A Black Detective in the White House: The Residence

[Spoiler alert: Netflix’s The Residence is, in one respect, a mystery about a murderer. Toward the end of this post, the murderer is revealed.]

For Bob Grunst, the only twitcher I know

“Unpredictable recurrence is not a sign of language’s ambiguity but is a fact: of language, as such, that there are words.”
– Stanley Cavell, “Macbeth Appalled”

“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.”
– Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich

“Would you show me this house? One doesn’t often get the chance.”
– Dr. Jacquith to Miss Vale in Now, Voyager

Much as Icarus owes his reputation to imitating a bird, so the ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin could attribute his ascent to fame to a goldfinch. The goldfinch appears in Austin’s “most Wittgensteinian piece of writing in terms of method and literary format,” according to Austin’s biographer M. W. Rowe. It’s the 1946 essay “Other Minds,” which “contributed to the transformation of post-war philosophy,” a transformation called “ordinary language philosophy.” Consider the goldfinch your bird in the hand.

As Lars Hertzberg puts it, ordinary language philosophy is not a school of thought like deconstruction. The label “ordinary language philosophy” concerns the way one attends to language, a kind of attunement to language, a listening to what is said when. It is a way of reminding ourselves of how we speak. Timothy Gould summarizes: “Ordinary language requires us to recall or to produce instances of what we would say when in a given set of circumstances.”

My prooftext is Toril Moi’s The Revolution of the Ordinary. Moi explains, “Ordinary language is not a normative notion. It is simply ‘what we say.’” She describes ordinary language philosophy as “the philosophical tradition after Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, as constituted and extended by Stanley Cavell.” It’s tempting to think that the “ordinary” is being offered, by Wittgenstein, or Austin, or Moi, or me, as a “cure” for philosophy. No. The ordinary happens in a space that calls you to read it.

Moi doesn’t mean that the revolution in her title will involve anyone becoming a “guerilla fighter.” Moi says in an interview, “Interpretation (or what I understand as simply ‘reading’) is where a culture comes to consciousness of itself.” It’s not clear to me why Moi thinks someone cannot be simultaneously a reader, literary critic, philosopher, and guerilla fighter as Austin himself was. He trained as a “fighter” against the Nazis during World War II.

Austin’s key question in “Other Minds” is “How do you know it’s a goldfinch?” Austin responds: one thing people say about the goldfinch question is that you would ask an expert. Call in a twitcher.

This provides my segue to Cordelia Cupp, the main character of The Residence, a mystery about the murder of Chief Usher A. B. Wynter at a White House state dinner. Cupp is “the world’s most famous detective” and a bird watcher. My thesis is that Cordelia’s use of language in The Residence shares characteristics with the revolutionary potential of ordinary language philosophy, the most important of which is that Cordelia adheres to Wittgenstein’s repeated instruction in Philosophical Investigations (§66): “Don’t think, but look.” That “but” has a more imperative tone in the original German’s sondern, more like English’s “on the contrary,” and different from the more prevalent use of aber for “but.” Cordelia’s detecting skills are rooted in a mode of attention to particular words themselves and to the spaces in which they occur.

Birding is so central to understanding The Residence that the opening shot of the second episode is the world reflected in the eye of a hawk. The viewer’s vision and the hawk’s vision become one. The camera includes the hawk’s blinks. Blinking (from the Old English blencan “deceive”) will become crucial by the narrative’s end.

Seeing the whole White House from a bird’s eye view recurs for both viewers (when the camera floats over walls of rooms as over an open-roofed doll’s house) and characters (Wynter annually bakes a the White House in gingerbread, and some characters act out fantasies using it).

Upon learning she’d be going to the White House, Cordelia memorized the ninety-three birds Teddy Roosevelt spotted at the White House in 1908. Cordelia carries that list with her, checking when she spots a bird Roosevelt recorded. In other words, she’s behaving more like a previous resident rather than a guest. When not investigating the murder, she’s hunting for Roosevelt’s birds. Often, she reads people and clues through her knowledge of birding.

In one sense, these details enhance Cordelia’s oddity among the government officials. The President’s closest advisor, Harry Hollinger, looks down on her by linking her to King Lear’s Cordelia (whom Lear calls “our last and least” [1.1.83]). No one mentions Cupp’s race or gender as a source of their feeling of superiority. A black woman detective is as rare in fiction as a Nicobar pigeon is in nature. The male officials, especially Harry, intent on being the most colorful political peacock in any room, wonder why one of them isn’t in charge of the case. Harry: “The entire national security apparatus of the U.S. government at our disposal, and we get stuck with some beat cops from the fucking MPD? I wouldn’t call the MPD to help me find my dick.” By contrast, Cordelia wonders why she is constantly in the company of “dudes.”

Cordelia’s attention to the White House’s history parallels a relationship to the house described by the first witness at the Congressional hearing that begins The Residence, Jasmine Haney (the White House Assistant Usher and successor to the murdered Wynter). Haney, committed to preserving the White House as cared for by its long-term employees (which the show refers to as the “House of Usher”) tells Cordelia it’s “us versus them,” with the “us” meaning the family of people care for and treasure the White House, not the political families who come and go. Haney posits a symbiosis between the physical house and its caretakers, saying “We are the house. All these other people [who come and go], they are not part of the house.” Jasmine’s description echoes Poe’s story that describes a similar melding: “The ‘House of Usher’—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.” (Tangentially related is Cavell’s point that “the sound of Poe’s prose…is uncannily like the sound of philosophy,” as Poe “disestablishes reason,” which is also what irks people about Cordelia.)

The House of Usher is the White House, the House of the Chief Usher. It’s Wynter’s House, the man who represents “the family,” the ongoing collection of people who care for the house, and maintain traditions. After Wynter’s death, Haney inhabits Wynter’s role as spokesperson for the House.

The Residence’s set confirms the importance of the story’s title, of the house, of the murder scene. As Fredric Jameson says, “‘space’ must be read”; a reader or viewer enters a chamber, like the White House, “in which the appropriate decoding techniques are taught and learned.” Each room has a significance, a name, and a function. Each room’s contents have been mapped and catalogued. The mystery’s final clue depends largely on Cordelia’s attentiveness to the house, her spatial awareness. Her memory of a room’s structure, its grammar, allows her to suss out the murder weapon. She looks at rooms as ordinary language philosophy recommends.

As further evidence of Cordelia’s adherence to Wittgenstein’s instruction, consider Cordelia’s discussion with Harry and Edwin Park (FBI agent).

Harry: “Why do you want to go downstairs?”
Cordelia: “To see if I see anything.”
Harry: “Like what?”
Cordelia: “Like what what?”
Harry: “Like, what do you wanna see?”

Cordelia’s answer acknowledges Stanley Cavell’s point: “My relation to the world and to others in general is not one of knowing.” She responds to Harry: “Like, I don’t know. If I knew, I’d ask you to go get it for me…” The exchange begins by explaining that she wants to do more seeing downstairs at the state dinner, though Harry reacts as if she should have a specific goal for going downstairs. Parroting Harry (stichomythia) puts him in her place with respect to the question’s aim.

Harry responds by suggesting people see what they want to see. Repeatedly, almost all the people around Cordelia have decided what they have seen, or go looking with presuppositions of what they’ll see, or, as happens at the end of the dialogue quoted, they lack the ability to focus, to see the most important things, like food, or a knife at a murder scene.

When Harry suggests suicide is “more than possible,” Cordelia exposes that phrase as nonsensical. “What’s more than possible? Either it’s possible or it’s not,” Cordelia says. Cordelia aids people in saying what they mean. She listens. She also knows when to leave behind a conversation to take it down a new, edifying path. In a conversation with the FBI Director, she switches to talking about birds, saying birds can focus in a way FBI officials do not: “You know the amazing thing about birds? Birds have the ability to focus. It’s not that they are just good at hunting for food. They literally filter out things that are not food. You know who doesn’t have that ability? All of you.” By contrast, she attributes bird characteristics to Wynter: “I have a strong sense he knew something bad might happen, just like birds have this thing where they can sense a change in barometric pressure when a storm is coming.”

In the verbal fencing match with Harry at the murder scene, Cordelia is better at noticing. Cordelia asks Harry how Wynter cut his wrists. With what? Cordelia’s question triggers an epiphany in Edwin: “Fuck. There’s no knife.” In the power play, Cordelia lives up to her initials C. C. (See. See.)

Moi says speaking necessarily involves a shared vision. The shared vision in The Residence is not just about a missing knife but also about a mutual perspective about what America is. Moi says, “The purpose of this kind of philosophy [ordinary language philosophy] is to dispel illusions, undo the false ideas, free us from the prison-houses created by our own uses of language, to help us make our way back to the ordinary and the everyday, help us to see clearly” (italics added).

Even as she, Poirot-like, assembles all the possible killers at the White House, Cordelia is uncertain who the murderer is. How to decide? It will depend on a blink. She says, “A mockingbird does this thing. It knows there’s an insect nearby, but it doesn’t know exactly where. So, it suddenly flashes its wings open. Gets the insect to blink. Watch for it. The blink.” Indeed, the killer blinks and FBI agent Edwin spots it.

Cordelia makes apprehension possible by helping others clear away the weeds in their gardens of discourse and by deliberately employing silence to motivate others to speak, to fill in the empty space in the way Maurice Blanchot in “Everday Speech” talks about the purpose of playing a radio:

How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate.

Cupp takes advantage of this common disquiet about quiet. Witnesses fill silences with more verbiage about the murder. Cordelia’s master class in ordinary language philosophy highlights a point made in Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein about something of “fundamental significance” to that philosophy, “giving a clear presentation of our words-in-use” (§122).

What we say sometimes isn’t planned, isn’t foreseen. Call it improvisational. Composing in the moment. Bureaucrats like Harry tend to be hostile to spontaneity, which exists apart from the easy legibility of routine. In this sense, Cordelia enters the White House as an agent and proponent of freedom, a freedom from knowing ahead of time what to think.

Yet Cordelia also insists on a deep respect for Wynter as a guardian of traditions. The murderer, a “disrupter” in the late capitalist sense, hated that about Wynter. Cordelia’s summation in the last episode situates The Residence as a text about America, where America is a place occupied by those who mostly agree on what they see. As Moi says, “To speak is to appeal to others: ‘Can you see what I see?’’ The murderer doesn’t see things the way Wynter and others in the White House do. Post-blink, Cordelia explains that the murderer hates everyone in the White House, including the house itself. Cordelia: “She hates it. The history. The traditions. The staff. What it represents—America, I guess?”

What did the murderer want? Cordelia says, “She wanted to ‘reinvent the White House’ and to her that meant tear it down.” Seems appropriate here to think about the current President’s destruction of the East Wing.

Wynter became an object of hate because he represented a shared viewpoint of the type that ordinary language philosophy advocates. He loved tradition. Cordelia demonstrates that she cares about words, as well as their history, their tradition, the spaces in which commonality is shared (like singing together the answer to the question “Can you see what I see?,” the opening question of the national anthem).