Wolf Hall's Three Card Trick: Episode 1

[tealin]

The PBS airdate for the first episode of Wolf Hall is coming up. This series made me ecstatically happy when it was airing on the BBC and I am very much looking forward to finding out what the reaction will be from across the pond. What made me so excited aside from the brilliant acting and gorgeous production and general intelligence of the whole thing, was the subtle game it played with the audience – a game which, I fear, may have been too subtle, as I feel like the only one I know to have picked up on it. Usually I'm the one missing something completely obvious in a movie, so I was a little worried I was hallucinating, but in rewatching, and reading what other people have to say, I'm pretty sure I'm on to something. For that purpose, dear North Americans, I shall write out my take on the show, in the hope that when you see it you can check it against my theories and perhaps enjoy it as much as I did. At the very least I aspire to spark some interesting meta.

I should clarify now, when I refer to Wolf Hall, I mean the 2015 BBC miniseries directed by Peter Kosminsky, screenplay adapted by Peter Straughan. I have not read Hilary Mantel's novels, but I have read the RSC stage adaptations by Mike Poulton, which differ from the TV series quite a lot. As such, I don't know who to credit for the storytelling to which I refer, and whether these ideas and the way in which they are presented are faithful to Mantel's vision or an invention of Straughan and Kosminsky's. I shall refer to the creators therefore as 'they', a nebulous hand-wave in the direction of the font from which this all came, and someone who knows more than me about its creation can inform me as to where credit and blame should fall.


Wolf Hall is a TV drama based on two novels by Hilary Mantel, the first of the same title and the second called Bring Up the Bodies. It is set in a historical period and the cast consists of historical figures, but it makes no claim to be documentary. Even the opening credits of each episode say 'based on the novels' rather than 'based on the books', a small distinction but an important one; one they didn't have to make, but they did, which I think is significant. Wolf Hall is fiction, and therefore art, and art is subjective. Art is motivated by having a deeper message than the literal interpretation thereof; it makes a statement about something and, ideally, gives you some new ideas and perspectives to play with.

In order to convey to their audience the statement they intend to make, artists use their craft to sift signal from noise, to emphasize what it is they want to communicate. Even photography, which by its very nature is inclined to be objectively documentary, is manipulated by filters, exposure, depth of field, and especially composition. How you crop reality – and how you organize the reality within your frame – is powerfully communicative.

This is what Wolf Hall does with history. It wears its bias on its sleeve from the outset. It takes a popular story, about which its audience is very likely to know a little truth (or at least have seen one or two other dramatic interpretations), and tells it with a new, unexpected, and drastic slant, in favour of one of the most obviously nasty men in English history: "... when I was doing research for A History of Britain," writes Simon Schama, "the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture." (Financial Times, 14 Feb 2015) Yet clearly from the TV adaptation we are not only supposed to root for him, but genuinely like him. There is no point complaining about Wolf Hall's bias because the bias is central to its existence – the question is, what is the greater artistic reason behind this bias? What is it trying to tell us?

The first assumption, of course, is that it's an exoneration of Thomas Cromwell. It's certainly possible; the bias is so heavily in his favour that it does come across this way. While the big picture paints a positive image of him, though, a closer examination turns up all sorts of contradictory details: if you've willingly swallowed the proposition that Cromwell is a great guy, at least for the purposes of this narrative, these turn up as annoying inconsistencies, or are easy to brush aside if you notice them at all; if you're tuned in on a more skeptical wavelength, however, they are clues as to the artists' intent. If Wolf Hall were meant to be a pure and simple exoneration, it has the dramatic license to wipe these contradictions from the story – so why doesn't it?

During the Vietnam War, American Navy pilot Jeremiah Denton Jr was captured and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese, and was forced by his captors to participate in a televised press conference promoting their side of the war. During his interview he repeatedly blinked 'T-O-R-T-U-R-E' in Morse code, something missed at the time by his supervisors but caught by the Americans, and was taken as the first testimony that American POWs were being tortured behind enemy lines.

My theory, regarding the apparent discrepancies between the details and the big-picture bias of Wolf Hall, is that the narrative as a whole is, in effect, Cromwell's Argument for the Defence in the court of public opinion. He is a lawyer, and good at it; he has been indicted by history and historical fiction, and this is his rebuttal. Everything is spun in his favour; when the evidence is against him, he cannot change it, but can discredit it, trivialize it, disregard it, recontextualize it, or distract the jury (the audience) with appeals to sympathy. The troublesome fragments of contradictory information are the filmmakers' Morse blinks – small subtle clues that what we are seeing is not the full story, that Cromwell is not to be trusted – and if we step back from blind complicity with the narrative being sold us, we can see the hidden message. The filmmakers are, very subtly, double-dealing: they ostensibly give us Cromwell's defence but simultaneously undermine it for those with eyes to see. With awareness of this double-narrative, we can see when Cromwell doth protest too much, or buries conflicting testimony; we are are invited to pick apart the narrative and filmic techniques with which the unconscious audience is manipulated, on top of the way he manipulates the people around him. Being in on the con, and appreciating the craft with which it is pulled off, brings a whole second level of enjoyment to the drama.

So, what is the purpose of Wolf Hall's blatant bias? In a world of image consultants, lobbyists, PR machines, and not being able to move for spin, it gives us a case study of how one of the greatest rotters in history can be turned into a loveable protagonist. If it were obvious, it wouldn't work: a blatantly unreliable narrator would be poor testimony for Cromwell's masterful lawyering, and we would learn nothing from a lock that's already been picked. The presentation of his case needs to be just airtight enough that you'd believe it if you weren't paying close attention; the fact it rewards that close attention encourages you to be just as skeptical of the stories being sold on the street every day.

This is a big claim to make, on behalf of creatives who have said nothing to this effect.* It is possible they didn't intend it, but I hope to lay out enough evidence to prove that even if it were accidental, it still works. If you haven't seen the show yet and want to watch it for the first time without any influence, stop here – if you wish to play the game from the outset, or have seen it already and are wondering what I'm on about, then read on ...
*Of course, if they had, it would ruin the game.


The first signal that all is not as it appears is in the very title of Episode 1. It is called 'Three Card Trick.' Also known as the shell game, Find the Lady, and probably a million other things in every language, the three card trick is a sleight-of-hand con in which the practitioner bets the observer they can't find one of three cards, or the ball under one of three cups, or something similar, after they have shuffled these clearly laid-out items in what looks like an obvious way. The punter identifies the one of three which should, really, be the one that was pointed out before the shuffle, but lo! It is not the one! So titling the very first episode this way is quite boldly telling us that what we're about to see is a con. We think we're clever, though, so the title must be figurative somehow – shuffling Anne and Henry and Katherine perhaps – or a reference to the scene in which Cromwell himself is literally performing the three-card trick before our eyes. Out of the infinite potential titles for this first episode, though, they chose 'Three Card Trick,' ensuring we see it in the opening credits, framing what we're about to see. Is this an accident?

Every Screenwriting 101 student knows that how you introduce someone is one of the most concise and effective ways to give the audience a grasp of the character and their role in the story. So how is Cromwell introduced? Before we even see his puppy-dog eyes and crinkly smile, he is an enigmatic figure standing in the shadows, dressed all in black. We don't even hear his first line – he whispers some technical (and implicitly dubious) legal advice in the ear of the figure all in fiery red. Is this a first impression of a good guy? Or a villainous Grand Vizier?

Wolf Hall is nearly all told, visually and narratively, from Cromwell's point of view. This is how he can 'crop' the story to suit his ends: we only see what Cromwell wants us to see, and how he wants us to see it. Sometimes the narrative needs exposition of things for which he was not present; these scenes are, in this context, his imagination of those events, and therefore subject to all the spin he can put on them if not complete fabrication. Naturally we are expected to take the side of our narrator, unconsciously identifying with him and giving him the benefit of the doubt, all of which helps him pull the wool over our eyes. Testimony against Cromwell comes from nearly every character, but he helps us to shrug it off by discrediting the witnesses, making us dislike them and therefore dismiss what they have to say, or couching it in such a context that we pay more attention to who is saying it and how it is said than what is actually said. When you look at the literal words that come out of people's mouths, though, they do not paint the rosiest picture of Our Hero.

The first instance of this comes from a person very close to Cromwell, one of the few people he paints in a glowing light, and one of the few who likes him: Cardinal Wolsey. And it comes out during the demonstration of the three-card trick, when Cromwell is frankly admitting a history of professional duplicity:


He says it jokingly and affectionately, but he still says 'monstrous' which is a very emphatic and specific thing to say. And later, this, delivered in much the same way:


Again, this could be a light tease, but it didn't have to be written that way, so the fact that it was implies that the writer means us to get something from it. And this from his friend!

Later in the episode, this odd little scenelet is wedged between two other scenes:

It's Mark Smeaton, we find out later, and is a cunning underhanded way to introduce his character, gossiping in dark corners. It's possible that this snippet was intended to sow the seed of dislike which ends in Cromwell engineering Smeaton's doom, but he could just as easily have been talking smack about Wolsey – Cromwell seems to have it equally in for anyone who does that, and it would serve other story purposes. Evidently, then, they want us to hear this about Cromwell. It's such an awkward scene that it cannot be an accident; an editor looking solely for clarity and flow would have cut it without a thought, so it must be worth its weight in contrivance.

Another character introduced this episode is Sir Thomas More, one of history's apparent exemplars of a man of principle. If Wolf Hall is the Argument for the Defence, then the Argument for the Prosecution is A Man For All Seasons, with proto-saintly More in the lead. Critics of Wolf Hall take offence at the portrayal of More, at least in the first few episodes, but it is of course Thomas Cromwell's perception of More, not an impartial portrayal. For the purpose of discrediting the prosecution, More has to be presented in an unfavourable light, so that we dismiss his statements. He is also set up as a foil, first to Wolsey, then to Cromwell – our narrative takes the side of the worldly, so to 'plume up' the political pragmatists, the principled idealist must be done down. This way, when More says


... we think 'you're just saying that because you're a prig' instead of 'you may have a point about Wolsey.' In fact there is no attempt to prove More wrong: Wolsey is a priest, but there is no hint of clerical poverty, chastity, or obedience about him. He lives in palaces, sleeps in furs, moves in splendour, demands quail and saffron, and – cardinal sin – does down the Regions, which is a sure sign of a bad sort in modern British arts. In his official capacity his interests are in political expediency and his own favour – not once does he stand up for something on moral or religious grounds. More, in these regards, is walking the walk of the Christian ideal far better than the officially sanctified man of the cloth. Wolsey is wholly a man of the world, despite the costume of the Church. He might very well be 'the most corrupt in Christendom' – no one bothers to deny it – but the generous gravy of warmth and humour with which he's served make us say 'what, Papa Wolsey, corrupt? Never!' (Or else you already know More, and are too offended by his portrayal to hear what he's saying. I won't deny his scenes in the first couple episodes come off as negative, but I also believe a lot of this is context: if you cut them out and put them verbatim in a film from More's point of view, they would make Cromwell look like the sort of boorish lout you wish you hadn't invited. Unfortunately there's no way to prove this without doing it, but I'd love to watch it if they did!)


It is well-established even in the first episode that Cromwell spent a significant portion of his younger life as a mercenary on the Continent. This is quickly glossed over as mere exposition, before you have time to think about the implications of being a soldier-for-hire in a foreign land, but they're there if you dig. Then the rumours from foreign wars trickle in and Cromwell speaks, apparently, from personal experience. What would you know about soldiers' habits, eh, Cromwell? You never had a part in anything like that, did you? You don't still, in any way at all?

Thomas Cromwell Esq. goes to visit Cromwell Sr. who, it's been hinted, he doesn't like much. We learn through artistic flashbacks it's because of some pretty severe child abuse. Then when his father, the man who reared him, in Putney (a suburb of London), says he looks like a foreigner, he comes back with "I am a foreigner." Now this is clearly supposed to be ironic – the man he's saying it to knows it's not literally true, and it reveals a complicated deeper truth about Thomas' character. Nevertheless he is lying, completely straight-faced, to the one person who knows beyond doubt that he is lying: and we think he's being honest with us?

Incidentally, if we had forgotten by this point that there is an established cultural attitude to Thomas Cromwell's profession, here's a little reminder:


... delivered, once again, by someone made out to be so ghastly that his opinion isn't worth our second thought.


The smithy scene also has some ambiguous but suggestive visual subtext. When Cromwell Jr arrives, before he makes himself known to his father, he tarries by a tool bench and picks up a hammer. We know by this point that he's the son of a blacksmith, so this gesture at this time looks like nostalgia, remembering the feel of long-forgotten tools, etc. The hammer disappears from frame and we are distracted by the content of the conversation and Cromwell Sr.'s rather intense personality. We learn the history of child abuse. We get a sense of why Cromwell Jr. left home and didn't want his father in his family's life. Then on the way out, he puts the hammer down, and we look back on the picking-up in a different light: not nostalgia but self-defence! Nice little delayed-action sympathy generator there, and glimpse of vulnerability, tidily packaged.

But if we move past the feelings and think about this a little more, we find something darker: First of all, Thomas Cromwell is an experienced soldier; surely he can hold his own in a fight, and in all likelihood has a blade on him somewhere already. Second, that's not just a hammer, it's a blacksmith's hammer, i.e. solid iron and damn heavy for its surface area. Any blow inflicted with such a tool has the potential for serious damage if not death. Even if we write off the idea of picking up the hammer in the first place with the excuse that we all revert to childhood around our parents – it's not Mercenary Cromwell making that move, it's Frightened Boy Thomas – we still have to confront the idea that when he picked up that tool, he was in some way prepared for the possibility of killing his own father. With a hammer. In broad daylight. What does that say about him?

Next in line to drop a bad review on Thomas Cromwell's TripAdvisor is the Duke of Norfolk.


Luckily he's already been cast as a snob and a boor so we can wave away his gut reaction and move on.

In many ways, film is the art of juxtaposition, and a lovely little example of that is next up. There is an inquest into whether there are grounds for annulment of the marriage between Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon; Henry wants Katherine out and Cromwell will have the job of making it happen. We have a courtroom drama sequence in which Katherine does her best to escape the net being made for her, and then we cut to this:


That's Cromwell's finger, pointing at (identifying with?) the spider, just in case we might miss it ... In the following conversation, we are delivered an important message straight from his mouth:


In context, of course, he's referring to the witnesses on either side of the Katherine debate, but it's also a statement on his overall worldview, and if we take the inference of the spider shot to be that he is thinking about himself, a statement not to trust him either, or by extension the story he is telling us.

Finally there is the big payoff of Episode 1: Cromwell Meets Henry. It is brief but revealing, as Cromwell spends a good deal of the encounter using what he knows about Henry to push his buttons, and we get this at the end of it:




When Henry queries Cromwell's failure to deny this, Cromwell replies "Your Majesty is able to form your own opinion." As should we all, eh Cromwell?

Incidentally, the flowers Cromwell is standing in front of in this shot are, as best I can make out, Foxglove and Larkspur – both quite poisonous! They had a whole garden to shoot in but they shot this scene in front of the poisonous flowers. Coincidence? If the intelligence and perspicacity of the filmmakers hadn't been so amply demonstrated to this point, I might say yes, but I have no trouble believing this staging was intentional.

It is possible to dismiss some of these things as mere storytelling – the indictments of Cromwell's character do serve the vital purpose of making him out to be the underdog, for example. But the unanimity of them, the effort put into distracting you from them, and the company they keep with the other little clues, suggest there's more to them than mere plot-building. Just because they serve a narrative purpose doesn't mean they can't also be true. Cromwell's underdog sympathy could have been established just as well with the parallel thread of his low birth and the closed society into which he is penetrating – why throw in all these comments specifically about his dubious character, unless you wanted to make a point of it?

It is also possible the filmmakers didn't necessarily intend this exercise in subjectivity to be directed at the audience. From what I have heard of the books, they take place predominantly in Cromwell's head, so it could be they're just trying to convey that feeling in film. That would make the duplicity of the storytelling a statement on the lies we tell ourselves, especially about ourselves – there's a scene in Episode 5 which addresses this directly so it's entirely possible that was the intent. But in broadcasting the inside of Cromwell's head to an audience, and putting that audience in his skin, Cromwell justifying himself to himself is, functionally, more or less the same as justifying himself to we the jury. If this is the angle we are meant to take, then on top of the statements about perceptive skepticism of the stories the world sells us, as mentioned above, the imperative is also turned on us: what lies do we tell ourselves, about ourselves? What evils in our own characters do we justify with a rationalisation or a countervailing good?

And when every trick in the book is employed to make you like someone, at what point will you stop forgiving the despicable things he does?

This is what engagement with your entertainment looks like. Have fun! Accept no substitutes!

Episode 2: Entirely Beloved