Columbo and the dialectics of personality

I was happily alerted this week to a recent article on Columbo, my favorite detective series and unarguably one of the most innovative and best-written entries in the genre. It's not hard to echo the author's sentiments about the show and second her proposal for new incarnations of the rumpled lieutenant (though I'm not sure if "making Columbo America's Dr. Who" would mean revealing Peter Falk's character to have been a non-terrestrial, time-traveling immortal. Thankfully, that's already the premise of a Wim Wenders film).

The basic argument of the piece is one that's been rehearsed in nearly every write-up on the series: Columbo is a decent, working-class folk hero, beloved for besting the criminally rich through persistence, perspicacity, and unfailing politeness. His suspects--doctors, lawyers, jet-setting playboys--underestimate him from the outset; he alternately sets them at ease and sets them to choler with his distractable manner and slack-paced relentlessness. It's generally clear from early on that Columbo has their number, but fans of the show treasure the famous fake exit and needling catchphrase: "There's just one more thing..." Even then, the killer might not cotton to the fact that Columbo's already out-smarted them. The final scene that closes each episode sees the well-heeled killer resigned to confirming Columbo's explication of the crime; this moment is repeatedly cited as a source of class-inflected satisfaction to many who have extolled the show's virtues, ideological and otherwise. "Real Marxists," intones this most recent panegyrist, "love Columbo."

Of course, it doesn't take a class warrior to pick up on the absolute lovability of the character as embodied by Peter Falk. Though not the first to play Columbo, Falk created the character in every meaningful sense of the word. The trademark raincoat over a suit and tie were his, as were the often-improvised circumstantial speech, the whistling, the battered Peugeot convertible (chosen though not owned by Falk), and, of course, the glass eye. Columbo carries an excess of distinctness, of recognizability. And not for nothing; except for our detective, no recurring characters are featured--no partner, no captain, no police chief, no street-wise CIs, no family members (unless you count sporadic appearances by Columbo's basset hound, Dog, or his always offscreen wife). It's safe to say that very few TV series have ever rested so entirely on the density and appeal of a single personality: personality, the generic fulcrum of the police procedural, here even more so than the much-vaunted formula but inextricable from it.

Sicut Wim Wenders, I do find something beatific, even seraphic, something not fully rationalized through the forensic logic of the police procedural and therefore left somewhat to the realm of the mystical, about Columbo's knowingness. It's a knowingness that exceeds the genre's mechanics of knowledge. The series famously popularized the crime-show format of showing the entire crime prior to the detective's arrival on the scene, so that the narrative and emotional crux of the episode lay not in discovering the truth, but in watching Columbo clean the killer's clock. But even when Columbo explains or the episode suggests how he first twigged the killer's identity--usually as soon as he meets them--we experience the detective's perception as not only empirically but morally faultless; it is aligned with the already-knowing perspective of the audience. He flushes out the killer because he's smarter, yes, but primarily because he's Columbo. Compare the mystique of personality here with, say, the more or less realist characterization of Starsky and Hutch, Steve McGarrett, or Rockford.

Ultimately, what I find to be the brilliance and dialectical loveliness of Columbo is that a series so predicated on the coherence of its protagonist's personality should register and pose personality--though never at the level of nameability--as a problem, specifically as a problem about history. Maybe it's real dialecticians who should love Columbo. You'll notice that in most write-ups of the show, the author describes the detective using a formulation like "absent-minded or pretending to be." Personality, in its generic capacity on the crime show, impels an essential correspondence between who one is and how one behaves, both of which are inscribed as destiny. The odd thing about Columbo is that the show never draws bold internal boundaries to denote when his personality is the thing that is instrumentalized and when it is the thing he cannot help. That is, there are alternate ways, subtly but significantly different, to describe Columbo's technique as a detective: 1) his personality works for him (his personality traits are felicitously the ones that get the job done); 2) he works his personality (he strategically mobilizes the salient traits of his personality to get the result he, the acting agent, requires). Neither of these accounts is exactly right or exactly authorized by the show; the show's unrationalized elevation of personality allows Columbo's character to ambiguate between the two. This dynamic later becomes reified in Monk through a total pathologization of the faculties that become in turn totally instrumentalized as investigative tools; it can also be seen in its opposite number in Sherlock Holmes, whose ingenious disguises act as a negative guarantor of the ultimately inviolable distinctness of the Holmes character itself. Personality's ontic status is unclear in Columbo, but the hitch is that this unclarity goes unacknowledged, never rises to the level of a problematic or an acknowledged narrative component.

The antinomies of personality take on the strongest charge in those well-loved episodes where Columbo develops an affection for the murderer, particularly in my two favorites, "Any Old Port in a Storm" (3.2) and "By Dawn's Early Light" (4.3). The murders here are motivated by the threat of loss, the end or impossibility of a certain era, culture, or sensibility, and it's the killer who's caught in a cleft stick between committing an appalling act of violence and seeing his world snuffed out by inexorable market forces. The show isn't necessarily concerned with the kind of loss/culture in question (here, a vineyard and a military academy), as with its desperate struggle to endure with its self-constitution intact. It's worth noting, too, that the killers--a supercilious wine connoisseur and army colonel--aren't depicted as "sympathetic" characters (Donald Pleasance's wine connoisseur in particular comes off as a caricature at first), and the manner in which they dispense with their victims seems especially gruesome compared to more mundane crimes of avarice, ambition, or megalomaniacal self-regard (Pleasance's Adrian Carsini leaves his unconscious half-brother tied up in a sealed wine cellar to suffocate to death, and Patrick McGoohan's Col. Rumford rigs a cannon to explode during a Founders' Day ceremony).

And yet these are Old World aristocrats with whom working-class hero Columbo sympathizes*--an aesthete and a soldier, people who have lost the world with which they identify entirely. They insist they are not remorseful and they develop respect for Columbo's acuity. These characters are, to use Kierkegaard's phrase, nailed to themselves; their characterization unfolds an historical allegory that's articulated as a tragedy of personality. They're unable not to commit an ultimately futile murder--Carsini kills his vulgar half-brother when he threatens to sell the unprofitable vineyard to a large corporation, and Col. Rumford kills the chairman of the board of trustees, who plans to turn the also-unprofitable all-boys' academy co-ed--and they are unable to avoid giving themselves away. Carsini explodes at a waiter who serves him a bottle of port that was exposed to excessive heat--a bottle that Columbo had earlier removed from Carsini's own cellar to reveal the cellar to be the site of the murder. As Carsini says in the remarkable final scene, he was the only person in the world who could have detected the flaw. Col. Rumford falls into a similar trap when he insists on investigating a bottle of cider he saw fermenting outside a cadet's window. As it turns out, the bottle was only visible in the early morning, so the Colonel could only have seen it if he had been the one tampering with the cannon prior to the ceremony. In the final instance, the worlds and values being mourned through these characters are conservative ones, and I'll refrain from commenting on the show's explicit or implicit attitude toward the specific institutions on display. It's the form of characterization--personality as an unporous self-identity, unusable and, crucially, uninstrumentalizable--that renders these characters tragic, and renders them vulnerable to the usable but still under-rationalized personality of the detective: a personality made out of different historical materials.

*This emotional logic follows a familiar tradition of inter-class sympathy between working-class and aristocratic positions that both see themselves opposed to an ascendant middle class.