The first episode of FX's The Bridge (which has a pretty epic amount of material online, btw) starts off with evocative promise. The El Paso PD and the Juarez police find a body on the bridge between Texas and Mexico, the most important and busiest land crossing between the two countries. They tussle over jurisdiction, in a very procedural way, and we think we understand how things are going to be. Then the crime scene techs move the body and it comes apart.
The set up seems so perfectly tailored to the fractious, fraught relationship between the United States and Mexico and all of the socio-economic issues that are bound up in it that it hardly seems believable the show is based on a Danish(!) show about the border between Denmark and Sweden. To be fair, that bridge is much more difficult to cross without being seen, in order to place two halves of different bodies in the middle of it. The idea of borders and crime is so potent that they are developing the idea in Britain, based on the Chunnel. As an American, I don't think I can identify the neuroses that these shows are meant to address, the difficult issues that investigating death lets the show interrogate within the context of these cultures. Whatever the difficulties between France and Britain, the Chunnel hardly seems like a contested boundary. The border between Texas and Mexico? That's a contested boundary.
I did not come into the Bridge unprepared though and this may have colored my expectations for the show. The background noise of the particular crime tale that the Bridge is telling is one of the great crime mysteries of all time: the lost girls of Juarez. My first exposure to this mystery was a novel called 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author who died while writing the novel. It is an epic, discursive tale that curls its way around to Mexico and to the legions of young women who disappear from the maquiladoras, the factories in the north of Mexico that create things cheaply and then get shipped into the U.S., a potent symbol of the economic gulf between the countries, if there ever was one. Over the last twenty years, young women, always between 16 and 24, have disappeared in disturbing numbers, hundreds have disappeared. The reality is probably complex and it's a mortal lock that, in reality, very few of these disappearances are actually related. But humans want narrative and the story of the lost, lonely, dispossessed, poor women who devote their lives to scraping together just enough to power the machinery of the largest economy in the world, which consumes them and their life's work without a thought, and tosses it aside just as easily practically writes itself. There is an evil that pervades the site of so much injustice. Corruption infects the place and it consumes the girls. That is certainly the mood that Bolaño works in and that is how I approached The Bridge.
That's not very fair to the show, of course. No matter how moody you make a murder mystery, you eventually solve mysteries. Rare is the crime show that is purely interested in the culture and the background and not the crimes. Even a show like Twin Peaks which was ALL mood, needed the hook of that dead body wrapped in plastic washing up on the river bank to get it going . . . And it collapsed when the story of that body was told. The fact that I'm comparing The Bridge to Twin Peaks at all, is probably bad for the FX show. Twin Peaks is incredible. I want to watch all of it again right now. I might rewatch the first four episodes of The Bridge, back when it was amazing, when it was all crime, when the detectives had no hope and they were up against what seemed like a supernatural force that was greater than all of them, aiming them, gruesomely, at the crimes of Juarez. That's the show I really really wanted to have. That's not the show I ended up with at the end of season 1. Maybe that's where they go in season 2 . . .
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