Small talk is boring. We hate it, and it’s obvious why – it’s a begrudgingly necessary preamble to any purposeful conversational exchange, universally demanded but also damningly transparent. I feel this the most when I go into my therapist’s office. “Hello!” I’ll say, “how have you been!” That she’ll almost always say Great, I’ve been well! before I shift around in my seat and launch into a deeply intimate rant about all my most embarrassing thoughts, seems both inescapable and also beside the point.
Detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) doesn’t do small talk. In fact, she’s reprimanded for this twice within the first half of Destroyer, director Karyn Kusama’s latest film. Loping around the dusty, sun-dappled suburbs of modern day Los Angeles, Bell pursues Silas (Toby Kebbell), a bank robber who has recently re-emerged after wronging her decades earlier. When she storms into a suspect’s home, he introduces himself pleasantly and offers her a glass of lemonade. But she simply asks: “How do you know my name?” Upon seeing Shelby, her estranged 16-year-old daughter (Jade Pettyjohn) beaten up in a hospital ward, Bell says dispassionately – though still with disapproval – “You were in a fight?” Shelby tries to chasten her. “Don’t worry, mom”, the resentful sarcasm clear in her voice, “I’m okay”. What some might call rudeness is someone else’s efficiency. When your entire life has been turned to a single-minded vehicle for vengeance, you don’t have time to pretend that you live in a society. In any case, everyone is using everyone. A tipster gives Bell information on her target in exchange for sexual favours. Silas ignores his girlfriend, but is happy to let her carry out his bank robberies. Shelby, to spite her mother, is dating an older man who can best be described as “Adam Sandler if he were a Soundcloud rapper”.
The sheer functionalism of relationships in Destroyer makes for a hollow moral universe, which makes us surprised whenever this logic doesn’t play out in the way we expect. In hardboiled police procedurals, which are often vested with a sparing machismo, moments of genuine warmth are rare. People are suspects, lackeys or irrelevant bystanders, and relationships exist only to help unravel the logic of the whodunnit crime caper. And yet in one of the film’s flashbacks we see Detective Bell, undercover with Silas’s crew at his house, overhearing him plan a “big job”. She then walks up to Chris (Sebastian Stan), an FBI agent who is also undercover as her pretend boyfriend, and gestures for him to follow her. As they enter a private room and close the door, we expect a sparse, professional debrief on what she’s heard – the unforgiving utilitarianism of Destroyer’s universe would suggest as much. Instead they kiss.
It’s a move that unsettles our preconceptions of the genre. Kusama first introduces the couple in a drawn-out scene where they rehearse their cover story with cold, detached professionalism. There are no lead-ups to the kiss either: no stolen glances, meet cutes, or predictably flirtatious rapport. Clichés are served up to be upended. A fake couple turns into a real couple, kissing not because they have to – as they have in the past, to avoid blowing their cover – but because they really, really want each other. The boundaries of the detective story begin to fray at the edges. Yet for Bell, this brief injection of hope only lasts so long. The film moves between Bell’s present day hunt for Silas and flashbacks on her backstory with the crew, in which she drifts between intimate house parties and late night bonfires, a little too comfortable with the slow nights and adrenaline-filled days. We’re therefore struck by the raspy world weariness of the later Erin Bell, who is more a vengeful husk of a revenge plot than a lively, ambitious career cop. Something has gone very wrong. In a refreshing twist, we learn that the fall was in fact the result of Bell’s own excessive appetites. The collateral was only the love of her life.
This is a revelation that may have been gut-wrenching, even transformative, had there been more emotional grounding to it. The sparse, unforgiving tenor of Destroyer has its limits: although well-suited to angst, it does not fully serve the complicated mix of feelings that would prompt a woman to break from her former comforts to self-destruct. This is not to suggest that what is missing is sugary feel-good sentimentalism, but rather the opposite; that a full exploration of women who want bad things should move past the sterile exteriors that they have constructed for themselves, leaping into the darkness to explore without judgment the ugly truths of bad desires that they would rather keep hidden. In Destroyer, Karyn Kusama sketches out the architecture for an impressive epic of desire, guilt, and shame that moves the police drama past its generic, one-note and largely male roots. It’s just a shame she hasn’t finished filling it with the detail that her characters deserve.
It is no coincidence that Destroyer the film, and Bell, the world-weary detective, are both redeemed by the same object: her daughter, Shelby. Too many hard-boiled crime stories uphold the myth of the downtrodden but heroic lone wolf. Their perennially flawed but adored protagonist hates everything, is accountable to no one, and avoids all meaningful attachments at all costs – Don’t love me, the grizzled ageing detective pleads to the doe-eyed twenty-something ingenue, I’ll only hurt you. Destroyer complicates this by showing how one can never live in a self-contained universe: cycles of trauma and hurt have a way of bleeding outwards. Even Bell cannot fully extract herself from the world, no matter how many obligations of care she defies – “Don’t worry mom, I’m okay”. The plot line around Silas hurtles towards death, an empty revenge for an empty betrayal, but it takes place alongside another: a story of an adult woman grappling with her strained relationship with her teenage daughter. Even in her own self-destructive spiral, Bell negotiates a basic truth that is too often lost in the genre: that the people in her life live through their own cycles of hurt, often bound to her own. We inevitably give to the world in some way, no matter how hard we try to resist.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is a staff writer at Another Gaze and tweets at @becbecliuliu
