‘Stella: Subject’—Feminist Grammar and Female Agency in The Fall

by: Julia Sattler , June 14, 2021

The Fall: A ‘Feminist’ Crime Drama

In February 2015, the entertainment website Buzzfeed invited its readers to follow the traces of the Met Detective Stella Gibson, the female protagonist of the BBC Two production The Fall, written by Allan Cubitt. Listing fifteen incidents from the show ‘[w]hen Stella Gibson was a total badass’ (LaRosa 2015), the entry cites situations in which the show’s female lead confronts everyday sexism, confidently takes decisions others may not agree with, and refuses to stay silent in the face of injustice. Around the same time, several fashion blogs—and even The Guardian—made recommendations of how to reproduce the unique Gibson’s dress and make-up (e.g. Marriott 2014), ultimately making clear that this character, played by Gillian Anderson, had become iconic.

Concentrating on Stella Gibson’s achievement of agency on the show, this paper analyses her character on The Fall through a genealogy of female detectives, while taking into account Gillian Anderson’s star persona and earlier role as detective Dana Scully on The X-Files. My research shows how The Fall sheds light on the workings of misogyny through its assertive feminist protagonist, who is both unafraid to use her femininity to achieve her goals, and intensely aware of the psychology of misogyny and sexualised male violence. Holding up a mirror to instances of gender-based discrimination and misogyny and using her own, unique, feminist ‘grammar’ and allusions to feminist ideas, this detective knows how to subvert the rules of a game set up by the patriarchy, and successfully builds female networks among the police force as well among women on the show more generally. Throughout the series, it becomes evident that Stella Gibson’s ‘female’ reading of the crimes is indispensable to the investigation, and, by implication, necessary in police work and other professional fields that are still male-dominated. These factors together quickly gained The Fall the reputation as ‘[t]he most feminist show on television’ (Sullivan 2015) and one that ‘reverses the regular gender roles of crime dramas’ (Softky 2015), an understanding that necessitates the analysis this paper seeks to provide.

Set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the action on The Fall, the first season of which was released in 2013, is fuelled by a series of murders committed by a male killer named Paul Spector, played by Jamie Dornan of 50 Shades of Grey fame. Much like a spectre, he haunts his female victims before torturing and killing them in their own homes at night. A ritual murderer, Spector, the seemingly-innocent and loving father of two children and a bereavement counsellor in his daily life, bathes, decorates and poses the women in their flats. Spector keeps a notebook with sketches, photos and other documents of the women, essentially creating his own porn, which he hides in the attic of his Belfast family home.

An inverted detective story, The Fall works without the classic whodunit structure, and focuses on the investigative work undertaken by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). The Fall, the title of which alludes to three different dimensions of the show: the fall of man and its moral complexities (also evident in the show’s borrowing of all episode titles from Milton’s epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’), the poem ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Eliot, from which the killer quotes in his diary and which relates to spiritual and moral emptiness, and the Falls Road in Belfast, along with many of the sectional and class conflicts in the city and Northern Ireland at large, is a prime example of complex twenty-first century television.

From her arrival for an internal review in the first episode of season 1, Met Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson is a force to be reckoned with. She is not afraid to ask questions relating to the results of the investigation so far, but also confronts double standards and sexism within the police force. Gibson quickly recognises that the murders that have been spread out over time and space are connected, with each representing an escalation of the killer’s force. Against the advice of higher-ups, she presses for the creation of the task force that becomes ‘Operation Musicman,’ and eventually centres on Paul Spector, who engages in a cat and mouse game with the police until his confession at the end of Season 2. Season 3 portrays the aftermath of his arrest, and deals with accusations against Gibson and Jim Burns, another officer on the case, as well as with Spector’s confession of more crimes committed in London. At this time, he is in a psychiatric hospital. The show’s final episode shows Gibson returning to her London apartment after an attack by Spector and his ensuing suicide by hanging, closing the circle.

Arguably, and as has been noticed by many critics, the series’ storyline including sexualised violence against women and the decorating and posing of female bodies—that is, their objectification—signals neither an evidently feminist narrative, nor female agency. (Jermyn 2017) The victims of the killer, all successful women in their early thirties, are deprived of the possibility to act or speak. However, the open representation of gender-based violence is not unusual even in feminist crime fiction, as Adrienne E. Gavin explores: ‘[t]he central concern of feminist crime fiction remains violence against women. Women are victims: captured, raped, murdered, butchered and in the hands of forensic detectives dissected into evidence. In emphasizing violence against women, feminist detective fiction makes a gendered protest’. (2010: 268) In The Fall, Detective Superintendent Gibson stages this protest. She restores the victims’ dignity, and responds to the widespread double standards she encounters along the way.

By training not only a detective, but also an anthropologist, Gibson, who is in her 40s, represents a new type of female investigator: well-versed in feminist theory and building female alliances, neither afraid to bust networks of male power, nor to stand up to men regardless of their background and rank. Since the female detective genre has always left some space for unconventional female figures (Heilbrun 2002), it is not surprising that one can place Stella Gibson in line with earlier iterations of this role, such as Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect—a show that has many parallels to The Fall, and certainly is its predecessor. Indeed, unsurprisingly, writer Allan Cubitt contributed to season 2 of Prime Suspect. Like Stella Gibson, Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison is an investigator for the London Metropolitan Police, and unafraid to speak her mind. She is certainly also independent and ambitious, and in the series gets frustrated with gender bias on the police force. Yet Stella Gibson can also be read in line with late Victorian sleuths such as ‘Lady Detective’ Loveday Brooke, who, like Gibson, is ‘intelligent, physically fearless, and highly observant’. (Gavin 2010: 260) Stella, in common with both of these predecessors, builds on ‘’female’ knowledge’ (Gavin 2010: 260) in her investigations. More interesting than establishing these links, however, is understanding Stella Gibson in relation to an earlier and equally iconic female role portrayed by Gillian Anderson: Dana Scully of The X-Files.

Scully and Stella: Detecting Gillian Anderson

Gillian Anderson as Stella Gibson deserves studious attendance and reading, both as a character and as a performance. Her casting was no happy accident, as the series was written specifically with her in mind. (Radish 2015) Her participation in this format is specifically relevant because this is, of course, not her first role as a new kind of investigator in a ground-breaking television show. In the 1990s, she played Dr. Dana Scully on The X-Files, a role which inspired countless women in the United States and around the world to study the sciences, and to find their path into professional fields such as forensic investigation or police work—something that has been credited as ‘The Scully Effect’. (Geena Davis Research Institute on Gender in Media 2018)

Over the past three decades, Gillian Anderson has played a number of iconic female roles, not just on TV and movie screens, but also on the stage. Among these are Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House (The Donmar Warehouse, London, 2009), Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (The Young Vic, London, 2014 and, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York, 2016), Margo Channing in Ivo van Hove’s rendition of All About Eve (The Noel Coward Theatre, London, 2019), Edwina Mountbatten in Viceroy’s House (2017, dir. Gurinder Chadha) and, most recently, Margaret Thatcher in Season 4 of The Crown (Netflix, 2020). She has a large following, with many fans having been around since the original run of The X-Files.

Part of her appeal goes beyond her roles, though: since the beginning of her career, Anderson has been known as an outspoken activist for the rights of children, animals and the LGBTQ+-community. In 2017, she published, together with Jennifer Nadel, a self-help book titled We. A Manifesto for Women Everywhere. In this volume, as well as in a number of interviews (e.g. Aitkenhead 2017), Anderson has addressed her struggles with depression, anxiety and panic attacks, and has passed on advice to younger women. Since 2012, she has also spoken on various occasions about her past relationships with women (Hicklin 2012), which intensified the status as a gay and lesbian icon that she has held since the 1990s—despite Dana Scully being heterosexual, there is a significant group of fans who claim that Gillian Anderson made them realise that they, in fact, are not (Howat 2020) Much could be said about Anderson queering binaries through her public image, but such a reading lies outside of the scope of this paper. In The Fall, Anderson plays an evidently bisexual character for the first time in her career, which further adds to Gibson’s appeal and complexity.

In The X-Files, the show that made Anderson internationally famous, her character, the forensic pathologist and FBI Agent Dr. Dana Scully, became known as an outspoken voice against injustice and abuses of power. But in the show, she often had to walk behind the men, specifically her partner Fox Mulder, and her fertility was tampered with by mysterious forces as part of the series’ mythological arc. The multiple and complex ways in which Stella Gibson differs from Dana Scully not only evidence Anderson’s considerable range as a performer, but also make manifest the progression of female roles in crime drama since the 1990s since, as Rank and Pool note: ‘[t]elevision—particularly television about crime—reflects and shapes societal values and concerns’. (2019: 36) In the 2010s, Stella Gibson can be openly feminist in ways that would have eluded or harmed Dana Scully in the 1990s; more importantly, she can also make mistakes, errors of judgment, and be seen to be imperfect in ways that would have been refused to Scully as a female television character.

Stella Gibson is a most unusual female character, and is important to both Anderson and her fans. In 2020, whilst looking back on her career to date for Vanity Fair, Anderson stated that Stella had changed things for her as an actor ‘in terms of feeling [her] own power in a character’. (Vanity Fair 2020) Further, in a recent appearance on The South Bank Show (2020), she added that Stella has given both her and other women the permission to be who they are—even if that means they make mistakes—and to allow themselves to be complex women. ‘[Stella] felt like she needed to be out there’ (56:00), she states about her character on The Fall.

One thing Gibson certainly shares with Anderson is her support of women. In a 2019 interview, Anderson stated, ‘I do feel like a woman’s woman, and I go out of my way to be one. And actually I get so shocked and shaken when I come across women who aren’t. It really unsettles me’ (Nicholson 2019), pointing to the idea that women—who are, after all, often pitted against each other by society—should support each other.  Along similar lines, in The Fall Stella Gibson takes a stand for the women in the show, and in doing so challenges power structures, while also making it clear that she deserves to be respected in a male-dominated field of work.

Reading The Fall

As is typical for a police procedural, once the hunt for the killer—in this case the ‘Belfast Strangler’—gains traction, the viewer accompanies several members of the police force and gets to know how the Belfast PSNI is organised—including how some of the police officers are involved in corruption. By following the routines of the characters, the viewer gains an insight into their lives, specifically, of course, those of Detective Stella Gibson and the murderer, Paul Spector, but also of Spector’s wife Sally Ann and their children. The members of the Spector family, as well as DSI Gibson, are seen both at work and at home, affording us the chance to witness their private and public personas; we note that Stella is entirely devoted to her work and that there is barely any differentiation between her working and private life. Stella’s work comes home with her, but she does swim regularly, has a healthy appetite, and enjoys an occasional glass of wine or whiskey. She is always impeccably dressed, and works until late at night—and she enjoys casual sex without commitment, as the viewer is made to understand early on. She is very hard to pin down, as she, in common with all complex characters, cannot ‘be understood in terms of one particular trait but rather in terms of a multiplicity that fuses into a … whole’. (Dyer 1998: 94) Even though the viewer is not provided with much information about her background, it becomes clear that she is unconventional, not a people-pleaser in any sense, and unafraid to turn around preconceived notions of femininity.

The Fall takes an intimate look at multiple marital, moral and economic conflicts in which the characters are involved. These are an important backdrop to the series’ events, and lead the audience to take into account crime in relation to poverty, corruption and sectional division, and Belfast’s urban transformation in relation to social class, among other things. This aligns the series with the Nordic Noir genre as it, too, includes ‘bleak naturalism,’ ‘social criticism,’ and a serial structure that ‘allow(s) their central murder mystery to act as a catalyst around which a whole number of other storylines and themes (often of an ethical, social and political nature) can revolve’. (Creeber, quoted in Rank and Pool 2019: 42) The Fall has also been contextualised in the emerging Ulster Noir genre, which, according to the Northern Irish writer Brian McGilloway, investigates the past and reflects about the moment ‘where it all went wrong’. (quoted in Rubin) That Stella Gibson is an outsider in Belfast works to her advantage, as she is not invested in past conflicts related to the city, to local loyalties, and to religion. (Hupertz 2015)

In its investigation of what series creator Cubitt calls ‘the fault lines in people’ (quoted in Rubin 2014), The Fall relies on a smart viewer who is well-versed in literature, art, and philosophy, and who recognises intertextual references to paintings and poetry. In this specific sense, The Fall aligns knowledge with power. Being highly educated and well-read gives Stella Gibson an investigative advantage compared to many others on her team. For example, her recognition that the killer quotes from Nietzsche’s Thus spoke Zarathustra in a letter to a victim’s family helps her gain a deeper insight into his mindset, since she recognises that he feels superior to others. At the same time, his conduct is located on a spectrum of male-coded behaviour (Rosenstein 2015)—while his violence is certainly exceptional, his misogyny and hatred of women who have built their own careers is not unusual: in many ways, his violent behaviour is the logical end of a spectrum of misogyny which Stella knows all too well, one that women face on a daily basis. In spite of the presentation of his athletic body, he is not, in my view, glorified on the show—but neither is he dehumanised. After all, as Stella Gibson notes, ‘he’s just a man’. (The Fall 2.6; 39:04)  In fact, the final series serves to deflate Spector’s grandiose delusions about his own power and mastery: this is why he lashes out at Stella, who sees through him to the merely mortal ‘man’ that he is.

Lives Intertwined: Mirroring and Doubling

Watching the series repeatedly reveals how the characters’ fates are intertwined, even if they do not share any screen time^[1]. This recognition leads the viewer to question characters’ powers, motivations and urges, but also allows the viewer to focus on their own moral judgments with regard to the characters’ behaviour and actions. This renders clear that there is a gender bias relating to how certain behaviours are interpreted—there is a subtle but decisive difference between society’s judgements with regard to whether a specific action is carried out by a man, or by a woman.

Stylistically, the dual nature of every action is emphasised in the way the series formally mirrors certain elements, which results in diegetic intertextuality so that studied repetition reveals subtle alteration via context. The pilot, which by definition teaches the audience how to watch the show and what to read for (Mittell 2005: 56), is a masterclass in the use of mirroring, and thus binds the fates of detective and killer from the outset. In the very first scene of the show, the viewer meets Stella Gibson who is preparing for her imminent departure to Belfast. The camera tracks her through an intimate scene: she is dressed casually, and removes a face mask in front of the bathroom mirror—by implication we see her taking off her professional face, a gesture which dramatises the boundary between the public and private, which will become increasingly blurred for Stella; she gets her professional attire ready for the next day, places various items into a small suitcase on her bed, and begins to study case files. The second scene details Paul Spector stealing into someone’s home via a window. We see that he is dressed entirely in black, and wears a ski mask and surgical gloves; he also possesses a tiny flashlight disguised as a watch. He moves easily between an empty bedroom and the bathroom, where he switches on the flashlight and becomes visible to us for the first time. Removing his mask—in a sense, revealing his identity to us—Spector proceeds to take a photo of himself reflected in the bathroom mirror. The first encounter with this vicious killer makes clear that he is very experienced: he is readily equipped, and takes pleasure from intrusion without expressing any apparent nervousness.

Moving back to Gibson’s London home, the viewer encounters her in bed by herself, while the murderer she will later chase explores the bed of his future victim, leaving highly deliberate traces—a woman’s underwear and a vibrator (so as to reveal the intimacy of her private life). The resident of this home, a solicitor named Sarah Kay, will find the items later that night, leading her to call the police. But while Spector is in her bedroom, Kay is still out with colleagues, enjoying flirting with a man she has met. She tells him about the Mosuo, a small matrilineal culture living along the Chinese/Tibetan border. They practice ‘walking marriages,’ where women invite men into their chambers for a night, but the men continue to live with their mothers. In this culture, she says, there are no double standards with regard to sexual intercourse, and the relationship does not need to be acknowledged officially. In a later episode, we discover that Sarah Kay, who will become Spector’s victim, was in fact pregnant despite lacking an identifiable ‘steady’ partner. Notably, Stella Gibson, as an anthropologist, will later explain the Mosuo philosophy to her younger female colleague, Danielle Ferrington (The Fall 1.4, 11:06); she will also allude to it further in a conversation with a male co-worker when he finds out that Gibson regularly engages in casual sex. (The Fall 1.4, 22:30)

This mirroring device, which sets up a thrilling ‘cat and mouse game’ between Spector and Gibson, not only inextricably links their ‘private’ identities, but in some respects also sets them up as each other’s doppelgängers. Not only are they both products of the same patriarchal society, but each has insights into the other’s psychology, insights that they will use against each other throughout the investigation. They literally recognise each other as if in a mirror. At the same time, The Fall directly problematises this relationship between killer and detective, and specifically with regard to gender. In her attempts to get closer to the Belfast strangler, Gibson establishes a kind of ‘secret language’ with the killer that relies specifically on her femininity and identity as a woman. For example, at a press conference about the murders, she uses a particular shade of red nail polish the killer has been using on his victims, knowing he will recognise it.

While Spector tries to demystify Stella by suggesting to her on various occasions that they are alike, Gibson understands intimately the ways in which the male imagination renders the female body as fetishised object, and she knows how to use these codes and conventions against its most violent exemplar. Unsurprisingly, this has caused debate about whether or not The Fall fetishises and objectifies the female form, but this misses the fact that it is Gibson herself who functions as an internal check and commentary on priapic male visual culture and the manifold ways in which it plays out as a spectrum of violence.  The Fall problematises any easy alliance between hunter and hunted by positioning its female detective as an outspoken feminist who knows she needs to subvert the rules of the game within a patriarchal, violent culture: even whilst needing to play by those rules to achieve her ends.

Indeed, in several instances throughout the series, the viewer begins to wonder whether Spector and Gibson might not actually be alike, whether they are not both ‘hunters,’ transgressing boundaries. Spector’s crossing of lines is, of course, fundamentally different in nature: In episode 2.3, he breaks into Stella’s hotel room—and thereby into her most private sphere—and reads her dream diary. This most intimate manifestation of her thoughts can also be compared to the fetishistic scrapbook Spector keeps as a form of trophy of his killings. He installs Fuseli’s painting ‘The Nightmare’ as her desktop background, a painting that is well-known for its references to both the subconscious and eroticism, and that also serves as a commentary on the series’ own use of the naked female body. Whilst Stella also has illicit desires, she understands human psychology well enough to fathom her internal conflicts, unlike Spector, who is driven to act out through violent mastery. Stella’s control is evidently of a different sort, and this extends to her agency within sexual scenarios: she often remains mostly clothed and ‘on top,’ as a visual registration of her refusal to be fetishised and dominated. This stands in stark contrast to the rituals and practices of domination Spector uses when acting out his dark desires and killing his victims. Entering their homes uninvited and at night, he tortures the women before murdering them via strangulation, thus taking first their voices and then their lives. Bathing and then decorating them, to then pose the naked women on their beds, he renders them entirely as objects. This intimate psychological allegiance between Gibson and Spector serves throughout to illuminate the boundaries between darkness and light, control and wanton violence, self-knowledge and self-harm, neurosis and pathology.

The Fall comments on the discrepancy between those parts of the self that are visible to others and those that remain hidden from view—there are few occasions wherein characters appear truly ‘unmasked’. While psychologically speaking, ‘[a]n essential form of duality in all human beings is tied to the acquisition of consciousness’ (Saveedra & Velez Núñez 2011: 258), from a moral standpoint, this leads to a person being ‘continuously compelled to choose between different actions and their consequences’ (Saveedra & Velez Núñez 2011: 258) and is directly tied to ‘the question of the origin of evil and the freedom of the human being to avoid it’. (Saveedra & Velez Núñez 2011: 259) In the series, it is Spector who acts out his dark desires and obsessions, increasingly losing control over them, but at the same time, he dotes on his children. His violence is unsettling, because despite his love for his family, like the kind of alter ego known from gothic literature, his ‘dark half’ acts ‘as a physical manifestation of a dissociated part of the self’. (Saveedra & Velez Núñez 2011: 262)

On a variety of levels relating to both content and form, then, The Fall comments on the idea of duality in human beings—in Spector and Gibson being each other’s doppelgängers of sorts, but also in form of a character like Spector leading two entirely different and separate lives, one adjusted to mainstream expectations, and another in which he is unable to control any instincts. The show also complicates audience assumptions about victimhood—Spector can be read as a victim of his uncontrollably violent desires, but also of a past shaped by abandonment and molestation. That he can gain such intimate access to Gibson that he is able to break into her hotel room makes clear that the PSNI underestimates him—in part, because he leads two very different lives, and in part because the officers’ focus is diffuse as a result of being caught up in internecine power struggles and attempts to prevent Gibson from becoming too dominant within the team. 

‘Woman: Subject’—Stella’s Feminist Grammar

Confronted with power struggles and the sexist judgements of the men on her team, the solidarity Gibson builds during her time in Belfast is exclusively with women, whether with her female co-workers, the female witnesses, or the victims themselves. The series counteracts the notion that women cannot work together and trust each other, or will use another woman’s weakness to their own benefit. As such, it stages an explicit form of feminist community and female world-building. The emphasis on networking between women has led to some critics complaining that the show is too predictable in its triumph of the female over the male, and that it in effect represents an instance of positive discrimination. (Martínez-Lucena & Carretero 2016: 266) The female network in the show stands in stark contrast to the men who are characterised as either lone fighters (like Spector), or as part of a system of manipulation and corruption. Whilst the series does paint a bleak picture of many of the men involved in the police force, and evidences their significant incompetence, their potential for aggression and violence, and their illegitimate and illegal networking, Stella Gibson is also not necessarily a ‘realistic’ character (in fact, this criticism misses the point entirely). Gibson is a symbolic figure. She can be read as the ‘answer to the endless parade of white, male, hard-nosed, ‘genius’-type protagonists who have long been a staple on television’. (Softky 2015)

Gibson gains agency via her strategic use of language—including her body language. She distils the results of several generations of feminism and generates a unique ‘grammar,’ which effects both originality and intertextuality. For example, a close reading of seasons 1 and 2 reveals that she is very well aware of the effect of women’s representation in the media, as well as of theories of sexual politics and the history of feminism. Whilst this is not surprising considering she is an anthropologist by training, it is rare to see these theories and, at times, their consequences, spelled out so clearly and to such mesmerising effect in mainstream television.

Stella Gibson exposes double standards regarding male and female behaviour. Following the death of PSNI officer James Olson in a case-related shooting, she is questioned in her office by another detective, Matthew Eastwood. It has become public knowledge that Olson spent his last night with the DSI. Explaining that she does not know who could have killed him, she emphasises that their encounter did not entail any exchange of information. While Olson had sent Gibson several suggestive photographs following their encounter, effectively making himself available despite being married, she had confronted him with the fact that she had ‘read [him] wrong’ (The Fall 1.2, 42:12) and was not interested due to the fact that he could not exercise discretion.

Since Eastwood has a hard time catching up, Gibson spells out her agency in some of the most memorable lines from the series: ‘Man fucks woman. Man subject, verb fucks, object woman. That’s ok. Woman fucks man. Woman subject, man object—that’s not so comfortable for you, is it?’. (The Fall 1.3, 51:10) While speaking these lines—rendering the subject of the sexual act female, and thus speaking against objectification, but also making clear her agency, both sexual and otherwise—she leans back in her chair, almost putting her feet on the table. This behaviour is explicitly coded as male. Eastwood, who is standing in front of her desk, is stunned, and has no response to such a bold display of female confidence. Here, Stella asserts her subjectivity and agency in a situation where others are trying to render her an object: she can have sex outside of a relationship, and does not want or deserve to be judged for it—as, in fact, a man would not be. This is a prime example of the show’s intelligent dissection of sexual politics.

Claiming her status as female subject is not the only tactic Gibson uses to point to her agency. Her awareness of instances of both overt and covert gender-related discrimination does not stop at her own life, but extends to the victims of Spector’s crimes. When the PSNI’s press team formulates its text linking the murders before their first press conference, Gibson changes the wording significantly to avoid victim-blaming. The original text described the victims of the crimes as ‘innocent,’ which, as she points out, is highly problematic: ‘What if he kills a prostitute next? Or a woman walking home drunk? Late at night in a short skirt? Will they be in some way less innocent, therefore less deserving, culpable?’. (The Fall 1.3, 28:00) What follows is her version of the virgin/whore dichotomy: ‘The media loves to divide women into virgins or vamps, angels or whores. Let’s not encourage them’. (The Fall 1.3, 28:30) This understanding makes it clear that Gibson is on the side of the victims, and wants to minimise any opportunity for the press to blame them. She repeatedly points out that she is not interested in judging or policing women for their behaviour—and in return, she does not want to be judged, her own life certainly being at odds with more traditional understandings of womanhood.

Needless to say, Stella’s investigative skills are shaped by the understanding that the life experiences of men and women differ, and that this manifests in their reactions to threats. When looking for Rose Stagg—the decisive source who led Stella to Spector, but who has as a consequence been abducted by him—Stagg’s husband cannot understand why she left with the man who had broken into their home. Here, Gibson makes a speech about consent:

 In fact, the most common instinct in the face of this kind of threat is to freeze. If she didn’t fight, if she didn’t scream, if she was silent and numb, it’s because she was petrified. If she went with him quietly, it’s because she was afraid for her life. And not just her life—yours [her husband’s] and Nancy’s and the baby’s [the couple has two children]. In that state of fear she might well have been compliant. She might well have submitted. But that does not mean she consented. (The Fall 3.1, 47:05-48:37)

Gibson knows that it is important for Stagg’s husband to understand that her compliance represented an act of loyalty to her family, and was a result of ingrained female knowledge of appropriate responses to immediate danger. She spells it out to him clearly, because she knows that he will play a significant role in his wife’s healing process, but only if she can trust him.

Gibson has to explain repeatedly to male members of the police force that women and men perceive their world and themselves entirely differently. ‘A woman, I forget who, once asked a male friend why men felt threatened by women. He replied that they were afraid that women might laugh at them. When she asked a group of women why women felt threatened by men, they said, ‘We’re afraid they might kill us’’ (The Fall 2.6, 1:05:00-1:05:35), she tells a team member, after sharing a ‘sweet night’ with him. This occurs at the point where she realises that it was a mistake to allow him to stay the night, as he misconstrues her interest in Spector for attraction to him. While Gibson claims not to remember the author of this quote, a similar remark has been credited to Margaret Atwood. (e.g. Dickson 1996) Referring to Atwood in this context is certainly not a coincidence:  despite rejecting the label ‘feminist,’ Atwood uses sexual politics and gendered storylines to point to the complexities of gender roles, as well as the ways in which women’s societal gains can be taken back. That Gibson has to spell this particular quote out to male police officers shows that in the PSNI, the men do not understand women’s justifiable fears, and that it takes a voice like hers to challenge this willful ignorance.

Female Networks in The Fall

The female characters on the series all trust Gibson with specific knowledge that they do not offer to others, which in turn creates bonds between them. Gibson finds the right words to empower her colleagues in the police unit and Spector’s victims alike, but never speaks for them. Rather, she gives them the opportunity to speak for themselves. She establishes a close relationship Danielle Ferrington, a younger police officer at the PSNI, in which they support and trust each other. Early on in the series, Ferrington comes out as a lesbian to Gibson (The Fall, 1.4, 13:44), building on this trust between women in this specific working environment. She becomes Gibson’s assistant on the case—an opportunity for her to learn from a more seasoned detective, and develop in her role as a police officer.

Before she is taken captive, Rose Stagg confesses to Stella her experience with a man who tried to strangle her in bed many years ago—and who turns out to be Spector. This is an experience about which not even Stagg’s husband knows, but while she is hesitant at first, Stella manages to gain her trust. (The Fall 1.4, 47:41-54:28) The detective does not judge, but just listens and understands. Sensing that the man who strangled Rose might be their killer, an artist’s impression drawn with her help and some other information about the possible suspect gets published in a local newspaper, where, of course, Spector discovers it and understands that he is under threat. Thus, instead of revealing the man who had called himself ‘Peter,’ the information Stagg volunteers to the PSNI leads to Spector abducting her from her home. She is found alive, but Gibson has to live with the knowledge that she made a crucial mistake that caused the other woman harm. Seeing a video of Rose under Spector’s control is one of the few times in the series the viewer sees Stella close to tears.

In the third season, Gibson manages to establish a conversation with Katie Benedetto, the Spector family’s teenage babysitter, who has fallen victim to Spector’s ability to seduce women and has therefore provided him with a false alibi. Katie is self-harming, and Gibson gains her trust by sharing her own history of similar behaviour. (The Fall 3.6, 31:45-33:34:08) This demonstrates to the viewer Gibson’s understanding that it is not a sign of weakness to talk about one’s problems, a skill that is tends to be coded as female. Even here, Gibson’s stance is not so much one of mothering, but of empathy and openness to vulnerability. Tellingly, Gibson has not forgotten what it is like to be a teenage girl.

At the same time, in its focus on power dynamics and on building female networks in a world that Gibson herself describes as ‘masculine, paramilitary and patriarchal’ in series 3, The Fall falls short with perhaps its most interesting relationship between women, namely that between Stella Gibson and Professor Tanya Reed-Smith, the pathologist working with the PSNI. Their connection is not only interesting within the context of the narrative, but also on a metatextual level. Like Dana Scully, Reed-Smith is a forensic specialist, and Archie Panjabi, the actress who portrays her, rose to prominence playing a bisexual investigator named Kalinda Sharma on The Good Wife. Like Anderson, Panjabi has a huge female following, many of whom are queer, which has led to a queer reading of both characters among fans.

The on-screen bond between the two women is strong from their first meeting, when Stella asks her colleague to tell Reed-Smith, who has just arrived on a motorcycle, to join ‘us at the command vehicle’. (The Fall 1.2, 33:20) While the casual viewer might read this statement at face value, this moment mirrors Stella asking Danielle Ferrington to ‘[i]ntroduce us’. (The Fall 1.1, 52:25) when she first sees James Olson, the police officer with whom she has casual sex. (Ep. 1.2). The women’s first encounter takes them to Sarah Kay’s bedroom, where their conversation soon turns more personal.

Throughout the first two seasons of the show, Stella Gibson and Tanya Reed-Smith meet each other both on the job and casually—it is clear that this is more than just a working relationship. There is even a scene where the pathologist comments on Stella’s short nails: a queer tell if ever there was one. (The Fall 2.1, 51:56) They have a shared understanding of being at fault for Rose Stagg’s disappearance, as it was Reed-Smith who introduced her to Stella—an issue they can address openly with each other. While at a bar in episode 2.3 (45:00-47:17), a male solicitor propositions Reed-Smith, leading to the DSI saving her with a kiss that makes it patently obvious that she is unavailable to him. The scene culminates in Reed-Smith following her to the lift, but making an excuse as to why she cannot come up and ‘go with the flow,’ as Stella Gibson suggests. While it can certainly be argued that the kiss happened to play to the male gaze, it may also gesture towards the (yet unfulfilled) potential of a closer relationship—of whichever nature—between the two.

In contrast to men such as Jim Burns—who comes to see Stella later that same night and touches her without her consent—Stella does not try to cross the boundaries the other woman has established, a sign of the moral superiority of women within the context of the series. Confronted by Burns’ harassment, which Stella has to quite literally beat down, she argues: ‘The basic human form is female. Maleness is a kind of birth defect’. (The Fall 2.3, 50:53-53:40) While this refers to the biological difference between men and women, and the supposed female origin of all life also mentioned in works such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, the quote does raise the question of Stella’s preference for a relationship with another woman, someone whom she neither has to control nor dominate, because they are equals and supporters of one other. Someone, indeed, like Reed-Smith, who mirrors her body positioning and style of dress in every shot in which they appear together. At the same time, it is still unusual to see on screen what Stella Gibson represents: a woman who does not lament being single, and is not desperately looking for long-term companionship from anyone of any gender.

Conclusions & Further Ideas

While The Fall is certainly not the first crime series to expose a gender bias in police work—and in fact can be read as part of a larger canon of series to do so—the ways in which it cleverly interlinks questions of the complexity of living and working in a patriarchal world to feminist ideas and philosophies (as survival strategy) leads viewers to consider their own judgements about the characters’ behaviour. Yet whilst Stella remains non-judgmental and open-minded in relation to other female characters, the show itself judges her quite harshly. There are many instances where it becomes clear that this is a universe where, all too often, ‘the woman gets the blame’. (The Fall 1.3, 13:31) We see this in the fact that Gibson constantly has to keep the men on her team from voicing their opinions about women, herself included, to the moment when Jim Burns confronts her with the question as to whether she has ‘any idea of the effect [she has] on men’ (The Fall 1.4, 21:40) —as if men either have no self-control, or their ensuing behaviour is a woman’s responsibility. In season 3, Stella is punished for her behaviour, as she is physically harmed by Spector while he is already in custody: as is so often the case, the system does not protect women. Apart from its commentary on gendered power structures within the PSNI, the series is also a productive resource for precipitating discussions about women’s roles in the workplace in a larger context: not only can it be used to explore the politics of dress and workplace behaviour, but it also addresses the role of emotions in the workplace. Stella Gibson has been described as being well in tune with notions of postfeminism (e. g. Jermyn 2017, Steenberg 2016), but it can also be argued that she breaks with postfeminist ideas—in her relating to earlier concepts of feminism rather than contesting them, in her strengthening of a specifically female subject position.

As becomes clear throughout the series—and specifically via Stella Gibson’s ‘feminist grammar’—this character has learned from those who have come before her just as much as she serves as an inspiration to a new generation of women on the Belfast police force, and, by implication, to all women working in male-dominated fields. For Gibson’s character, her ‘female’ knowledge is not only crucial to the investigation as she draws confidence and security from it, but it also allows her to be ahead of the game in hunting a misogynist killer. The Fall was first released during a time, and in a political climate, in which the question of whether feminism was still needed gained traction. The series definitely responds to this question with a resounding ‘yes’—it points out that the need for feminism has indeed not faded in relation to changing definitions of femininity, or to the higher public offices women can reach in the 21^st century. Rather, it makes clear that in a culture that is patriarchal at its root, women can still be subjected to the male gaze, misogynist threats, and even violence—and that like Stella Gibson, they can defy objectification and make themselves the subjects of their own lives.

Notes

[1] It is not until the final series that Gibson and Spector share any significant screen time together.