LOVECRAFT COUNTRY STRUGGLES AGAINST THE OPPRESSIVE FORCES OF RACISM AND METATEXTUAL SPOILERS

 

HBO’s new prestige series, LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, is only three episodes into its run, but it is already garnering fairly rapturous reviews.  But as I was watching the second episode of this sumptuously presented, well-acted show with a killer sci-fi premise and thematic undergirding that could not be more timely, I felt something wasn’t fully clicking.  And then the third episode fell almost completely flat for me.   I think there are several factors contributing to my disconnect, the most glaring of which being that I’m a middle-class whitebread type, and the show is very much centered on the experiences of black Americans enduring violent racism largely perpetrated by people that look and sound more like me.  So it’s possible that this is just a thing that is by design Not For Me, but even if that is the single biggest factor in why I don’t fully vibe with it, it’s also one about which I don’t have a ton more to say beyond a shrug of “okay, then.”  But I do have a lot more thoughts on how the show is managing all the other metanarrative hats it wears as a prestige HBO series, a televised horror anthology, a black uplift story, and a deeply nerdy fantasy epic, so let’s get into some of that stuff. 

I suppose one other potentially big, surface-level thing I should mention that might be keeping me from fully connecting with the show is that I feel like the main character is miscast.  Not that Jonathan Majors is giving a bad performance, but just that his appearance clashes with who Atticus is made out to be on the page.  He is one of those actors like Tommy Lee Jones or Gene Hackman that just seems to have a face that was born middle-aged, that makes it feel like they should be playing 48 year-olds even when they are actually 29.  Atticus the character has a tour or two in Korea under his belt, but assuming he joined up around age 18 that would still put him in his early twenties, which gibes with how the character interacts with others onscreen, but not really with how he looks (to me).  Compounding that is that he has a physique that is clearly sculpted by a team of professionals to be ready when Marvel officially gets around to recasting Black Panther, which, hey, kudos.  It's legitimately, distractingly, impressive. But even if the character is supposed to be this bookworm that filled out and got hot while in the army, I just don’t really buy that this sort of Hollywood Bod even existed in the 1955 era that the show spends so much effort lavishly recreating, to the point where the sight of the hero shirtless feels as otherworldly as the rampaging, many-eyed monstrosities or the ancient warlock cults that control them.  These are shallow issues, but they create a subtle aura of dissonance around the main character that is not intended (as opposed to how the superlatively pasty look of the villainous Malfoys Braithwaites is intentionally off-putting, for example).    

yup, just a nerd that did a couple push-ups

But now let’s zoom out and talk about the baseline difficulty of doing horror in a serialized TV format.  TV is, overall, my preferred storytelling medium because the longform dramatic possibilities it creates can’t be duplicated by traditional length plays or movies (as much as the Cinematic Universe phenomenon that picked up steam on the heels of the 00’s Golden Age of cable TV has tried).  Horror as a genre, however, seems more suited for the one-shot storytelling of a film, novel or EC comic than an open-ended TV series.  Which is why most horror series tend toward an anthology format, be it episodic a la THE TWILIGHT ZONE, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, THE OUTER LIMITS, BLACK  MIRROR, or by the season as more recent offerings like AMERICAN HORROR STORY, PENNY DREADFUL, or THE TERROR have begun doing.  The reason for this is so basic that it almost seems to get overlooked in critical conversations: horror depends on the credible threat of the worst possible outcomes coming to pass for the heroes.  Even if you aren’t versed in the behind-the-scenes minutia of the process of producing big budget TV series (which even casual audience increasingly are, as the internet has made such info easier and easier to access) that dictate that stars of a certain stature aren’t going to be killed off before a season finale, everyone has an intuitive understanding of the narrative economy that will prevent a show with a core cast of 3-4 characters from killing one of them every week of a 10+ episode season.

The most direct way of counteracting this effect is also rather difficult, from both a financial and creative standpoint.  That is to create such a sprawling cast of characters  that it becomes plausible to take out any one of them at any time, without damaging the basic architecture of the show so severely that it can’t continue.  This is how the most successful longform horror series operate, such as THE WALKING DEAD or GAME OF THRONES (a series that presented as fantasy, but largely operated on horror logic).  Another tactic is to throw a big punch early on by killing off a seemingly-major character in the opening episode or two, which LOVECRAFT COUNTRY attempts with the death of Uncle George in episode 2.  This is intended to destabilize our sense of narrative priority, and make it feel like “anything can happen!”  But it didn’t work for me this time, partly because the angst around his death was weirdly muddled by a general confusion as to how Lety suffered pretty much the same wound in the same episode, but she turned out to only be mostly dead, and then when George turns out to be all the way dead at the end I still wasn’t entirely sure how seriously to take it.  But mostly, it was because there just wasn’t a deep enough bench built up after 2 episodes for me to worry about Lety when the next episode puts her in a fairly standard haunted house set up.  There is a bit of a supporting cast with the central trio’s family, but it only goes four people deep, and it certainly doesn’t feel like Ruby or aunt Hippolyta are ready to carry the show if Ruby’s sister were to abruptly fall down the haunted elevator shaft.   Because of this, George’s death actually has the opposite effect of convincing me that anyone can die; it cements Atticus and Lety are the leads of the show, that can’t be going anywhere any time soon.

Some of this is par for the course of the “episode 2 blues” that afflict most ongoing series.  It’s a phenomenon that reflects how the two most fussed over episodes of a TV series are going to be the pilot and the finale, in that order.  The first episode is going to be something the creator has probably been working on for years, and fine-tuned to be as splashy and attention-grabbing as possible to hook both networks and audiences.  But the bulk of any season that follows is going to fall into a more procedural format, with each episode conceived and produced under much tighter deadlines, crowdsourced to a writers room, and still holding back the biggest punches the creators have cooked up for the finale.  Limited series such as LOVECRAFT COUNTRY shouldn’t feel this effect as acutely, as they do not have the same need to pad out the longer 20some episode season of a traditional network show, or even the 13 that Netflix originals normally require.  But the show seemed to steer directly into the traditional pattern anyway, with a 2-part premiere that featured an epic struggle to foil an apocalyptic cult of omnipotent warlocks commanding an army of eldritch hellbeasts.  Only for the following episode to shift down multiple gears for a rather basic haunted house one-off that felt like it could have been a script for any number of midseason episodes of SUPERNATURAL or CHARMED or ANGEL, repurposed for this show by adding extra racism.

"Wait, what did I do?"

Okay, that’s a bit harsh, but it definitely felt like a sideshow from the main Braithwaite cult storyline, and extremely unlikely to have any  lasting effects on the main storyline.  I hope subsequent weeks prove me wrong on that, and Lety owning the house does become significant to the main plot in at least some way, but it doesn't stop the central tension of this episode falling flat because every metatextual indicator made it obvious that the danger being built up around her was phony.  And there is one more of those indicators that ties back to the unique racial component of the show, and made it, for me at least, impossible to ignore:  there was just no way, no how, at any point that the mutilated ghosts of black people that seem to be menacing Lety were going to be the actual villains here.  Not in this show, with racial justice issues so at the forefront of its mind.  From the first (awesomely grotesque) appearance of the old lady at the foot of the bed, these are clearly going to be what I think of as “Guillermo Del Toro ghosts", despite how much better and more obvious THE SIXTH SENSE would be as a touchstone for most people. In any case, this is the thing where the third act twist is that the horrifying-looking apparitions plaguing the hero are revealed to be fellow victims of and ally against the real bad guy.  Which of course they are, leading to a hilarious moment where Lety exhorts the ghosts that they “can still FIGHT!!!”, including one that is just a baby’s head surgically attached to the body of a full-grown basketball player.

Now, I love that bit to death, for entirely the wrong reasons.  Is she telling the baby it can fight?  Or the…torso?  Who is in charge of this ghost’s decisions here?  Why did the mad scientist perform this obviously fatal and pointlessly ludicrous surgery while the victim was still in his uniform?  I have so many questions.  But I digress.  The point is that this type of twist works a treat on the purely thematic level, where the subjects of gaslighting or otherwise abusive treatment wake up to how those they have been led to fear are actually victims as well, and find strength in solidarity to target their actual oppressors.  That’s great as subtext, but unfortunately it has become enough of a trope that it can undermine the text, which is a big problem for a genre that operates as viscerally as horror does.  When it is played as a twist, the first two acts of such a story become a slog, while I await reveal of why the ghosts that haven’t actually done anything to the hero besides look spooky in mirrors and photographs for the last hour are good guys after all. 

And I do think there are ways around this.  The recent season of THE TERROR: INFAMY, about a vengeful revenant haunting a Japanese internment camp in World War II California, was flawed in many ways, but it threaded a lot of the same needles “Holy Ghost” was going for more effectively.  The horrors of racist state violence were ultimately scarier than the ghost, imo, which imparts the same feeling LOVECRAFT is angling at with making the bigot cops and neighbors the real malevolent force.  But by making that ghost a genuinely vicious and destructive spirit, INFAMY succeeds in making the two types of terror amplify each other, with the supernatural element making the nightmare historical circumstances that much worse, rather than ultimately serving an escape hatch from that historical atrocity.  It could be the Japanese influence on that show that made the difference, as J-Horror seems to have a pretty good grip on how to fill in the backstory and motivation “ghost girl” archetype from THE RING or THE GRUDGE or what have you in a way that you understand what they are so pissed off about, while keeping them as figures of genuinely homicidal menace. 

But seriously, that design is fantastic

I am realizing as I go here that I am actually circling a lot of the same issues as I did in my post on the HALLOWEEN reboot.  Which I think come down to having a skepticism about the viability of the horror genre as a vessel for pure empowerment.  This is also on my mind due to a comment my podcasting partner made in our last recording session about horror being a genre with a strange relationship to feminism.  Which was that women were often cast in the lead roles for distinctly non-feminist reasons, to heighten the sense of vulnerability and the revel in the various exploitative and skeevy implications of that.  But over time, just by virtue of centering women within the narrative, the genre became the source of better-rounded female roles than many others had to offer, and started to take on a sneaky feminist bent by accident.  HALLOWEEN '18 was trying to tap into that directly, and reclaim some greater power and agency for the terrorized Final Girl archetype, just as I think the post-GET OUT breed of horror-as-black-uplift-narrative is trying to do by upending the "black guy always dies first" trope.  But I'm starting to question whether this stuff works the same when you do it on purpose.  Because horror is, fundamentally, meant to upset people.  When it sets out with the explicit goal of empowering them, something in the primal power that centers the genre’s appeal gets sapped.  And that is to say nothing of how odd a fit horror meant to uplift makes for an updating of the works of HP Lovecraft, whose signature theme was the utter powerlessness of human beings in the face of primeval forces beyond their comprehension. 

In any case, LOVECRAFT COUNTRY has a whole lot going for it in terms of performance and production values, so my hope is that my issues with episode three turn out to be an unfortunate confluence of these various metatextual factors conspiring to undermine the central conceit.   I don’t expect the rest of the season to be radically different that what we’ve seen so far, but I hope it evinces a greater awareness that racism is scarier than ghosts. So far, nothing the show has done with the supernatural has been half as scary as when the heroes had to race the sunset to the county line or found themselves at the mercy of racist cops.  Ideally, future episodes will find a way to use the supernatural horrors to complement and heighten the real-world ones, rather than undercutting them.