The Listening Detective: Thinking Music, Gender, and Transnational Crime’s Affective Turn

Abstract

This essay argues that in extending the audiovisual convention of “thinking music” and focusing it on the traumatized mind of the female detective, crime series such as Top of the Lake (2013–), Marcella (2016–), and From Darkness (2015–) present female knowledge as fundamentally emotional, even irrational. In these series, the female detective is victimized, traumatized, troubled, and her thinking music is distorted, discordant, affectively charged. Arguing that the female detective’s “thinking” music moves away from the forensic mode’s “showing and telling” and toward “listening” as an investigatory model, this essay posits a sonic turn that recalibrates the genre’s engagement with the female victim along affective and emotional lines. Analyzing this trope, this essay connects the female detective’s sonically defined emotional investment to transnational crime drama’s self-reflexive strategies of affective legibility.