Human Remains

Human Remains is a bleak series of six mockumentaries, each depicting the intimate lives of six couples of varying ages and social classes, and yet all unmitigatedly malcontent.  We, the voyeurs, become susceptible to morbid curiosity as their lives are slowly revealed layer upon layer, each one increasingly dreary.  For the camera, however, more often than not they put up a brave front, making their agony all the more pitiful.  This is particularly true of those relationships where one spouse is clearly dominate and in torturous control over the other, at times bordering emotional and/or physical abuse.  The victim will attempt to appear disaffected, but the pain and misery of their dejection nevertheless seeps through.

“Are you happy?” One husband sheepishly asks his wife, who simply replies, “No.”  Not willing to face such a jarring reality, he jovially retorts, “More than happy!”  We know the truth.

That multilayered clarity of emotion is a true testament to the acting abilities of the two stars and writers, Julia Davis and Rob Brydon.  Arguably, Davis portrays the authority of all but one of the relationships presented.  This authority is at times explicit and forceful, as in episodes one and five, at times subdued, as in the final episode, and others far more subtle, as in episodes two and four.  Only in one relationship is there a hint of the male being abusive towards the woman, perhaps because of its social implications.

Personally, that episode was the most difficult to watch and provided the fewest laughs, perhaps because the threat of spousal abuse in the real world is primarily at the hand of the male figure.  When a man is emotionally tortured by his wife, despite being cringe-worthy it was simultaneously laughable and judging by my own reactions, it is certainly culturally more acceptable to find humour among female inflicted spousal abuse than vice versa.  A defining difference of episode three, where the male is clearly abusive, is the allusion to – and indeed one incident I would classify as – physical abuse, which is clearly more serious than the simple emotional abuse presented at the hands of Davis’ characters.

Human Remains aired in 2000 on BBC.