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| "I'm the moon - the main moon!" |
As the layers of American Gods continue to unfold and
reveal themselves, the Gaiman/Fuller/Green series gives us its most
thematically-dense episode yet with Head
Full of Snow. In a somewhat unexpected choice for a show that is still so
close to its beginning, the episode presents us with a narratively-loose
collage of moments which cuts back and forth between the main story of Shadow
and Wednesday and several other vignettes about the interactions between humans
and supernatural beings. These various threads add up to a portrait of the
nature of belief, and how it intersects with human experiences of sex, death,
and cultural identity. The series is still being pretty coy and secretive about
what it is actually about in the narrative sense, but these themes are a large
part of what it is really about at a
deeper level.
With its several loose plot
threads – two of which are totally disconnected from Shadow’s main arc – this episode
provides a perhaps unexpectedly faithful adaptation of the book (while commonplace
for a novel, it is much more unusual for TV shows to temporarily abandon its
main characters to explore other parts of the world), and also expands upon the
novel. Using the long-form storytelling mode provided by TV, it adds even more
character development and thematic depth to Gaiman’s already beautifully
fleshed-out work, giving fans of the book new surprises while also allowing it
to stand on its own as a large-scale drama. It does all come full-circle in the
sense that the side-stories mirror Shadow’s journey, and the tests of belief,
philosophy, and conviction that the cunning and mysterious Wednesday is putting
him through, but it does so in a way that is highly unusual for TV. The
episodes of American Gods are purely
serialized, and don’t seem to have any desire to stand on their own or have
self-contained arcs. In that regard it is very much structured like a novel,
which you have to read/watch from beginning to end. This makes it an extremely
satisfying and deep show, but also one that requires commitment from the
viewer; you can’t be a casual American
Gods fan. I mean that completely as a strength: this joins the ranks of
great modern television shows that feel more like gigantic single works of
cinema than a collection of episodes.
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| "Welcome to the other side of the Stargate. Kurt Russell will be with you shortly." |
From a philosophical standpoint,
this episode is fascinating in how it deals with the complexity of belief in
its many facets. It doesn’t look at belief in terms of religion, per se, but in
a broader, deeply personal sense of how one’s philosophy, world-view, and
heritage shape the way they interact with the world around them, and with their
own intimate experiences. One vignette looks at the way a woman’s current
religion and much older fascination with mythology both influence her views on death;
another looks at intimacy and the knowledge and realization of one’s sexual
identity as a holy experience of the most personal kind. And Shadow and
Wednesday’s conversations look at the tension between abstract belief and
concrete psychology, and the bizarre existential crisis inherent to the
particularly-American longing for a sense of cultural identity in an increasingly
displaced and alienated landscape. This is a show that is ripe for analysis by
philosophy and anthropology scholars, and one that I am sure will inspire a
good deal of papers by both students and academics.
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| "My seasonal allergies are really awful this year..." |
Score:
- Christopher S. Jordan
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