Given that
Columbo is formulaic to (or past) the point of perversity, and given that
Columbo –– unlike every other detective series –– forfeits the prick-teasing withholding of the killer's identity until the end of the show, you might think that
Columbo was a hard sell. To continue with my vulgar
figure, choosing
Columbo over
Inspector Morse (for instance) is like favoring premature ejaculation over delayed gratification. It is like continuing to leaf through a pornographic magazine after the "money-shot" has been and gone. It flies in the face of Aristotle, who remarked that man is the only animal to experience sadness after the sexual act. It defies the tantric logic of Sting and Trudie Styler who must postpone the event eternally –– how they jealously fetishize withholding pleasure from each other!
However, I seem to be drifting from my subject and along the way I have summoned up some grotesque images.
One reason why the strictly formulaic aspect of
Columbo is irrelevant to the pleasure derived from the viewing experience is the calibre and the variety of the guest stars. This has been said before. However a further variable, I have started to perceive, particularly as the seasons progress, is
the personality of Columbo. This can veer all over the place. It is subject to frequent self-fashioning, as they say all too frequently in the academy. Self-fashioning or auteur-fashioning. It is said that Falk was his own man though and I believe it.
In the early seasons, I thought
Columbo is like Zatoichi. There is a similarity in that both men are seemingly shamblers, they are humble, they bow their heads and do not swagger or rear up, and yet they are unsurpassed in their respective cosmic roles: the first a homicide detective, the latter a roaming swordsman. They are, from an exterior perspective, unimpressive, yet they contain within them the gold and jewels of exceptional abilities. Zatoichi is blind (although Katsu Shintaro obviously was not). Peter Falk was half-blind. It is to be assumed, although so far as I have seen it has not been commented on, that Columbo also has a fake eyeball. That's interesting but it has little bearing on the case.
Columbo, however, shows more personality variance from episode to episode than Zatoichi does. I do not say categorically that this is preferable –– I like that Zatoichi's shining goodness is an eternal in a dark, foul world. We need Zatoichi like we need Emerson –– to guide us through the last days before the crack of doom.
Columbo's personality zig-zags are interesting rather as Louis C.K.'s purposeful lack of continuity is. (There was the excellent episode of
Louis with Seinfeld [playing himself as a consummate jerk] where Louis ends up having to pay the wealthy family of the girl he punched when she tickled him in bed several million dollars in installments for the rest of his life. We do not presume that in each subsequent episode of
Louis Louis actually has to maintain these payments –– the event happened and then left continuity, like a dream subsiding.) In one episode Columbo is tugging his forelock and coughing. In another he is subdued. In another he is reeling about, bleary-eyed, half-insane. He craves coffee. He is in his pajamas. He has his dick half out at a bar-mitzvah. He is usually star-struck, even while he is poised to send that same "star" to the
hoosegow or the
death chamber. He blunders at social events. He frequently upsets the "help". Did you see the one where he nearly drove the snobbish elderly female retainer to a breakdown with rage. Other times he is severe, angry, even vengeful. The Biblical God. In the third of the great Jack Cassidy episodes he pursues Cassidy's ex-Nazi stage magician doggedly like one of the Eumenides –– Alecto, say. In the superb "Last Salute to The Commodore" he is more like Jerry Lewis.
And there I thought,
They should have had an episode with Jerry Lewis as the killer.
"Last Salute to The Commodore" is understandably a divisive episode in the bustling
Columbo community. A casual survey I made after watching it turned up no end of dismay. A few people declared it a work of brilliance. More of them were writing to their Congressman and demanding a government inquiry into
how this thing came to be made. I'd by and large side with the former. Some of it is magnificent; for instance, the avant-garde aspects, when Falk is channeling in equal parts his friend Timothy Carey, Antonin Artaud at his fist-biting best and also the Buddha in his
rub my belly for luck aspect. Conversely, it is unusually conventional in its climax –– the seeming tribute to Agatha Christie. Whither Ustinov in his white suit. Problems include: the frazzled, soused daughter of the Commodore. She spends the whole episode in a drunken stupor, and over time this palls. The viewer finds that he wants to administer a cold bucket of water over her head. You want to say: Sober up. Join a club. Make friends. Get laid. Get a new hobby. Like the girl doing the Transcendental Meditation. Both of them were good looking by the way. The lush and the TM girl.*
There are several sublime scenes in it. The much-discussed, and protracted, scene where Columbo gets everybody to pile into his car and then sits in Robert Vaughn's lap and musses with his hair. He does this again later, on board the yacht ("yawl"). In this version, Columbo seems to favour crude, omnivorous sexual harassment as a key crime-solving technique. Let it be noted that Dick Tracy never did that. Also commendable is the endless, mirthful scrutiny of the terminology peculiar to the maritime community. How it makes us lubbers chuckle. "That's the mizzen mast jibe?" There is the scene on the docks where everything is shouted over the sound of a nearby drill. Falk visibly weeps with laughter in this scene. The viewer has a certain wistful consciousness of not being entirely in on the joke.
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In this episode Columbo also has a young double, with a Polish surname, who inexplicably asks that he be known as "Mac". Columbo promptly, and gamely, does so. "Ya got any Irish blood in ya Mac?" He asks Mac this several times. "Ya sure ya haven't got any Irish blood in ya Mac?" Mac is a doppelganger of sorts –– the chief loves him, and he loves Columbo. He even buys a raincoat (NB, "mac") like Columbo's which shows up (again, inexplicably) in the middle of the denouement. Columbo picks it up from the back of a chair and absently asks, "Whose is this?"
The episode is hilarious and disturbing. The
Columbo myth is fraying at the parameter –– the comforts of the formula have vanished as soon as it is discovered that Robert Vaughn was not the killer after all. The Columbo convention is disrupted, Columbo is virtually unrecognisable and anything could happen now. A lot of diehard viewers resent that Columbo is somewhat arrogant, wisecracking and winking in this episode. One commentator (that rare thing, an admirer of the episode) is certain that cast and crew had all ingested LSD before filming even began.
In fact, in the previous episode to this one, the also-amazing "Now You See Him" with Jack Cassidy as the Nazi legerdemain performer, Columbo is already in a
new mode of existence. I said that he is vengeful (I compared him floridly to Alecto from the Aeneid). He is also, once again, arrogant and sadistic to another admirer, Bob Dishy reprising Sgt. Wilson. In this episode Columbo's wife has crucially bought him a new coat, a nice coat that looked good on him. It's a good coat. I remember thinking,
If only Columbo would wear the new coat. But no, Columbo spends the episode trying to lose the coat. Wilson keeps finding it again for him. Cue muffled laughter. But my point is that Columbo's identity is in flux. His irritation with Wilson eventually turns into admiration when Wilson distinguishes himself as a slewfoot in his own right (knowing that rare article,
what Columbo does not, about the typewriter) and contributes to solving the crime.
The recurrence of murderer-actors such as Jack Cassidy, Patrick McGoohan and Robert Culp is, like Louis's changing array of wives and small details, a subtle disruption of the sacred continuity traditionalists insist upon. How can Jack Cassidy now be a bad novelist, now a free man again in the guise of a publisher, now a legerdemain man? He is always Jack Cassidy after all. (In the third iteration, much is made of Cassidy's character's shifting identity –– he emerges blood-besmattered from the deathcamps of Germany to posing as a Hungarian end man, to posing as an Englishman, to posing as an American.)
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall repay."
Are we, each season, deposited in an alternate universe, where the same people (Cassidy, McGoohan, Culp) have different occupations? And yet they are always killers, and they are always thwarted by Columbo, albeit each Columbo is also slightly different? I am reminded of the Borges line from "Death and the Compass" (I last used this quotation quite shamelessly in reference to an episode of
Dog the Bounty Hunter):
"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."
(When did I become the man with the Borges quotation?)
(Why am I still not employed by a university?)
That being said, Columbo scotches my thesis, because several times he has recalled past cases from previous seasons in tedious detail. He recalls the entire story in an incidental anecdote. This is peculiar, because when that motif –– an old adventure recalled in brief –– is usually employed artistically, it refers to an adventure that has not actually been delineated before; it is employed as a teaser, a story that has never actually been set down, like a fictional book within a fictional book.
I once dreamt that I was reading a book by Proust, one that is not in any of the Proust bibliographies I am certain.
(Idea for a bibliography category: "Dreamt Books by the Author.")
It was only at the end of this magnificent story, anyway, when Columbo is rowing off towards Japan to meet his wife at the yacht club, that it was revealed that the director of this minor masterpiece was that expert at brilliant stories with mystical not to say deeply unsatisfying conclusions, Patrick McGoohan. I saw the name –– I had what Oprah rather sickeningly calls my "aha moment".
It is well-established that The Prisoner ended unsatisfactorily and as the result of events which occurred off-camera which precipitated a distinct compromise. McGoohan elected to leave England to live in sunny California, and so he rushed out (for Lew Grade's sake) a nonsensical ending to a job he had grown bored of. "Number Six", who was formerly known as John Drake ("Danger Man") eventually shows up in California as "Nelson Brenner" in the Columbo episode pointedly titled "Identity Crisis"(directed by Patrick McGoohan). Brenner dresses at one point in a blazer intended expressly to recall Number Six.
As one commentator on IMDB sagely observes, "he even has the nerve to deliver the line 'Be Seeing You' repeatedly... What a star!" Interestingly, this excellent episode is also marred by McGoohan's regrettable signature, his Achilles heel: vagueness of intent and lack of proper closure. I don't have a clue why Nelson Brenner is secretly posing as an aging Eastern European who is apparently #1 on the CIA's Most Wanted list unless the answer is existential ennui.
Vagueness of intent and lack of proper closure.
Yes.
[* I say nothing here of TM or its present messiah, Mr. DAVID LYNCH; see earlier writings elsewhere.]
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