At last, a villain!
In the run-up to Christmas 2021, in yet another lockdown turmoil, I'd been enjoying the new BBC series The girl before. As one would expect, it's well made. It's also rather superficial and full of slick characters with vague butt successful careers, in elegant clothes and attractive surroundings. Sometimes they don't talk but make short speeches consisting of pithy soundbites, perfect for social media. As a thriller, it should be taken with more than one pinch of salt. The plot is rather predictable, the motives transparent and the inanimate protagonist, an AI-based, smart building designed to subtly yet persistently modify the behaviours of the occupants less than believable.
Still, I enjoyed watching it for two main reasons. The first was that the four episodes were broadcast on consecutive evenings (who has the memory or patience to wait for next week's installment in our binge-watching days). The second was that the series was a funny satire on architecture (probably unintended because not fully exploited).
First of all, the AI housekeeper is funny. One can take it seriously and analyse what should have been different but my point is that is nearly fulfils its comedic performance. I couldn't help laughing at the dramatic moments (including two shower scenes) when the AI housekeeper refused to obey occupants any longer before they answered some questions. With its insistence on questionnaires, it falls quite short of the menacing threat we associate with intelligent machines. HAL 9000 is probably turning in his grave with impotent rage at this bureaucratic descendent.
Even more than that, I enjoyed watching a villainous architect in the male lead. There have been enough incompetent, devious and sycophantic architects in cinema and on TV but I don't remember an evil genius before. Finally, here's one we can all appreciate as a pinnacle of the profession.
Having been raised on a positive, even heroic image of the architect fighting for his art (always his) or society, I'd accepted that it's a professional responsibility to design for the good of users, society, the environment etc. This could escalate into Fountainheads, Corbusian propaganda and other extreme or arrogant forms, even caricatures, but somehow even hyperbole remained excusable. After all, we are generally eager to forgive mistakes in architecture.
It didn't take long to realize that this wasn't always the case. One cannot just ignore all those architects who have been designing for evil: dictators, unjust regimes, corrupt organizations or oppressive ideals. Still, the dipole of good-intentioned visionaries versus amoral mercenaries worried me with its neatness. It suggested that more is missing. Now at last -joy of joys- we have a clearly psychopathic villain who mixes things and uses his craft for direct and personal evil.
Our architect is enjoyable as an exaggerated version of all those architects who know better and forbid users this or that, actually just imposing arbitrary beliefs, usually on questionable aesthetic grounds, promoting random lifestyles as universal truths. He's actually more complex and cleverer than them. For example, he shrugs off criticism of his manipulative, high-tech design by correctly pointing out that any building modifies users' behaviours, intentionally or not. Having spent time and energy on the affordances of buildings, I nodded at the screen in appreciative agreement when I heard him say things to this effect.
He's also insistent (with a nice bit of indignation) that his designs are not minimalist but decluttered and liberated from trivialities. That was a nice touch. I could see the architect's sensitive nerves being stricken: who wants to be pigeonholed in an old tendency that obscures their rationale nowadays? Everyone is a special individual, not a representative of some vague ideas.
I'd been enjoying a good part of the spectrum of architectural foibles in the series, from unfounded intentions to naive belief in novel technologies, as well as the twist of an architect doing that for personal, evil gain, when the last episode went and ruined it. Yes, the architect is a psychopath but no more than other male characters in the series, and moreover not the villain. He even gets the opportunity of redemption in the open end.
Inevitably I feel cheated. The series came close to giving us a true villain of an architect but in the end failed to deliver. Let's hope that someone else will take over the task and further the cause of architectural evil in popular culture.
