How ‘Top of the Lake’ Reinvents the Detective Story

By Julia Eve

Few characters are as consistently-defined across all iterations of a genre as the Detective. In most cases, he is an aloof, yet highly charismatic, man (what are real detectives even like, anyway?) who navigates through situations by the sheer force of his cologne.

BBC’s The Fall, now in its second season, has received some attention for its supposedly counter-intuitive lead character, Stella Gibson, a hardened superintendent detective, played by the piercing Gillian Anderson. Gibson, a woman, is brought to Ireland from England to investigate a serial killer who, surprise, preys on women. The show has been given a lof of credit for the way the victims are treated as people rather than props and for the general badassery of Stella Gibson. However, the killer Paul Spector (played by Jamie Dornan) is sexy and intelligent, and the show devotes a lot of attention to him. Anti-heros are exciting, but to create a viewer-friendly serial killer who preys on women for the sake of entertainment is a tired trick. The show is also written and directed by a man, Allan Cubitt. And though he does aim for some sensitivity on the subject matter, making violence against women sexy and clever at any time is no longer excusable, especially when coming from a man.

But recently, I’ve found comfort in another female-led detective show, and it is beautiful. Top of the Lake is directed and mostly written by Jane Campion, the first female director to win the P’alme d’Or (for her 1993 film The Piano). It takes place in the fictional town of Laketop, New Zealand, a pastoral but troubled town where children travel to school on horseback and drug lords live in A-frame homes. Something sinister is happening, and when a twelve-year-old pregnant girl, Tui Mitcham, disappears, detective Robin Griffith (Elizabeth Moss) must enter the dark corners of the Laketop’s consciousness.

Ryan Martinie Was in the Wrong Band

I listened to a lot of terrible nu metal bands when I was younger. I used to be embarrassed about this but the truth is that such is the journey of every "trve" metal head. And you know what? It wasn't even that bad. In fact, give it a few more years and we'll probably see some kind of revival. It's inevitable. That's just how these things work.

That said, even in my more orthodox metal days, Mudvayne has always bordered on the acceptable for me, thanks largely to the exceptional bass work of Ryan Martinie. Nu metal is a genre where the band largely functions as one bludgeoning instrument, with the bass buried in a pile of grunting down-tuned garbage. Martinie's performance on the band's 2000 debut, L.D. 50, was probably the first truly impressive instrumental performance I can remember singling out.

Again, without disparaging the entire genre, nu metal didn't exactly ask a lot of its guitar players. But Martinie found a way to slap, slide, and pop everything he could out the sound, his bass lines defining their early hits "Dig" and "Death Blooms." With his pointy devil's doo and manic smile, Martinie channeled the manic intensity and technicality of Danny Elfman into a theatrical nu metal mold (I'm sure he would find the idea insulting, I would have loved to hear him on some bonkers tech death album). I was too young and inexperienced to realize it at the time but it was cool as hell. Check out a few of their live performances, with Martinie effortlessly pulling off his insanely technical parts while wearing some really cumbersome pants. You definitely won't feel embarrassed.

Lotus Thief: If Stevie Nicks Played Black Metal

Fair warning: I'm going full geeky gushing cheese-fest love-in on Lotus Thief's Rervm. It's possible that deep down I'm just so starved for melody that I'm seeing greatness that isn't really there, but I choose to believe that this album is a genuinely impressive melding of some great musical eras, metal and otherwise.

When I was in my late teens I was really into female-fronted gothic/symphonic metal bands like Nightwish and Lacuna Coil. The sound, melodious, sometimes operatic vocals over doom laden guitars, was catnip for net-based metal heads usually starved for melody, and probably in a few cases—in mine at least—feminine company. I don't mean to suggest that I listened to these albums out of lust—though there were certainly bands in the genre, especially its later phases, that marketed themselves to that demographic (See: UnSun).

I was in an all-boys school until I moved to Israel as a child, where my difficulty with the Hebrew language limited my social skills with other kids. I hid myself in computer games and comics, neither of which in the late-90s and early-2000s featured a ton of well-developed female characters. I knew about explosions, aliens, sorcerers, and super powers, but I didn't know romance in the classical sense. Gothic metal exposed me to those feelings and helped craft my first ideas about what it must be like to, well, be in love. It made me want to have those feelings for someone else, to act out their stories of passion and heartbreak. Looking back, it's probably why I ended up such an oversensitive doof.