The Sinner is the one of my favorite detective/crime tv series on Netflix. It was a long wait since the last season, and I finally got the chance to watch the latest season 3 last weekend. Compared to the last two seasons, the season3 is more predictable in terms of story plot due to its more focus on the protagonist Jamie Burns and less on investing different characters that can(or can’t) contribute to the story development. However the sacrifice of the width of the story for the height of a character is worthy because it displays a character more fully/thoroughly. It carries out a more vulnerable human being. Through Jamie Burns’ psychological development we can see a paradoxical character who is struggling from two extreme personalities and inevitably turns himself to a dark side that has no way back.
It doesn’t have to be a criminal to understand one. From the book In Cold Blood, I’ve known that I have more sympathy toward criminals than for example policemen. I don’t know it’s because of my rebellious character since I was a child. I always wanted to be different. The romance, the common ground, the cliche, the shared holidays celebration, the chitchats could only make me laugh. Meantime, people’s individual background and experience also helped them grow and become who they are. My attitude toward it is more on no need to argue with another person, it won’t change a person’s opinion until he or she experiences it himself/herself. And people want to be liked, they want to feel as part of the community, and that’s why they do the same things other people do without question the reason why. Are you happy doing all these traditions when they all mean nothing to you when the day you die? Or you do that because you are just a social animal? Of cause the consequence is many people might think me as a cold person, a freak, an outsider, a person doesn’t explain herself enough and she ultimately becomes a culprit of who she has caused herself to be. Of course, culture does put lots of pressure on people, to shape who they are. One’s environment has helped create the very person even though he becomes a monster at the end.
The person in this case is Jamie Burns. He has doubt, like many of us. He questions everything and the things people are obsessed with like looking at their phone no matter where they are. The material things, the social static, the great job, the prestige that people give them, a perfect family that people try their whole life chasing after become empty the time they die, and this story starts with Jamie’s very question. It also makes him reconnect with his college friend Nick. Nick is a dark person, and he takes risk and question everything as well. Also he is a criminal and he likes to do dangerous things to make him feel alive no matter it’s to others or himself, and even that dangerous thing means crimes. Jamie didn’t want to become like him, but at the same time it’s like a magnet he was attracted to Nick’s personality. Jamie said he didn’t feel anything before reconnecting to him. And after Nick’s accident, Jamie gradually becomes like him eventually.
The reason? Many things have contributed to his shift in life. His great occupation as teacher, her perfect role as a husband and soon-to-be father become empty just like our cellphone. We depends on it but at the same time it could be an empty object without meaning. If we don’t have them so what? Start from the question, he fell into a hole that he wanted to fall and experience life again. The falling inevitably makes people around him become afraid of him, like his wife later refused him seeing his own son, kept him outside of the he-called-home. His boss wanted him to quit his job for the sake of school reputation. That further made him fall into a bigger hole there’s no way out. Maybe I shouldn’t use a hole as a metaphor. It’s a choice of life he picked. It’s totally fine if you don’t agree with me. I’m not writing this to have people agree with me. He became a killer at the end because people he trusted betrayed him, one by one. He didn’t have the support that he thought he had like the detective Harry, the wife Leela. I wouldn’t say either Harry and Leela did the wrong thing, but the conscious choices they made following the fact that Jamie becoming a dangerous person, they did help further create the final version of Jamie Burns.
At the end of the story where it shocked me the most. Jamie died and there’s a good amount of time in the last episode to portray him as a person who is really afraid of dying, which can sound contradictive to the whole character development especially after he questioned the meaning of living, and his belief of everyone will die one day leads to he wanted to experience life again without those empty subjects that society has given people. He eventually committed himself to become a killer, a total different “lifestyle”. As a result, you probably think he wouldn’t be afraid of death, but indeed he was. He was really vulnerable at the end of his life. But that’s the very condition of human being. We are somewhat the same. We are afraid, we like to question, we don’t want to be the same as everyone, we don’t want to chase things that has no meaning except the contribution to the society, we don’t like to do things that people think we should do. At the same time we want support, we want friends, we want understanding, and if it doesn’t exist we don’t know how to continue this shady life, and we take whatever we can to escape the normality, the boring expectation that everyone looks upon us. We hate fitting ourselves in the frames that society has given us, given us the meaning of how to be a person instead of we decide it ourself. Yes at the end he took the control of his life instead of the one people have given him, also he was very afraid of his own death. He was asking when the ambulance would come why the detective shot him. It shows a fully human nakedly. Who wouldn’t be afraid at the end? Even though maybe in some of us there might be criminals.
Maybe it’s in all of us, the little darkness can spread fast widely. We could suppress it and pretend it wasn’t there but time after time we will start questioning. Maybe at the end we don’t have to take it so far. We don’t have to take lives. Well, but Jamie did, I look at him as hero, a brave human being breaks through everything that is superficial, but at the same time he was very vulnerable like any of us. More or less we are just like him, and sooner or late, we will die and we will be all the same, very scared in front of our end.
flatlamb 