The new Perry Mason – more Raymond Chandler than Raymond Burr
HBO’s Perry Mason employs the 1930s setting as a lens to investigate the perennial anxieties surrounding race, class, sexuality and immigration in America
Perry Mason was a creature of and for the courtroom. Who he was beyond the courtroom was a bit of a mystery. For 82 novels, four short stories, eight seasons of TV, six movies, 30 TV movies and more than 10,000 episodes of radio, the crusading defence attorney had remained a static character trapped in amber. With no roots exposed. With no discernible personal life. With no outie, only innie, in Severance-speak. This impersonality helped paint Perry as an indefatigable defender of justice. Each case, the wily attorney would defend a falsely accused suspect with the assistance of his private investigator Paul Drake and his legal secretary Della Street, launch into theatrics across cross-examinations almost unfettered by full-throated objections and procedural restraints, and expose the true culprit usually found sweating and trembling in the witness box. The seemingly-unwinnable nature of each case allowed for a neck-and-neck finish — that kept readers reading and viewers watching.
Starting with The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933), creator Erle Stanley Gardner perfected his modus operandi across a prolific writing career that lasted decades until his death. Gardner was a trial lawyer himself before he found writing for the pulps to be a more rewarding pursuit. As a writer, he was adept at sinuous plotting, not so much at getting under the skin of his characters. Dialogue drove all the action. Characters were a function of plot. Personality was irrelevant. Crisp though the writing may have been, there was no room for biographical details or moral ambiguity — or at least Gardner didn’t have the inclination to make room for them. Where did Perry grow up, what was his childhood like, what event shaped his life, career and perception of justice — were not questions his books cared to answer. Nor did the scripts of the popular CBS series he would okay before airing.
As readers however, we are drawn to the unknown. We like to think of every character, more so the ones we grow attached to, as fully individualized figures. It is in this interest of filling in biographical gaps that the more enthusiastic readers leverage their own imagination to write fan fiction. Mason heads Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald do something similar with HBO’s greener-scrappier-moodier incarnation of the famed lawyer. Perry Mason gets a supplementary personal history and a noir facelift to boot. We travel back to a heightened Los Angeles of the 1930s where hats, cigarettes and shadows are the uncredited stars, where social, cultural and economic fault lines only become more visible as day journeys into night, where those treated as outsiders must battle a corrupt system to vindicate the innocent.
The new Perry Mason employs the 1930s setting as a lens through which it can investigate perennial anxieties surrounding race, class, sexuality and immigration in America. When the show peers into the shadows, we see an America not too different from the present. A country still recovering from the collective traumas of wars, pandemics and economic disasters is being run by greedy tycoons and crooked policemen. Worship is entertainment for some and entertainment is worship for others. The egalitarian promise of upward mobility remains broken. Lack of access to fair legal representation keeps justice elusive for the poor and marginalised. Benefit of the doubt is a luxury given to only those who are white. Black people and incoming migrant populations continue to face discrimination. In the recently-concluded second season, Perry must defend two brothers (Fabrizio Guido and Peter Mendoza) of Mexican descent accused of the murder of an oil tycoon’s son (Tommy Dewey). The assistant DA (Mark O’Brien) is quick to other the Mexicans as “savages” — the same kind of inflammatory rhetoric that got Trump elected as President. A legal procedural thus presents a nifty mechanism to examine how the past continues to impinge on the present. The thorny noirscape of 1930s LA emerges as a symbolic space for America to reflect on its open wounds.
Any kinship with the old Perry Mason ends with the names and professions of the canonical characters. If there is a Raymond that the showrunners and star Matthew Rhys look to for a baseline, it is not Burr, but Chandler. When we first meet Perry on the new show, he is a hardboiled PI à la Philip Marlowe, more the tough customer from Gardner’s early novels like The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935) than the smooth operator from The Case of the Rolling Bones (1939). Rhys’s sad eyes reveal a man overcome with regret, haunted by memories of his time fighting in the Great War, and tormented by his failings as a husband and a father. Alcohol offers some respite. Taking on disreputable gigs like capturing scandalous photos of movies stars pays some of the bills. At the request of an old friend in struggling lawyer EB Jonathan (John Lithgow), the down-on-his-luck, divorced and dispirited Perry investigates a child kidnapping that develops into a murder case. The child’s mother (Gayle Rankin) is held responsible — and the odds are soon stacked against her.
“When a state aims its annihilating power against a mere individual, who will stand up against it? Who will defend the defenceless? Who will fight for justice against a heartless expediency?” asks Jonathan in a fiery moment. Well, Perry must, when Jonathan suddenly dies. Defending the young mother accused of infanticide sets up Perry’s expedited transition from PI to lawyer in Season 1’s origin story. The natural sleuthing instincts he possesses combined with the legal/moral guidance he receives from Della (Juliet Rylance) and Paul (Chris Chalk) serve him in good stead. Della, in particular, impresses upon him the difference he could make as a lawyer for the powerless. But as any person taking on a challenging job for the first time, Perry feels like a pretender out of his depth.
Reimagining canonical characters lends the show a contemporary resonance. Della is no more just a legal secretary, but a lawyer in training herself. She is also a closeted lesbian who lives in secret with her girlfriend (Molly Ephraim) at a boarding house and later becomes entangled in whirlwind romance with a Hollywood screenwriter (Jen Tullock). DA Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk), Perry’s loyal opposition, too leads a closeted existence — a double life lived in secret that puts him at risk of extortion. In Season 2, Della and Hamilton enter a mutually beneficial relationship as each other’s beards to circumvent scrutiny at public appearances. Paul Drake starts off as a Black street cop who feels the tug of conflicting loyalties: to his Black community vs his racist white colleagues. As a Black man, Paul struggles to negotiate working for an institution that will always treats him as an outsider. Knowing he will always be underestimated, or worse, made an accomplice in corruption, he joins Perry as a PI. But becoming a PI presents dilemmas of its own: like when a crime boss tells him if he wants crucial information for a case, he must beat up a young man or have his own hand cut off. The challenge for Della and Paul is they wish to uphold justice in a society that wishes to keep them out. Rather than overlook the challenges of being Black or gay in the 1930s, the show addresses the injustices and all the profound implications of bigotry. When thin streams of light creep through the window blinds in the show, the grille-like shadow evokes the prisons the characters are forced into.
As a period piece, Perry Mason sources the ideas for its cases from the city of Los Angeles’s history. The case in Season 1 takes inspiration from the reported kidnapping of celebrity evangelist Sister Amiee and the murder of Marion Parker. The case in Season 2 nods to the flattening of Mexican-American neighbourhoods to clear the way for LA’s Dodger Stadium. We learn the murder victim, Brooks McCutcheon, being the son of a powerful industrialist, was keen to make a mark on the city by luring a Major League Baseball team. The suspects, Mateo and Rafael Gallardo, lost their younger sister in a fire when the families were violently evicted for the project.
There is a tortured self-awareness to the show’s cynicism. When Hamilton insists, “there is no true justice, only the illusion of justice, the fantasy that keeps people believing that truth always prevails,” Perry builds on it in a closing argument to the jury, explaining how the oath of impartiality is in itself futile because everyone comes into a trial with preconceived notions anyway. Whatever satisfaction we get from watching a courtroom drama isn’t always tied to justice being served at the end. Watching the opposite can sometimes be a lot more resonant because it can reveal the rot at the root of systemic dysfunction.
While fighting a system that has allowed ideas of equality and social mobility to drift towards illusions, being optimistic can take more courage than being cynical. Perry’s guilt colours how he sees the world. But going from hardboiled PI to super-attorney recalibrates his belief system to a degree, enough to see that everyone is innocent until proven guilty and justice is still possible within a corrupt system. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be navigating the nine circles of pulpy hell to defend his clients, taking on the establishment machinery, and exposing the presumptions of the public, the press, and the prosecutor. As Hamilton tells Perry, “Despite all your brooding cynicism, you still believe in justice”. Illusion or not, no matter how cynical we may get about the world, we all want to believe in it.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.