Peaky Blinders (BBC, 2013–2022).
Peaky Blinders is a popular and well-written crime drama from creator Steven Knight that aired on BBC Two and One from 2013–2022. It is exciting, intricate, sexy and thrilling. But it is more than a historical gangster drama. It is also a thoughtful reflection on freedom, the possibility of redemption, and living in death's shadow.
The first scene of the series introduces us to Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy), leader of the Peaky Blinders gang, as he rides a black racehorse through the streets of 1919 Birmingham. The second son in the Shelby family after older brother Arthur, Thomas is both the ambitious, unofficial (and later official) leader of the family and gang and a decorated hero of the Great War. But he suffers. Unable to sleep, rest or sit still, Tommy lives in the terrors of the tunnels that haunt him. Tommy is not a man who lives and works for the excitement and perks of the life of a gangster. He is, ultimately, a man imprisoned in death, unable to escape its clutches.
The first three seasons offer the promise of life through his love for Grace, the barmaid/undercover agent who falls for Tommy in Season One. Her love is reciprocated by Tommy, but the discovery of her betrayal dampens their love and she marries another. They reunite later in Season Two, marry and have a child in Season Three, but their happiness is short-lived when Grace is murdered in retaliation for Tommy’s violent actions against the Italian gangs. It is at this point that Tommy’s entrenchment in death is deepened, and the series becomes less about crime and more of a character study, asking: “Is it possible for a dead man to desire to be good, and can that desire bring the possibility of redemption?”
Freedom, in this sense, means liberation from the limits of death, convention and morality. But this freedom is illusory, a false promise of immortality because it offers no real transcendence.
The interesting thing about Tommy’s love for Grace is that it elicits the desire for an honest and good family life, but later, “after” this or that criminal venture. The desire seems to be true, but put off, and Grace does not really seem to mind. Eros awakens a desire for life in him, but it alone is not enough to bring him out of the shadow of death that haunts him. Even when Grace’s ghost comes to visit him in later seasons, she does not encourage him to keep living, but rather, she tries to persuade him to join her in the land of the dead.
Despite Tommy’s constant claim that he died in France, he still wants to live. He puts himself in dangerous situations, placing himself ever again at the threshold of life and death, but his living in this “wicked world,” as fellow gangster Alfie Solomons calls it, is not merely a death wish. It is an attempt to take control over life and death. When asked in Season 6 why, despite being a member of Parliament, he still carries on with his criminal enterprises, he responds that it is so he can point a gun to a man and decide whether that man may live or die.
Tommy’s mistake is that he views the power over life and death as freedom. As his Aunt Polly puts it following her own near death: “I’m just like you now…I was dead, and then I was saved, so everything else is extra. But what I didn’t understand until today, is when you’re dead already, you’re free” (Season 4, “Heathens”). Freedom, in this sense, means liberation from the limits of death, convention and morality. But this freedom is illusory, a false promise of immortality because it offers no real transcendence. Tommy is aware of the dissonance between this illusion of immortality and his experience. He knows he is not free because he knows he does not truly control life and death. He recognizes that his addictions to alcohol, lust, and violence are simply manifestations of his helplessness before life and death.
The turning point in the series is the awakening of Tommy’s conscience and the beginning of his desiring the good. This movement is elicited by two people. The first is British fascist leader and Nazi sympathizer, Sir Oswald Mosley, with whom Tommy serves in Parliament. He recognizes in Mosley pure evil, the unadulterated reflection of the illusory power and freedom that Tommy seeks. This vision of evil repels Tommy, moving him towards desiring what is right rather than what is self-serving. Seeing the risk in the operation Tommy undertakes, Tommy’s sister, Ada, wonders aloud if Tommy is starting to believe in something again, something no one has seen in him since before the War.
The second person who draws Tommy’s desire to the good is his young daughter, Ruby, who tragically succumbs to tuberculosis in Season 6. Her death utterly guts him. He believes her illness was caused by his many sins and vows to make things right. But his way of being is immersed in death, so his first attempt to make things right is the murder of his Gypsy kin who had put a curse on Ruby in revenge for his evil deeds (all while Sinead O’Connor’s “Lullaby for Cain” hauntingly plays). When Lizzie confronts him about this murder done in their daughter’s name, he rationalizes how he will make good from this:
Tommy: “I’ll spend more hours working in the House of Commons with Mr. Churchill. His fight is now my fight.”
Lizzie: “I sat like a stone and thought about you killing someone in her name.”
Tommy: “The Shelby Institutions will be expanded. I will set up a fund to research the causes and cures of consumption—”
Lizzie: “Did the woman you killed have children?"
Tommy: “—Ten thousand children die every year, Lizzie. I’ve been reading about new research—”
Lizzie: “Go to bed, Tommy.”
Tommy: “I will not… I will not stop—”
Lizzie: “What is this ‘good’ that you will become?!”
Tommy: “I killed a woman. A woman and three men. And their bodies will be thrown on a boat, like all the other bodies. But I am stepping off that boat and onto another boat.” (Season 6, Episode 4, “Sapphire”)
But Tommy’s efforts in stepping off the boat of the dead are tainted with violence, and so he remains where he was before: trapped in death. In the final moments of the series, Tommy, alone, believing he is dying due to the trickery of Mosley, finally resolves to take his own life. And then, a moment of grace comes to him as the ghost of Ruby appears to him and appeals, “You have to live, Dad!” Her appearance also reveals that the fatal diagnosis he received was orchestrated by none other than Mosley himself. Furious, Tommy finds the doctor who worked on behalf of Mosley and aims to kill him in vengeance. Holding a gun to Dr. Holford’s head, he says:
Tommy: “You made me believe death was coming and let my nature do the rest, eh?”
Dr. Holford: “You may not have tuberculoma, Mr. Shelby, but you are sick. I know you. You are sick with guilt. Sick of death at your own hands. Sick of who you were. You are no longer the kind of man who would kill another man in cold blood. Tommy, you have been on a journey. From the back streets to the corridors of power. You can’t go back. You are a different man. The gun no longer belongs in your hand.”
This exchange, followed by the tolling of the bell and memory of Armistice, moves Tommy to walk away from the path of death. And the man who rode into the series on a black horse ends the series riding off on a white one. It’s unclear what Tommy does next—even the cover of Bob Dylan’s “All the Tired Horses” playing overhead leaves it ambiguous if Tommy is redeemed. Nevertheless, the series ends with the hope of his redemption, the hope that he can perhaps leave the land of the dead and join that of the living again. But it is not due to his own efforts, but to the gratuity and transcendence of fatherhood and childhood that the desire, previously elicited, takes concrete form. It is the child that calls him from death to life. The man who was once so hollowly present to those he ought to love most is now, miraculously, a man with hope.
Carly Henderson is a wife and mother of three and a sessional instructor at Catholic Pacific College in Langley, British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in 2019.
Posted on September 20, 2024.