Any Human Heart Episode Three

by Courtney Hilden

I am usually sad to see a miniseries come to an end on Masterpiece Theater, Classics Edition, but here I found I was desperate to see this particular story, with increasingly wonky structure, no discernible meaning, and despicable characters, end, so then finally, blessedly, I would never have to revisit this work.

The first two episodes were relatively simple: Logan, the main character, moves between a netherworld where all his former selves reside, the story of his life, and then his old age self. Episode three found the story also moving between several stories of the older self (played by Jim Broadbent), and this became particularly confusing, as it wasn't exactly clear when things were happening. (When exactly, in the chronology, was Logan at the beach? He was suddenly in the cabin burning things, then we cut back to the beach scene, where he's drinking a beer and looking miserable.)

Midway through the episode, Logan asks himself "is my luck running out?" What I find myself wondering is when he ever had luck. His entire life was just one mistake after the next, and the fact that he spends his entire life thinking it's luck, when it's clearly all about the decisions he makes (and, the decisions other's make), his continued illusions just make him seem far too stupid. (The only thing easier to see through is the makeup that the various young actors had to put on.)

But all these things are tiny quibbles next to the various problems of the work as a whole, which I found myself struggling with. The place of women within the story was troublesome. Logan spends his entire life treating women poorly. He sleeps with women he knows are involved with his best friend, Peter. He marries two separate women because he wants to be in a relationship, not because he loves them. When one tells him she's divorcing him, he throws an abusive fit at her. He longs for children, but never to really be there or do anything remotely supportive, he just wants their love and affection, particularly the love and affection of female children, in what is an obviously creepy role. And then he sleeps with whatever he can. And yet, the work never passes any judgement on his poor behavior, never reveals the obvious misogyny and patriarchy that destroys several of these women's lives. If nothing else, it seems to revel in Logan's relationships with women, even depicting them as the underpinning of his life. But, of course, Logan's life is not about how much he loved these women, it's about a pathetic man too oblivious to realize how much harm he does and how treating women badly is impractical because it just leaves him feeling empty and hopeless, which just causes him to repeat the cycle of lovelessness all over. The work glorifying him as a model is problematic because there is nothing really good about him, just selfish, pathetic, or both.

The other troubling depiction is of the socialist collection Logan works for in this particular episode. Like other parts of this story, this just seems to be another way for the work to show how important its star is ("Look!" the works says. "There's the former King of England, there's the second World War, there's a reference to "Hills Like White Elephants." Please. Let's not pretend that this isn't just a cherry picking of historical events to make the audience feel as if somehow Logan is important, when the truth of someone's life within historical events is often far more complicated and rarely so involved in things only a Masterpiece Theater audience would be familiar with.) This socialist collective could have been fascinating, a critique of the collective's most anti-woman, racist leanings, which is vaguely danced around. Instead, it became a series of jokes, poorly made and apolitical. This miniseries might leave you to believe that the collective was ridiculous to have security measures, but the truth was that organizations like this were under constant watch from various governments, and they did work, through spies to infiltrate and disrupt their activities. (Whole books, yes, whole books, have been written on the subject, and yet this miniseries, with its dedication to HISTORY, is ignorant of them.) Two girls who engage in lesbian sex are depicted as evil, mean and stupid, and just another attempt to make lesbians villains. Moreover, this part of the episode totally brushes over what the collective was trying to do, making it into a silly game of silly young people, instead of important work to end oppression, work that still, in various ways, goes on today. It is an insulting depiction of activists. If you think that activists are unimportant, then clearly you haven't been paying attention to the work going on in Egypt.

Overall, the work was toggling between boring and offensive. I would much rather seen the life story of almost every female character than Logan, and I would have much rather seen historical events depicted in the way they happened, not from a reactionary, simplistic point of view. The only thing that I liked about this miniseries is that it is over and that, unlike say, Downton Abbey, there isn't talk of a second season.