who knows? Despite being human beings who experience life as any other human being, women are viewed this way to disguise cultural incuriosity and squeamishness about them. They are not, in fact, mysterious creatures we can never really understand. It’s a casual misogyny that leads dead woman stories to so often treat the dead femme at the center like an unsolvable mystery. To me, women are made mysteries to avoid taking their lives, experiences, pains, and joys seriously. Alas, we live in a world where there are actual pills you can take for a curved dick, but women with endometriosis have to just live with managing the pain, so this incuriosity runs quite deeply beyond the sphere of media.

So it goes with Presumed Innocent, the latest David E. Kelley legal drama/whodunit that, in the words of The Watch was more a fast-food steak than a gourmet cheeseburger. That is to say, it was an entertaining show with good performances that was nonetheless pretty cheap in its writing quality. I most recently got a kick out of how truly awful the show made its protagonist Rusty and how this felt like a response to the 80s erotic thrillers of yore, and that’s all still true, but unfortunately, the same revisionist lens didn’t do the same for Carolyn Polhemus, the dead woman at the center of the story. Carolyn appears in flashbacks and jittery visions that pop onto the screen like intrusive thoughts, showing her in different modes and moods throughout the series. The goal seems to be to let the audience know her through these disconnected moments, perhaps to paint an organic portrait of her through these snapshots. The trouble is that this approach turns Carolyn into a ghost, an apparition of context-less words and behavior that fails to gel into a coherent portrait.

All humans are contradictory and complicated. There are many things about people that don’t make sense because humans are not entirely rational beings. However, even taking that into account, we’re still left in the dark as to who Carolyn was. It really doesn’t help that most of our experiences with her are strained through Rusty’s obsessive perspective as it reduces Carolyn to being mainly a sex object who once, notably, displayed some nurturing instincts with a young child witness during a case. She loved having sex with a character played by Jake Gyllenhaal, something I’m sure many of us would aspire to, but Rusty’s scary attachment to her implies that there must be something else that drew him to her and we don’t really see that. It all stands to emphasize how little of a character Carolyn is outside of a sex-haver who died. We get very little idea, if one at all, of what emotional connection the two had. The few times we step outside of the sexual serve to confuse things further.

As presented, Carolyn’s choices are somewhat confounding. She separated from her husband and son, deciding to live a life without them. She had a long-running affair with Rusty, one that resulted in a pregnancy. She also decided to keep the child, seemingly around the same time she tried to break from Rusty. She seemed to be pulling away from him to which Rusty responded with frightening re-attachment. She also decided to keep the child and further still, when Rusty’s daughter Jaden confronted her, claimed that hers and the Sabich’s lives would be intertwined while she raised the kid. Carolyn didn’t seem to want to be with Rusty as she also agreed to stay away from him outside of work. These choices don’t add up at all.

I’m all for Carolyn being a complicated person, but decisions without context or connective tissue don’t create a coherent character. I would love to know why Carolyn separated from her family and decided to keep the child she conceived with Rusty as I’m sure exploring that would’ve been interesting and shown us who Carolyn is, but the Presumed Innocent doesn’t seem to care about that. What Carolyn wanted, why she wanted it, how she felt, why she was attracted to Rusty, what she got out of their relationship, and how she reconciled all of these different angles and dimensions of herself would have been fascinating and it would have also added emotional weight and resonance. We could actually care about Carolyn and feel the pain of her absence, but instead we’re left with elliptical, fleeting impressions of her that simply don’t connect. It’s as if Presumed Innocent is saying, “It doesn’t matter who she was or what she wanted, her death motivating the plot is what matters.” It’s just strange to have Rusty wax on and on about Carolyn only to be given so little of her.

Kelley, for me, is a hit-or-miss creator. He has undeniable talents in legal dramas and that skill was on full display during the excellently-done courtroom scenes of Presumed Innocent. The show was never better than when it was taking the viewers through the trial, but when it came time to treat the dead woman like a human, the show whiffs it. Maybe it’s Kelley, who used several too many sex-and-violence visions that broke up the show and confined Carolyn to such a narrow perception. Maybe it’s the fact that Presumed Innocent is a B- show with an A+ cast and C writing, so a multi-dimensional view of Carolyn wasn’t in the cards. Whatever the reason is, it’s disappointing that Presumed Innocent had the chance to show us who Carolyn is and simply didn’t. It makes Carolyn seem like an artifact from those 80s thrillers where some women are for domestication and some are for sex, and the ones for sex must die if they intrude on the family unit. It’s unsatisfying and worse, it shoots the show in the foot. Maybe instead of dreams of exploding heads, Presumed Innocent could’ve given us a clear look at the dead woman we’re meant to care about.