Differentiating Holly Gibney: Genre, Gender and Intersectionality in The Outsider

by: Pembe Gozde Erdogan , June 14, 2021

If you happened to accidentally come across HBO’s The Outsider (2020) and started watching the first episode, you could have mistaken it for a straightforward crime story. The show has all the usual tropes and trappings of the genre in its first two episodes. It starts with the discovery of a heinous child murder in Cherokee City, Georgia, and the arrest of the main suspect Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman), the middle school baseball coach. Through flashbacks into the investigation, we learn how Detective Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) and his team found their suspect. The first two episodes of this ten-part mini-series^[1] feel like an overload of forensic information and police procedural. There are the eyewitness interviews, the evidence and fingerprint collection from the crime scenes, the perusal of CCTV footage, the interrogation of the subject, the blood type and DNA samples, the incarceration of the suspect, and the arraignment. Soon after this, for the crime fans unaware of the show’s actual premise, The Outsider changes its colours dramatically.

With conflicting evidence mounting and its main suspect murdered in the second episode, The Outsider slowly but surely evolves from the naturalistic and forensic world of crime drama into a horrific diegesis where everyday reality is haunted by the seemingly impossible presence of a monstrous entity. From its third episode on, the show then becomes one of the most interesting examples of genre mixing on TV, as the tensions between the crime story and the supernatural horror become the driving force. The true harbinger of this genre mixing, however, is the character of Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), the on-the-spectrum, eccentric, black private investigator hired by the group of white men trying to make sense of this puzzle. Like the titular monster of the show, Holly is a true outsider in life. By circumstance she finds herself in the center of an investigation, trying to convince people to follow the evidence to its natural end; in this case, to the monster. As she possesses the only mind flexible enough to question the boundaries of reason and reality, Holly becomes both the vessel of horror for the audience and the enquiring mind that hunts down the supernatural entity. In this show that is both a crime story and a horror tale, Holly is both the ‘neurodiverse female detective’ (McHugh 2018) and the ‘final girl’. (Clover 1987) ^[2]

Holly Gibney and the show that contains her are nothing new: they are the end products of a long process of influence, creation, genre mixing, adaptation and production. What they both offer, however, are new spaces that contain contradictory elements, ideas and ideologies that might help us look at crime and horror television in light of each other. The Outsider ‘activates’ categories of genre (and thus character) through its mixing. (Mittell 2004: 155) The key to understanding what Holly Gibney might offer to the debate about the female detective lies in dissecting her as a product of genre practices within a prestige HBO adaptation of a Stephen King book. This article will follow Jason Mittell’s claim that genres are ‘cultural categories’ that operate not just on the textual level but in multiple sites: ‘across the cultural realms of media industries, audiences, policy, critics, and historical contexts’. (2004: xii) Similarly, in her book Adapting TV, in which she analyses the innovative and boundary-pushing adaptation practices within television’s serial format, Yvonne Griggs emphasises that adapted TV texts are products that have their ‘genesis’ in ‘an array of textual sites.’ Generic predecessors and paratexts inform the inception and reception of TV adaptation. (2018: 5 & 6) Aiming to deal with the TV show and its female detective in a parallel manner, this article will analyse the notion of difference coded in the female detective when seen through the lens of genre mixing and adaptation practices. Both The Outsider and Holly are products of institutional, authorial and production decisions. Thus, they also activate and subvert cultural assumptions about genre, gender and race. I am hoping to show how processes of genre mixing, adaptation, production and performance can create a different kind of female detective on screen by inscribing different levels of intersectionality into her on the axes of race and disability.

Generic Mixing: Crime vs. Horror

The Outsider was a ratings success for HBO.^[3] However, the reviews of the show were lukewarm at best. While most critics praised Cynthia Erivo’s performance as Holly, they were divided on the show’s aesthetics, pace, and genre mixing. One critic commented that the show suffered from ‘too many influences,’ and criticised the tensions in its generic mixing of detective noir and supernatural horror by saying it ‘refuses to be about what it’s about’. (D’Addario 2020: 137) Another critic reported that ‘some people are turned off by the way it segues from police procedural mystery to supernatural skirmish’. (Hale 2020) Running through this critical discourse was an underlying value judgement about genre and critical prestige. Anne Thompson listed ‘genre’ to be one reason The Outsider lacked ‘awards gravitas’ as it is an ‘unconventional hybrid’ and is ultimately ‘terrifying’. (2020) This article aims to show that, in spite of the views of these critics, the ever-present tension between these two genres’ modes of reality is one of the most important features of The Outsider.

It is important to note that, as a prestige HBO product, the genre mixing of the show is almost preconditioned by the industrial and cultural conditions of a post-network era characterised by digital convergence and overproduction.^[4] In this multi-platform era, what is deemed ‘quality TV’ has to incorporate some sort of innovation. The new narrative forms seen on different cable channels and streaming platforms seek to activate and subvert different genre conventions through mixing, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, in a bid to attract the experienced niche audiences of quality TV. Shimpach calls this an ‘economy of abundance’ in which programs compete for attention from viewers, through both their polished aesthetics and their complex and unique narratives. (2010)

In Genre and Television, Jason Mittell points out that genres work in ‘an ongoing historical process of category formation’ and that they are always ‘in flux’. (2004: xiv) Disagreeing with the critics who think that generic mixing in texts is a sign of the declining importance of genre, Mittell claims that generic mixing, as a conscious industry practice, ‘actually reinforces and reasserts the role of genres’ by foregrounding and activating generic ‘conventions, codes and assumptions’ much more than ‘pure’ generic texts. (2004: 155, xvii) Mittell refuses to use the term ‘hybrid’ because of its biological connotations coming from the crossbreeding of species, creating a static end product. For him, ‘the term “genre mixing” is more indicative of an ongoing process of generic combination and interplay, not rooted in biological notions of taxonomic purity’. (2004: 154) Analysing how different genre conventions operate within the generic mixing of The Outsider will thus help in the analysis of its female detective.

For The Outsider, generic mixing is its raison d’etre. Most of the crisis and drama in the show stem from the tensions between the two diametrically opposed cosmologies, coming from the diegetic assumptions of the detective story and supernatural horror. If we take The Outsider as a mixture of detective noir, supernatural horror and family melodrama, it is the conventions of the first two categories that are foregrounded and pitted against each other.^[5]  The Outsider perpetuates the tensions between crime and horror in the clash of its plot and aesthetics. Even as it moves into the horrific terrain with its plot, it insists on keeping the aesthetics of noir and dread typical of crime shows. The whole feel of the show is very dark with murky tones of brown and green creating a dusty, dirty naturalistic look. The pace is sometimes painfully slow, creating time for silences and stares. The soundtrack, rather than being the orchestral crescendo of horror, uses ‘an eerie and unsettling pulse’. (Creeber 2015: 29)

Genre-mixing practices have continuously been used to incorporate a contested genre like horror into a public medium like TV. (Jowett & Abbott 2019) Thus, horror is a malleable genre on television that is able to sneak in any type of diegesis. In fact, crime TV has seen two successful examples of the incorporation of the inexplicable into its diegesis before, in Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and The X-Files (1993-2018). However, with more recent noir shows, especially with the ones with female detective leads like the Danish show Forbrydelsen (2007-2012), and the Danish/Swedish co-production Bron/Broen (2011-2018), there is usually ‘a deep sense of realism’. (Creeber 2015: 29) Even as these shows play with gothic, weird and eerie atmospheric elements, they usually do not include anything supernatural.

The clash between the detective story and the supernatural that runs through The Outsider helps to highlight the assumptions of any detective narrative. The detective is, first and foremost, ‘a scientist, committed to finding the truth’. (Westlake 1980: 37) Perfected in the nineteenth century, the detective is the agent of reason, order and civilisation, suppressing any instance of chaos, irrationality or perversion in society. Demarcated by strong assumptions about reality, a traditional detective story cannot contain the supernatural and reach its natural conclusion. Braudy suggests that,

[t]he monster and the detective are opposite sides of the same coin: the monster is the embodiment of disorder, an eruption into the world of normality … from wherever and whatever is not normal. The detective by contrast is the seeker for order … [t]he detective’s discovery of motives and the connection of cause to effect brings the unique and unfathomable into the realm of the familiar and understandable. Instead of the horror story’s preoccupation with the ineffable and unspeakable, the detective story would not exist without explanation. (2016: 141)

Contrary to many critics’ assumptions about the incompatibility between the detective story and the supernatural, the two modes have always been coexistent and have influenced each other. Braudy suggests that ‘each perspective, the explainable and the unexplainable, in some way requires the shadow of the other to play against’. (2016: 142)^[6] Edgar Allen Poe, the quintessential father of the detective story and the master of the horror tale, had an imagination that could contain the paradoxes of the inexplicable and the comprehensible. However, when a show like The Outsider actually dares to cross the line of the ontological barrier between the everyday reality and the supernatural within the naturalistic diegesis of a crime show, cultural assumptions about the low-brow nature of horror and the supernatural are activated.

In The Outsider, Detective Ralph Anderson represents the worldview of the detective story.  During his first meeting with Holly, Ralph makes it clear that he has ‘no tolerance for the unexplainable.’ It is Ralph’s relentless refusal to believe in the supernatural that delays the action. After Holly introduces her theory about the malevolent entity El Cuco to a room full of non-believers, Ralph loses his cool completely. When asked to keep an open mind by one of his colleagues, he shouts, ‘You keep your mind open. I’m just going to look for facts, evidence. You know dumb cop shit like that.’ Ralph’s world is shaken to its core, as he is unable to turn to his usual explanations of forensic evidence and psychological analysis. His attempts at psychoanalysing what is happening around him sound cliched. His obsessive perusal of the plethora of contradictory forensic evidence proves to be futile. As such, the genre mixing of the show creates an epistemological and ontological crisis for the traditional white male detective. The agent of this breaking of ontological and epistemological boundaries is Holly, an autistic black female detective with an alternative belief system.

If the detective story is about the empirical, the literal and the evident, horror and supernatural are seen to represent the figurative. For Robin Wood, horror, in the figure of the monster, is a representation of everything a civilisation seeks to repress. As the monsters in horror stand for the Other of a culture, horror texts become our ‘collective nightmares’ and depict the return of the repressed. (1979: 13) Thus, the symbolic meanings contained in the monster can be potentially subversive and help to question hegemonic ideologies. Similarly, in her analysis of fantasy—the name she gives to mostly gothic and supernatural elements occurring in an otherwise realistic narrative—Rosemary Jackson claims that fantasy depicts ‘the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’,’ thus opening up the basis of a cultural order to disorder. For her, this opening up is an opportunity to ‘subvert, overturn, upset, undermine rules and conventions taken to be normative’. (1981: 2 & 8) Thus, one way to approach the introduction of the monster into a narrative form that has strong roots in reason and empiricism is to see it as an opportunity to question, to subvert the very notions of reality shaped by a white, male, heterosexual, humanistic tradition.

Carroll claims that monsters are ‘categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless,’ violating a culture’s ‘conceptual scheme of nature.’ They are not only ‘physically threatening’ but also ‘cognitively threatening’. (1990: 32 & 34) In The Outsider, the path to capturing or destroying the monster starts with accepting its existence. Until the very end, Holly, Ralph’s wife Jeannie, and his colleague Lieutenant Yunis Sablo urge Ralph to broaden his cognitive horizons or stay out of the investigation. Yunis says, ‘Here’s the difference between you and me. You need this whole thing to make some kind of sense that you can live with. I just want it to end.’ The monster in the show is the composite being par excellence; it lingers on the boundary between reality and unreality, and contains many different monsters within itself. It combines attributes of the serial killer, the vampire, the bogeyman, the ghoul and the doppelganger. The way El Cuco operates is to steal the DNA of a human through a scratch, transform into that human, hunt and kill its victims (mainly children), and then transform into a new human being and leave the first human to take the blame for its murders. In a way, Cuco seems to have figured out the humanist assumptions about reality, and the obsession with forensic evidence in the criminal justice system. It makes sure that there is ample evidence to convict the person it copies—eye witnesses, CCTV footages, fingerprints and DNA samples. Until Holly takes over the case, Cuco has a perfect system which uses the so-called rules of the humanist, rational, empiricist world against itself. In the status of its liminal monster, the show seems to open up a space for alternative versions of knowledge and belief.

The presence of a monster might help with the questioning of hegemonic values, but it is also important how the monster is treated within the story. It has long been recognised by scholars that the crime genre usually has a conservative bias, with its emphasis on order over chaos, and the silencing of perverse impulses. It is said to have strong ‘bourgeois, capitalist, chauvinist and sexist dimensions’. (Ascari 2007: 9) However, no genre as a whole can be reduced to one ideological stance. Crime as a genre can be both subversive and conservative. This paradoxical ideological positioning is intensified when we look at the genre of horror. Various horror subgenres usually manifest different ideological positions. If slasher movies operate within mostly reactionary instincts suppressing sexuality, zombie movies are seen to be subversive and critical of capitalist society. In describing contemporary horror movies, Pinedo notes that they have contradictory tendencies in issues like race and gender, both ‘criticiz[ing] and endors[ing] hierarchical relations of power’. (1997: 133) By treating the monster as evil and destroying it at the end, The Outsider adopts a reactionary stance. In creating a black female detective character so strongly marked by difference, however, the show opens up a subversive space.

Gender in Crime and Horror: Heroines, Victims, Monsters

Both crime and horror have traditionally been coded as masculine genres, mostly appealing to a male audience demographic. This assumption has changed radically for crime over the last three decades. In the twenty-first century, the female detective has become one of the most recognisable and widely-used characters in crime TV and film. The character of the official female detective became very popular during the early 1990s, in both the U.K. and America, with films and shows like The Silence of the Lambs (1991), The X-Files and Prime Suspect (1991-2006). The trope of the female detective has recently returned to prominence, with the popularity of the character Sarah Lund in the Danish series Forbrydelsen (2007-2012), which became the inspiration for many shows.^[7] These TV shows were so influential, and had so many aesthetic and narratological common points, that scholars and critics started using the term ‘Nordic Noir’ while referring to them.^[8] The role of the female detective within the crime genre has been of great interest to feminist scholars, since it highlights issues like female agency, and violence against women.

Female detectives have been seen as ‘gender benders,’ performing both masculinity and femininity. (Gates 2011: 6) Most crime shows with strong female leads also incorporate storylines that depict intense gender violence. As such, the female detectives are seen to ‘perform ambiguity’ (McCabe 2015: 31), and the shows are seen as paying lip service to ‘the female detective’s postfeminist progress’ at the surface level. (Jermyn 2017: 259) In this vein, Klinger points out that TV noir shows usually pair the female detective, the ‘avatar of feminism,’ with the female victim, ‘her shadow sister,’ thus creating an ‘ideological gridlock’ for any feminist watching these shows. (2018: 531) As such, leading feminist scholars constantly question ‘the recurring tropes of “broken bodies” and “inquiring minds”’ that can be found in female representation of these shows. (Coulthard et al. 2018: 510)

In most of the shows with strong female detectives, issues around gender prevalent in larger society are depicted, highlighted, and commented upon through topes of realism of the crime genre. In The Outsider, this emphasis on gender is lacking. The ‘broken bodies’ in the show are of children, and we do not see the ‘shadow sisters.’ As Holly is dealing with child murders in the show, she does not possess the gendered ‘felt knowledge’ most female detectives share with their victims. In The Outsider, Holly’s gender is downplayed when compared to other crime shows with strong female leads trying to solve murders of women. As a result, there is no ‘ideological gridlock’ for feminism in the show, no depiction of violence against women. This also means that by moving into the horror territory, the story evades the feministic preoccupations so typical of the noir genre. On the other hand, women do have ‘inquiring minds’ in the show, and it is their openness to alternative knowledge and belief systems that make them the resolving force of the narrative. Furthermore, by depicting an autistic black female private investigator, the show embodies different intersectional identities and issues, rather than focusing on white womanhood. The next section explores these issues fully in the analysis of Holly Gibney.

Similarly, the position of women in horror has been controversial from the start.  Just as the crime genre revels in the representations of murder of women, horror has been built on the torture of female victims whose deaths ‘are filmed at closer range, in more graphic detail, and at greater length’. (Clover 1987: 201) Horror also presents a great many female monsters, depicted as monstrous through their sexuality and reproductivity, and as castrating figures for male viewers. (Creed 1993) When women become heroines in horror, it is usually through their initial positioning as victim. The figure of the ‘final girl’ seen in slasher films is the most prominent example. Although she is hunted down by the killer, the final girl manages to survive. She is smart, competent, watchful and usually sexually inactive. For Clover, the final girl is not really a girl at all but ‘a congenial double for the adolescent male.’ The gender of the final girl is compromised because of her masculine interests, her lack of sexual appetite and her appropriation of the ‘active investigative gaze’. (1987: 212) It is important to note that most of Clover’s assumptions about the final girl also rest on the assumption that the horror movie audience is mostly male, and all final girls are white.

These ‘fairly rigid, gendered assumptions’ about horror spectatorship have recently been under scrutiny, leading scholars to note that horror movies are ‘intense sites of negotiation and contradiction’ for gender. (Berenstein 1996: 146, 149) Isabel Pinedo criticizes these scholars, as they fall into the trap of coding power as always masculine, making the notion of female agency oxymoronic within horror. (1997: 82) Pinedo claims that, ‘the horror film speaks both to women and about them, often by articulating the legitimacy of female rage in the face of male aggression and by providing forms of pleasure for female viewers’. (1997: 95) This notion of female agency in The Outsider is intensified by the incorporation of the figure of the black female detective, who does not need to be victimised by the killer to go looking for him.

Intersectionality, HBO’s The Outsider, and Cynthia Erivo’s Holly Gibney

In her book Searching for Sycorax, Kinitra Brooks claims that black women in horror are ‘the absent presence’ who have either been ignored or stereotypically depicted. (2018: 7) She suggests that patriarchal and Eurocentric tendencies within horror focus on the experiences of white men, and the anxieties in horror depict ‘the other sides of the white male binary.’ The black woman is excluded as ‘she is the non-Other, the Other of the white male’s Others (black men and white women)’. (2018: 8) For Brooks, intersectional identities of black women as characters within horror texts and creators of these texts subvert the normativity of whiteness and maleness in horror. Cynthia Erivo’s casting as Holly Gibney gives us a complicated and complex black female detective within horror that is worthy of analysis.

Brooks also differentiates between black female representation in horror (which is not necessarily created by black females), and black female creators and the themes they foreground. Similarly, in her seminal book Horror Noire, which rehistoricises and recontextualises the horror film through the analysis of race, Robin Means Coleman distinguishes between ‘blacks in horror’ films, that show stereotypical representations of black characters in horror, and ‘black horror’ films, which have black creators and which were created for black audiences. In this vein, it becomes evident that authorship and production determines the representations seen on film and TV. In analysing Holly Gibney, we need to delve into the question of authorship in her creation.

Television, with its episodic structure and collaborative production practices, is said to evade any authorial attribution. (Mittell 2004: xiii) This approach to authorship within TV has definitely changed with the quality TV era heralded by HBO. The notion of quality within the HBO brand is closely tied to the notion of ‘an authorial vision,’ thus appropriating the stance of seemingly-higher culture art forms such as literature and cinema. HBO production crews are said to value ‘creative risk taking’ and encourage ‘authorial freedom.’. (McCabe and Akass 2008: 87 & 88) While auteurism in film is built on the vision of the director, television is seen as the medium of the showrunner.^[9] With The Outsider, HBO once more turns to its marketing strategy of authorial prestige with showrunner Richard Price.^[10] For The Outsider, Price was a part of a ‘negotiated and collective authorship’ (Caldwell 2008: 199) alongside Stephen King and producer/director Jason Bateman. Together, their decisions around adaptation, directing and casting transformed Holly Gibney from the version on King’s pages into the one portrayed on the show by Erivo.

Although the show’s status as a King adaptation is highlighted in its marketing, Price and Bateman have enjoyed considerable creative freedom in its adaptation, filming and casting. When asked about his approach to reinventing Holly, Price remarks:

I don’t want to be beholden to something. Holly was like that then, but this is my adaptation, and my job is to make Holly as compelling as possible. I have to do what I have to do, and I’m not beholden to fans or loyalists. I just want to do the best job and make the most complex and three-dimensional character that I can. (Turchiano 2020b)

It is obvious that Price was aware of the potential of this female investigator for TV, as he made a string of decisions to increase her importance within the story. He introduced Holly much earlier (she does not appear until halfway through the book), and severed her ties to previous King novels like Mr. Mercedes (2014). In the books, Holly is an assistant helping Detective Bill Hodges, and the group of men trying solve the Maitland case only lands on her accidentally after finding out Bill was dead. In the show, Holly is chosen deliberately by the investigation team as a result of her brilliance. Price also enhanced Holly’s inexplicable abilities for the show, emphasising her autism. However, the single most important fact that makes Holly Gibney so different and unique is that, as a result of colour-blind casting, HBO’s Holly is played by the black actress Cynthia Erivo, which underlines the character’s marginalisation in an all-white main cast.

The casting of Cynthia Erivo creates new layers of meaning for Holly. Mizejewski claims that ‘the picturing of the woman detective onscreen always involves an actress, stardom, and its baggage’ (2004: 4). Cynthia Erivo imports her unique cultural meanings into the show through her persona as an actress. As such, she represents the last and most important authorial layer in the creation of Holly. Erivo is an African-British actress, singer and songwriter, who came to fame mainly as a result of her performance in the musical The Colour Purple on Broadway (for which she received a Tony), and her portrayal of the abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet (for which she received an Oscar nomination). As such, the American public knows Erivo as a star giving life to iconic African-American female characters from American literature and history. Erivo also made an appearance as a singer in 2017 on the charity benefit ‘Night of Too Many Stars,’ a fundraising telethon for people on the autism spectrum. This could have been another factor in her being cast as Holly Gibney. For the majority of the demographic of HBO subscribers, Erivo might not have been a stranger. Her past performances and her association with strong African-American women would inevitably influence how the character Holly is decoded by the viewers. Erivo was the main brains behind the creative decisions made around how Holly would look. In all her interviews about the character, Erivo has described in detail how they created Holly visually. She wanted Holly to have the braids, a strong visual cultural component for black women coming from their childhood, and also insisted on her nails having extensions, which is also a popular choice for many urban black women. (Gold Derby 2020) ^[11]

HBO’s The Outsider also moves into more racially diverse territory in its larger narrative. In King’s book, all the characters are white. Similarly, most female detectives and female victims of TV noir are also white. Whiteness in these shows is seen as a prerequisite of transnationality, and a sign of the systematic erasure of the issues women from other races face. (McCabe 2015: Klinger 2018) Price opens the narrative up to a much more diversified cast by making certain demographic decisions. When Holly starts following the evidence backwards in time, she first ends up in Dayton, Ohio, and finds out that Heath Hofstadter, a male nurse working in a care home, was arrested for killing two girls. In the book this character and his victims are white, while Price chooses to make both the nurse and victims black. He also adds a storyline with Heath’s cousin, in which he is controlled by El Cuco, helping him to kidnap the girls and entrap Heath. The cousin later cannot handle the pain and chooses to commit suicide by making the police shoot him. Similarly, in another added storyline, Holly visits Maria Caneles in Rikers Island prison in New York, where she is serving life for killing a Latino boy. She was another victim of the monster’s entrapment before Terry and Heath. She is the only such victim still alive. We also see how her father and her uncle were shot by the boy’s grandfather. When one ignores the supernatural narrative for a second, the visuals of an African American man shanked in prison, another gunned down by police, and an incarcerated Latina woman all add a subtle social commentary on the symbolic level. Through these images, the show consciously activates the issues surrounding race in America. Even though the story does not have that social-realistic approach to ideological issues, it is possible to symbolically read another story about what it means to be an outsider in America hidden underneath its horror story about a monster.

Horror and crime narratives are thought to be mainly plot-driven, and this is certainly true for The Outsider (even though it lags in movement towards its ending). Viewers are not given many opportunities to get to know Holly Gibney as a character in this ten-episode miniseries. However, Price has carefully placed intricate details about Holly’s backstory within the narrative, hinted at during fleeting dialogue. An attentive viewer can follow the breadcrumbs of character in the story and reach one of the most intriguing black female detective characters seen on television. Holly is a ‘sign,’ a cultural product that highlights our assumptions and expectations when it comes to female detectives on TV. As a character who contains contradictions, she reminds us of the importance of accepting difference.

Holly is marked by difference even before we meet her. When the men trying to solve the case suggest hiring her, the defence investigator Alec Pelley remarks, ‘Shouldn’t be too hard to find where she parked her spaceship these days.’ When we first meet her, Holly is in her apartment in Chicago, watching the road and casually calling out the makes and models of the cars on the street. When Alec calls her, she goes to her usual pub downstairs, and within that short phone call we learn that she has aviophobia and some form of OCD (she insists on getting ‘her seat’ back from another customer). In the first meeting with Alec and Ralph at the pub, Holly talks about her abilities:

I can tell you what day May 1^st lands on 204 years from now faster than any computer on Earth. I can look at a skyscraper for two seconds from a speeding car and tell you within six inches how tall that building is. And I can not only recite the lyrics of every rock and roll song written from 1954 to the present day, but I can tell you which Billboard chart position they were in week to week until they fell off completely.

Right after this list of extraordinary skills, Holly continues: ‘I don’t listen to music, because I don’t like it. Heights make me throw up. And if you ask me what date it is today, I have to look at a calendar.’ She is an enigma even to herself.

The character of the eccentric, brilliant, talented, savant-like investigator is as old as the detective genre itself. The quintessential white, male investigators of literature, Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Holmes, are ancestors of Holly Gibney. As idiosyncratic detectives par excellence, these characters are tolerated by others around them, as they are the only ones who can solve the crimes they investigate. Within female detectives on television, Holly Gibney can also be seen as the latest example of a popular trope. In the latest noir cycle, female detectives are usually depicted as troubled, or they are, as McHugh states, ‘neurodiverse’: paranoia, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, depression, hysteria and sociopathy are some of the issues these detectives deal with. Most of these neurodiverse detectives, having experienced similar traumas to their female victims, use empathy and ‘felt knowledge’ while trying to solve crimes of violence against women. (2018: 536) In addition to having an ‘instinct’ or a ‘feel’ for the crimes, these women solve cases because they are good at their jobs. Their success is based on ‘hard investigative work and an uncompromising ability to ‘look’ and see what others do not’. (McCabe 2015: 40) When we situate Holly within this tradition, we find that she perpetuates this stock character. What we see Holly do most are looking and thinking. Erivo has said that through her minimal acting and mimics she tried to make the viewers read what goes through Holly’s head and her heart in real time. She approached Holly as processing information in front of people, as she does not have the social filters others have. (Baughan 2020) Thus, Holly becomes the active female gaze personified.

Holly’s position becomes more problematic when her blackness is considered. On American television, black female detectives have historically been seen as signs of diversity in some ensemble casts. Recently, HBO’s Watchmen (2019) and Netflix’s Seven Seconds (2018) gave us a black female police officer and assistant DA as protagonists. Another group of black female detectives are the ones that are pitted against the protagonists of shows such as Pretty Little Liars and Arrow. Recognising a strong ongoing trend in these shows and many others, Young claims that these ‘morally uptight,’ ‘irritatingly competent’ detectives become plot points of hatred for the fans: ‘[t]he proliferation of black women in these roles means that over time, an audience’s frustration with the character becomes synonymous with distaste for black women in general’. (2018)^[12] Holly Gibney in The Outsider, as an African-American female private detective on the spectrum, is a much more intersectional character than any seen on television. In an interview, Erivo talks about how she approached the character:

[i]n my head she is the outsider … not just because she came from somewhere else but also within the work she is doing, within the people she is meeting. She is just sort of on the edge of it all the time, she is a different type of entity that I don’t think they had been used to or had met before … [a]nd it is obvious, being the only woman of colour surrounded by mostly white men, she is an outsider full stop … [w]ith everything to do with her communication, the way she thinks, the way her brain works, what she looks like, where she comes from, she is just a recipe for ‘outsiderness’ … I always had this in the back of my mind. It made sure that I never got too comfortable–I hope you always sense an uncomfortability about her. (Gold Derby 2020)

As a troubled black female detective, Holly is depicted as categorically different from most human beings. Therefore, she is more instinctively linked to the monster, as she recognises its status as an ontological outsider. During the first meeting with Ralph, she tells him, ‘If you have no tolerance for the unexplainable then you’ll have no tolerance for me.’ Holly has been tested, studied and experimented on by all manner of scientist in order to find ‘what’ exactly she was. No one was able to diagnose her. Holly’s ontological outsiderness is the ontological outsiderness of black women in American society.

As a black final girl, Holly also problematises stereotypes within horror. Coleman drops the categorically white label ‘final girl’ and instead describes certain female heroines of 1970s horror movies as ‘enduring women.’ Unlike the sexually unavailable final girls, these black women were generally hypersexualised. For Coleman, while final girls returned to the normalcy of their lives after destroying the monsters, enduring women were essentially fighting against racism and corruption, meaning that their struggle would never end. (2011: 132) Brooks finds this strong black female stereotype to be harmful. When put into the position of final girls, the toughness of black women is usually read as a pathology. Brooks suggests that ‘the black woman’s display of strength is read pejoratively even as the strength of the (white) final girl is read as positive, plucky instead of pathological, independent initiative and not a series of acts threatening castration’. (2018: 20) For Brooks, the strong black woman stereotype contributes to the Otherness of black women and dehumanises them.

As a final girl, Holly appears as a black woman resisting this stereotype and showing some of the complexities of black womanhood. Holly is a final girl who is hunting down the monster without being ever attacked by it. She actively seeks the monster, closes in on it at the same time trying keep her own fear under her calm veneer. Holly is different from most final girls in horror, in that she does not appropriate violence against the monster (except when she pushes a knife in Cuco’s heart after it has already been incapacitated). She is vulnerable, and her otherness is always emphasised. Holly is the brains behind the operation; she saves herself from Jack Hoskins (who was trying to kill her for Cuco) while the men are still looking for her. However, she also needs help to face the monster at the end; she is protected by an army of men in the final showdown. She is very active, vocal and strong-willed, but she is no superwoman.

Holly also subverts stereotypes and norms regarding the sexualities of black women and female detectives. In most TV noir, white female detectives seem to have a problematic relationship with intimacy. This is seen as the effect of either the traumas from their pasts related to men, or working in such a misogynistic profession for long years. On the other hand, black women are often hypersexualised and depicted in opposition to the ideals created for white womanhood: ‘piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity’. (Brooks 2018: 27) Holly manages to avoid both of these stereotypical categories. Although she has issues in social interaction, she connects with a man on an authentic level. Andy seems to be attracted to Holly as exactly who she is. There are no efforts to change one another, no toxic behaviour because of past trauma. The two have an intimate relationship both sexually and emotionally. Holly is never depicted in a hypersexualised manner, always wearing trousers, sweaters and button up shirts in muted colours. She does not need to use her sexuality to solve crimes. Nor does she try to shun intimacy.

The show plays with its main binary of reason vs. faith on the dual axes of gender and race. First, it subverts the norms of white female detective’s gendered knowledge in the crime genre. More often than not, the white female investigator represents the rational and non-emotional side when paired with a male colleague, who is usually depicted as more sensitive. The most significant predecessors of this pairing are Dana Scully and Fox Mulder of The X-Files. As if to prove women can be professional, rational and logical against all stereotypes, from Scully onwards, the female detectives represent cold, hard, rational facts. These characters are mostly officials: police detectives, FBI agents, profilers, scientists; postfeminist signs of progress. In Holly and Ralph, The Outsider reverses this formula. Ralph is the police detective, the realist, the empiricist, while Holly is the private investigator who can think and colour outside the box because she is herself outside the box. Here, the show also does something curious. The people officially involved in the case are all men. However, the private sphere invades the professional, and the narrative also includes Ralph’s wife Jeannie and Terry’s wife Glory and their daughters. As such, with the addition of Holly, we end up with a group of men and women trying to come to terms with how to deal with the inexplicable. The show seems to be suggesting that more women (Holly, Jeannie and Terry’s daughter) than men are willing to believe in the supernatural. With this said, however, we also find exceptions in the characters of Glory (who removes herself from the investigation as a result of the supernatural turn), and Yunis and Alec (who are more willing to broaden their cognitive horizons).

The association of women with the inexplicable and the supernatural can be seen as regressive. However, within the critical tradition of horror, this has more subversive roots. In her analysis of the terrorised female character’s look at the monster, Linda Williams suggests an ‘affinity’ between the two as ‘her look at the monster recognises their similar status within patriarchal structures of seeing’. (2002: 62) For Williams, women see their own difference within the body of the monster. This also partially explains the association between Holly and the monster in the show. Similarly, in her analysis of contemporary horror, Pinedo points out that characters who survive in horror, more often women than men, are the ones that can ‘eschew critical tenets of rationality.’ She describes how Enlightenment thinking seeks to divide rationality, which is coded masculine, and irrationality, which is coded feminine. What postmodern horror does is to undermine this binary and combine ‘instrumental rationality’ and ‘intuition’ in the figure of the female hero. (1997: 25) As such, Holly and Jeannie’s willingness to believe in the monster is not a sign of their irrationality. Rather, they are practicing instrumental reason. In the meeting where Holly presents her theory about El Cuco to everyone, she says, ‘when the facts before you are so filled with uncanny coincidences that perhaps the first step to seeing things clearly is not to find a way to dismiss those facts, but to expand your sense of what reality might entail.’

Holly’s gendered knowledge is also racialised in the show. As the black female within white patriarchy, Holly’s faith is tied to her roots. Holly has a group of statuettes she takes with her to create a little altar. Here, we see that she is not just a believer but also a true practitioner of syncretism. Among her items in her altar are statues of Virgin Mary and St. Casimir, the patron saint of Lithuania (a detail taken from the character’s Lithuanian roots in the book). To these, the show adds a little black acorn doll given to Holly by her Trinidadian grandmother when she was a child to help her get through the rigorous medical tests she underwent. Holly always carries this doll with her. This little visual hint opens up a space where different kinds of knowledge and faith can have representation in American mainstream media. Holly’s roots in the Caribbean, with its different forbidden religions of Santeria, Voodoo and Obeah, signal a different type of belief system in which everyday encounters with the supernatural are facts of life. (Muir 2019) Such positive depictions of the black spiritual feminine identities create a space for the acceptance of non-Western epistemological systems. (Brooks 2018: 103) Moreover, Holly’s belief system is an evolving, flexible one. She has the ability to meld different faiths and create her own. Although Holly is marked by society as an outsider by race, gender and disability, as a character she represents openness, learning and the ability to contain paradoxes.

In the end, The Outsider chooses to keep Holly as an outsider. After the monster is defeated in a showdown with Holly and Ralph and after the end credits of the last episode, the show visits Holly one last time. Having survived the confrontation with the monster, Holly is sitting in her house, reading the news about Terry’s case, playing with her braids, with a scratch in her arm. This scratch once more marks her association with the monster. Essentially, the white patriarchy temporarily puts her belief and instrumental reasoning at the centre of the investigation to solve the mystery, and when she is no longer needed, her association with the monstrous is emphasised. The Outsider lacks the feminist edge of social commentary as a result of its foray into horror, and pushes its marginal female detective back to the periphery. However, the show also explores the idea of difference in the same way as the best horror texts do. In its autistic black female detective, The Outsider shows us that intersectionality and difference are important in cultural representation, and that women (and men) together can create a story of conviction, collective action and survival in spite of their differences.

Notes

[1] As of January 2021, the status and the future of The Outsider is still undecided. As an adaptation of a Stephen King book, the initial project was conceived as a 10-episode mini-series. During the show’s initial run, producers started hinting that they were working on a second season. This would change the show’s status from a mini-series to a long-form serial. More recently, however, HBO announced that The Outsider will not return to the network for a second season, giving way to some rumours about the possibility of the show continuing on a different network.

[2] This is a category created by Clover to refer to the victim-hero in the 1980s slasher horror movies. The concept will be explored further in the following paragraphs.

[3] The finale was watched by 2.2 million people across all platforms, which represents a 1 million boost from its season premiere. For many, this showed ‘the incremental, word of mouth nature of its success’ among audiences. When compared to more critically acclaimed HBO shows like Westworld (2016- ), Watchmen (2019) and True Detective (2014- ), The Outsider also has a higher average per episode across all platforms. (Thorne 2020)

[4] This new era has been identified within TV Studies and the industry by use of many different labels. Post-network era (Lotz 2007), TVIII (Rogers, Epstein and Reeves 2002), peak TV (coined by John Landgraf) and quality TV (Thompson 1996) are but some of them.

[5] The viewers who were disappointed with the supernatural turn in The Outsider might have missed the fact that it was adapted from a Stephen King novel. King is not only regarded as the master of horror, but also as ‘the master of creating his own hybrid genre’. (Sederholm 2015: 154) For many critics, the usual King story is one of ‘intense realism … rooted in genuine small towns’ full of ‘average individuals,’ a setup into which King introduces the horror element only after this recognisable reality is established. (Indick 1985:9) In The Outsider, King seemed to have found a perfect rendition of this formula by mixing the hyper-realistic and forensic genre of crime and supernatural horror. In the book, the investigation storyline takes half of the narrative. In the show, this naturalistic feel is maintained through the aesthetic conventions of detective noir.

[6] This may be the why certain TV shows that play with this line between crime and supernatural have been received positively before. The first season of True Detective was praised for its eerie atmosphere and hints into the weird fiction of Robert Chambers and to the supernatural, while opting to settle on a realistic explanation in the end.

[7] Some of these shows are: Bron/Broen (2011-2018), the American remake of The Killing (2011-2014), Top of the Lake (2013-2017) The Fall (2013-2016) and Broadchurch (2013-2017).

[8] In his article ‘Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy, and Influence of Nordic Noir Television,’ Glen Creeber describes TV shows with a Nordic Noir sensibility as including ‘bleak naturalism, disconsolate locations, and morose detectives’ with a ‘dimly lit aesthetic … slow and melancholic pace, multi-layered storylines.’ These shows depict society’s ‘dark underbelly’ and explore ‘the often lonely, desolate and isolated lives of its characters’. (2015: 21,22 & 25)

[9] There are many TV auteurs within HBO’s history of production:  David Chase (The Sopranos), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, True Blood), and David Simon (The Wire) to name but a few. Furthermore, already established film auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Stephen Soderbergh and Cary Fukunaga have also worked within HBO productions, strengthening its canon of TV auteurs.

[10] Price previously worked in The Night Of (2016) and The Deuce (2017-2019), and he was a co-writer on The Wire. He is a novelist and a seasoned adapter and scriptwriter.

[11] Erivo’s stance and influence on the character become evident in her latest comments on inclusivity in the industry, made in response to King’s controversial tweet claiming he does not consider diversity in art, just quality. At the Television Critics Assn. press tour panel, Erivo said inclusivity in art and casting changes ‘the way people think.’ See Turchiano 2020a.

[12] This is not to say that television does not present us with any positive black female figures. However, even when strong black female characters are concerned, there is always a layer of meaning suggesting those characters might have dubious intentions. One might think of How to Get Away with Murder (2014-2020) and Scandal (2012-2018) here.