#my mad tatort musings

[anukkuna]

Tatort Stuttgart: Verblendung

In order to fully shift into Spatort mode, I decided to watch Tatort Stuttgart last night (also, because I enjoyed some of Lannert's and Bootz' earlier cases).

I'll admit: the opening scene had me hooked. Sebatian being held at gunpoint, taken hostage by a terrorist? Will he be okay? Who is this woman, and what's her motive? How will they get him out? Will they have to strike a bargain?

The movie runs for 90 minutes, and we finally see how the opening scene is resolved at minute 87. After that, though, it’s just... meh. Don’t get me wrong - I was engaged while watching, but the resolution felt like blowing up a balloon until it’s about to burst, only to let it go all of the sudden. It flies across the room with that pprrffffttt sound, then lands as a shriveled, crumpled blob on the floor, leaving you to wonder: well... was that it? What am I supposed to do with this?

I kept thinking about it last night and again this morning, trying to pinpoint why I felt that way. I’ve boiled it down to three issues that bothered me, ranked by increasing importance.

1. The timeline

I wish I had Lannert's and Vogt's efficiency?! I mean, while everyone else is stuck at the cinema where round about ever hour an hostage gets killed (let's estimate: over the course of four hours? Maybe five at most). So, over the course of a rather short spell of time, Vogt:

is woken up by Lannert hat home when he is already in bed

gets to the morgue

revisits old autopsy reports

reads all the way through conspiracy forums

keeps investigating on the computer in Lannert's and Bootz' office and

phones with Lannert on multiple occasions. Already a thight schedule...

...but Lannert himself?!

gets a hard 'abort mission!' for the date he's about to go on

investigates at the cinema for quite a while

drives to the JVA

plays out a whole prisoner's dilemma with Höhn and Krewitz

Inspects the kitchen and interviews the inmate who prepared the meal the day Jung died

plays out some more prisoner's dilemma

rushes back to the cinema to arrive for the big showdown

I'm sorry, but the more cuts there were between the cinema and the prison, I felt like: how is that possible? Is time a joke to you?

But, okay, I'm willing to put that aside for fiction's sake. What bothers me way more are the next two issues:

2. The closure didn't match the build up

Basically what I said in the intro. You make me wait 87(!) min to just have the SEK bursting in and then it's: oh, he's fine, he is fine, though. Threat resolved, all good, episode over, that's it. Thorsten is relatively unbothered in comparison to his earlier worries about Sebastian. It feels like even he knew it would all be fine in the end. It's also not as if there was any smart or interesting solution to the take down. The SEK basically just... waited for the right moment to burst in and in they went.

So, I felt disappointed at that. Like, the movie created this atmosphere of wait for it... wait for it...! - and then that's... it? Really, queen?

3. I think I learned some-... no, actually, I didn't?

I'm gonna say this beforehand: this might be a me-problem, but I'd like to know if anyone else feels this way or can relate to it.

You know, I like my characters and plots a bit complicated. I like it when a movie or series gives me something to keep musing about. When there's conflict, character developement; when it's not as easy or black-and-white as it seems at first glance.

For that matter, I liked Tatort Stuttgart: Videobeweis - because it featured a more complicated culprit, you could have empathy with her.

But here?

This Yandere-ax-crazy woman who's weak point is the imprisoned far-right pop star? It would have been possible to give her some more depth as well.

Everything just feels so blunt... even the two hostages who got killed in the cinema. When she shot the smirky, slimy policepresident (who we as viewers were obviously supposed to like less than the politician in the first voting)... and later, when she decided to shoot the right-leaning doctor, who snitched to the terrorist that Sebastian had talked to her companion... both of these were characters and choices, we as the audience were supposed to feel less sorry about.

But why?

At that point I thought they were getting somewhere with this. Like: maybe the terrorist had a point and there actually was foul play going on in the prison at some point? Maybe there was a police mole? Why else characterize her choices like that? (It's not like police violence and foul play in prinson are so completely out of the window, just for a start...).

But nothing really follows from this. Turns out: she was just an evil right-wing terrorist who believed the state had murdered other right-wing inmates.

I really wonder what audience they had in mind.

Normatively what I took from this:

Right wing extremism bad. Terrorism bad.

State shouldn't give in to blackmailing from terrorists.

Right wing people have their own conspiracy theories and right leaning people fall prey to them.

But these are almost common points and I knew them already??

Yes, I know, not every Tatort is supposed to make you ask the big questions, not every Tatort is a social critique, etc. But as I said before, I also didn't finde the closure exceptionally rewarding.

Be worried about that protagonist of yours for 90min? Like, was that the assignment? Dude, I already know that there'll be more episodes.

I wasn't even rewarded with some human moment between Lannert and Bootz. Like, Lannert could have felt bad that Sebastian went to the cinema in his stead. I would have liked some interesting character developement, a more emotional closure to the story, some human moment between our protagonists.

Maybe next time, I hope.

After all: "You can't always get, what you want."