The Lone Ranger Evokes Brexit

"Life clung to me like a disease."-- Javier Barden

One of the Sjowall and Wahloo Beck novels which resonates our universality to a slightly more authentic degree is The Scorpion, which puts two cases of domestic violence on parallel tracks, one working class, the victim of the first case a woman abused by an evidently suicidal cop, the other, drawing heavily on Mikael Persbrandt, letting Peter Haber recede into the background, the top billed actor giving way to his scene stealing sidekick, involves Gunvald's sister and her troubled husband, who hangs himself before his tough love brother in law can shrink his prostate gland with a crowbar. Persbrandt has a limited range, but like many talented actors whose gifts align with the correct habitation, viewers bond to his invitation to join him in ironic complicity. 
Swedish actors are not my type, but Persbrandt cuts to the heart of my vulnerability. He represents what I've always wanted as a lone disabled woman: the protector, the one who will make it stop hurting, and the screenwriters for the Beck series play with this conceit, and upend it powerfully in this adaptation. The white knight can't always stop the pain, even though he risks life and limb, takes a bullet, trench coat billowing outward. Here comes superman, or the Pinkertons. Granted, this is still televised entertainment, and not all males provoked who slap women around opt for violent incremental, or sudden suicide. My father is a case in point, though before Shriners Hospital butchered me, maybe when I was eleven, I thought he was going to kill us all. My mother would not stop; let's face the fact that in episodes of discord women are verbal aggressors, and my mother wouldn't stop. She was like oil on fire, and I thought my fireman father, my hero, was going to kill his entire family. His rage and broken arm imprinted itself.
We survived. My mother moved on to worse men, really dangerous sick men, and my father married Louise, my mother's friend from college, who my father is keeping alive through extraordinary rendition, which I suppose isn't so remarkable, as love doesn't keep me tethered to Frank, but guilt refuses me the courtesy of obliteration to his ghost, much as the 2012 Skyfall is an endearing tribute to Ian Fleming, though we may roll eyes at the formula. This modernized installment on the franchise gets a great deal right about why we need melodrama and Judy Dench as the defender of the Union Jack. "No no, don't kill off mother!" We cry out, but what makes Craig absolutely the right man in the right casting for the reboot after Brosnan and Roger Moore, made him wrong for Enduring Love. McEwan's story is distasteful to me, but putting this in context, Craig was miscast. What makes him right for a super spy bordering on disbelief and immortality makes him wrong for a slice of life personality disorder stalker. But Javier's face, isolated in his glass pentagon, offers those of us systemically brutalized the same self-recognition The torture he took, which turned him, is representative of what hides behind this smiling face, the price she made loyalists pay. I don't live it anymore, not like I did, and taking her out when I myself am near the end would only reverberate within the culture for a brief period. Analysts would say tunnel vision prevented me from my own reconciliation, that this is the price of the game, as we call it. Yet that damage also liberates us, calculating the price.