HBO’s new ten-episode miniseries The Outsider, based on the recent Stephen King novel of the same name, fundamentally operates on the requirement of doubleness: the principle that one thing can exist in two versions, similar in outward aesthetics but differing in nature and method. About a beloved small-town English teacher who is caught having committed a child-murder but who has an airtight alibi and fervently denies any connection to the violent, deplorable crime, The Outsider quickly suggests an explanation to its own impossible gambit: that there exists a shape-shifting doppelgänger-monster capable of taking on the exterior identity of another to easily pursue its own nightmarish agenda. Though there are lots of characters who inhabit peripheral spaces, this monster is the most likely candidate for the “Outsider” of the show’s title, partially for its being a stranger to the town, and partially for its being a stranger to this metaphysical realm, but also because of its behavior: indeed, it literally steals ‘outsides’ that belong to other people, in order to accomplish what it wants.
When the supernatural identity of the show’s antagonist begins to surface, the conventions of the police procedural duly begin to melt away, but they do not disappear completely, broodingly coexisting together for a while. It’s been argued on this site countless times (including by me) that basically every other genre might very well also be a kind of detective story, but The Outsider does more than simply share a methodological approach with the long-form mini-series-style mystery. It deliberately, specifically, takes up the exact conventions of a prestige television detective drama and wears them around for a while.
What, then, does this disguise afford it?
* * *
The show (which, it is worth saying at the outset, is packed to the gills with talented character actors) begins conventionally, as a small-town police officer named Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn), who is still haunted by the untimely death of his teenage son Derick a few years earlier, learns of the horrific murder of a local boy, Frankie Peterson. Frankie has been found in the woods mutilated, raped, and covered in blood, bitemarks and human saliva. His killer’s DNA, fingerprints, and other evidence litter the body, and the identity of the killer is further confirmed by witnesses and surveillance footage. It’s an open-and-shut case (though The Outsider knows better than to use that phrase) and soon Ralph angrily arrests the obvious perpetrator, his friend Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman, who also executive-produced the series and directed the first two episodes). Terry is a lifelong resident of the town and a husband and father to two young girls. He works as a high-school English teacher and serves as the very fair coach of the town’s little league team (everybody gets a chance up at bat). He also reveals that he attended a conference during the time the murder took place—where he remained with the other teachers who went as well, and where he was recorded on a local news broadcast while asking a question at a panel. But the evidence against him is too copious and damning, and so he awaits his trial, while his lawyer Howard Saloman (Bill Camp) and a PI named Alec Pelley (Jeremy Bobb) gather evidence that can exonerate him.
Various tragedies quickly follow (tragedies that I’m going to make every conceivable effort, even at the expense of logical coherence, not to spoil here), leaving no defendant to defend, no family to vindicate, and no case to prosecute. The mysteriousness of the circumstance has drawn Ralph in, though, and soon he and his colleague at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Yunis Sablo (Yul Vasquez), join forces with Saloman and Pelley to begin a deep investigation into the aftermath of the crime, one that requires hiring an additional PI to do out-of-state legwork. Her name is Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo), and she is a socially-awkward genius with nearly-supernatural savantism who can guess the heights of buildings with an error margin of a few feet. She begins to find a trail of similar child-murders all apparently committed by upstanding citizens with perfect alibis, all of which form a trail that links back to Terry Maitland. It’s not too long before she arrives at the cause: Maria, a young woman in jail for a murder she swears she never committed, believes this horrific serendipity to be the work of the devil. Holly, who is open to extraordinary explanations, digs a little deeper into this concept. The monster, she confirms, is the shape-shifting destroyer Maria knows as “el Cuco” but which is called many other things in many other languages—a universal bogeyman that many cultures insist kidnaps children to be devoured in the night. The show’s shivery camerawork renders this haunting motif perpetual and highly physical—there are so many shots in which the camera is positioned, almost subjectively, under beds, watching feet dangle down and drop to the floor.
* * *
The gambit The Outsider proposes is a contradictory one, but not heedlessly so: its framework requires tangible, evidence-based answers, and its events cannot realistically provide them. The show requires its investigators to arrive at the conclusion that a mythological demon is behind a nationwide pattern of gruesome child-killing—a conclusion that the investigators, as citizens of the real world and as custodians of the law, cannot meaningfully pursue through recourse, whatsoever. Even if they do personally accept this development (which of course they eventually will), there is little chance they will be able to fill out a police report with this information.
But the Outsider keeps appearing, sweatshirt-clad, first to Terry’s littlest daughter Jessa (it talks to her at night and tells her to find Ralph and get him to drop the case), and then to Ralph’s thoughtful wife Jeannie (Mare Winningham), to whom it delivers the same warning. Developments like this serve as reminders of the intriguing flimsiness of the show’s police procedural architecture. Why does the Outsider care that a group of puny humans are on its trail? No one will believe them. Despite its penchant for human clothing, it’s not a person. You can’t put an incubus on trial. You just can’t. Can you even kill it? It’s unclear.
There’s no mystery to solve when the culprit starts giving the investigators the answers. At the same time, there’s nothing they can do with the answers when they have them.
It’s worth saying that, though The Outsider moves from detective story to monster story, these are not black and white categories. The show exists for a while in a smooth blending of these two things. Both genres usually begin with some sort of mystery, and share a required investment in a kind of epistemology, or knowledge-gathering on the part of the investigators involved. For the detective genre, this usually appears in the form of a crime without an accountable cause or initiator. For horror, there is additionally a question of logistical possibility—but not only “what” has necessarily caused the occurrence at hand, but “how?” The monster genre usually requires a re-learning of the laws of what is actually, literally possible in order to arrive at the truth. But it is the interloping of the monster into the police investigation, which keeps sinking The Outsider’s detective story format. There’s no mystery to solve when the culprit starts giving the investigators the answers. At the same time, there’s nothing they can do with the answers when they have them.
In this way, The Outsider begins to take on the shape of another familiar face, the 1897 epistolary novel Dracula—which also moves from detective story to monster story, about a team of learned investigators with varied skills (there are six of them, referred to collectively by scholar Christopher Craft as “the Crew of Light”) who band together to solve the mystery of unexplainable attacks throughout England, and discover through their impressive material research and technological expertise that the culprit is a folkloric titan, a seemingly-unstoppable, supernatural, shape-shifting, immortal-ish monster who has left a trail of many victims (both in terms of the people he has murdered, and the people he has turned into his servants). But these investigators, too, discover this because Dracula keeps popping up in their lives, when he does not have to. There are ways to stop him, but they seem extremely difficult—and there is no public way to establish what they are doing. As Dracula’s gifted heroine Mina writes in the novel’s epilogue, “We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.”
In a way, Dracula is as much about catching the monster as it is simply coming to terms with a new dimension of existence: that in an age of scientific advancements, a cultural truth thought of by the civilized world to be superstitious or even primitive has just as much credence as anything else.
Similar is the case of The Outsider. But while the genre-takeover of Dracula’s monster seems wholly symbolic (in his Victorian context, the vampire represents anxieties over sexual desire, including unease and curiosities about homosexuality, and wonderings about dying patriarchy, and questions about colonization and feudalism promoted by an undying aristocracy, and the double-binds of scientific progress), it’s unclear at first what the turn away from procedure and the emphasis on the monster plot in The Outsider is doing, culturally. In his essay Monster Culture: Seven Theses, scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that literature’s monster always does a kind of topical cultural work—representing and reflecting relevant questions and fears of the age in an accessible form (a person of some kind). It certainly seems to be about coming to terms with bad, powerful things we (even large, grassroots of us) can’t stop, which resonates with topical concerns about, say, American governance or climate change.
But in The Outsider, there still seem to be a few things at stake—Claude, a strip club owner (Paddy Considine), seems to be the next guy who will have his identity stolen by the monster; Tamika, a police officer (Hettienne Park), has just given birth to a new baby boy, and Jack, an alcoholic cop and man’s-man game hunter (Marc Menchaca), seems to be possessed by and a slave to the Outsider. There is, at least, the hope that further damage may be prevented. There’s also the suggestion that it won’t. The show really hovers on how the Outsider seeks temporary residence in abandoned, man-made structures that visually suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic earth with a deteriorated Anthropocene, and the Outsider himself is a kind of natural relic, an invasive species of tree or something, apt to survive, even if damaged and hungry, after all the humans are dead and their tombstones are all subsumed into the grass.
The Outsider and Dracula are all about building archives—but in a world in which the passage of time will erase their monumental importance, a problem which suggests the reverse of that classic even-the-most-powerful-of-us-is-going-to-be-forgotten-someday-so-whatever literary hallmark which is Percy Shelley’s 1818 poem “Ozymandias”: “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” reads the worn statue of a long-ago ruler whose empire has turned to dust.
There are creatures in this world, The Outsider teaches us, who exist in it without being necessarily bound up by its laws of justice. This theme makes The Outsider go down a little bit like noir, which often asks what good rule-following detectives must do when faced with monsters who don’t play by them at all, and get away with it. It might speak to our current political moment, which involves many investigators and tons of documents (piles upon piles of documents) which point to the corruption and vileness of our current president and are somehow not enough to banish him.
For a few beats, The Outsider even seems to suggest a social-justice angle. The detectives who begin searching for the (obvious) murderer of the deceased child, eventually understand that Terry Maitland is obviously somehow innocent, so the central problem of the show momentarily becomes a rumination on what happens when a suspect is arrested so quickly and easily for fitting a kind of profile. The two other people Holly discovers whose situations resemble Terry’s are people of color (a black man and a Latina woman). While Terry, a white man, is able to summon up enough local support to begin a counter-investigation that might exonerate him (when his videotaped alibi surfaces and people believe it), nearly identical bits of evidence are not given the same value in the cases of the two others, and they are locked in prison. This is not dwelled on further, but it does suggest, however briefly, something we all already know, which is that monstrousness is already present in the real-world legal system with or without a visit from the devil.
Regardless, with its particular interests in epistemology (the gathering of knowledge) and existentialism (how we live with that knowledge), The Outsider asks us what to do when we know a lot about the things coming to get us and probably can’t gather together a force of equal magnitude to really push back. In The Outsider, with all its emphasis on procedure, research, and archive-building even in the face of a force which can obliterate it all, none represents the fleetingness of human life more firmly than the aesthetic of the monster himself, who wears the bodies of his victims until they wear away. Jessa, Terry’s daughter, says that when the monster came to her the first time, it looked like her daddy, but when he came to her the second time, it looked like her daddy but if he had been erased somewhat. In The Outsider, we are depressingly reminded, the devil may be found in the details, but the details might not be so consequential, after all.
