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| Courtesy: HBO |
Both of the following statements are
equally, unavoidably true. 1) H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most
massively influential authors of the 20th century, and one
of the most massively influential horror authors of all time; his
Cthulhu Mythos has taken on such a life of its own as a genuine
mythology, which so many artists have built on and borrowed from,
that without it huge swaths of our pop-culture simply could not
exist. 2) H.P. Lovecraft was a virulent racist with truly
reprehensible views, and there is no separating the art from the
artist because his racism, classism, and xenophobia influenced his
mythology in deep, intrinsic ways that go far beyond the
oft-referenced name of his black cat. He famously said that "the
oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown," and for him,
“fear of the unknown” meant a fear, hatred, and dehumanization of
anyone who wasn't just like him – a white, American (non-immigrant)
man. The way he describes people of color in his stories (when they
appear at all) is pretty much the same way he describes his monsters,
and the recurring theme of Old Ones cross-breeding with humans to
create hideous mutations was a pretty thinly-veiled metaphor for the
mixing of the races, which Lovecraft apparently found just as
horrifying as people breeding with undersea monsters in Innsmouth. To really
understand Lovecraft's writing requires facing the ugly racist
undertones in his stories, and to acknowledge and reconcile the massive influence
he still has on pop-culture requires facing the fact that American
horror, sci-fi, and fantasy has deep veins of racism running
throughout its entire history.
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| Courtesy: HBO |
And yet, Lovecraft's mythos, and his inventions like the Necronomicon and his pantheon of Elder Gods like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and Dagon, are undeniably brilliant and unique, and his writing style creates such a powerful sense of unease and cosmic horror that “Lovecraftian” has become a commonly-used adjective in genre criticism. Pick just about any popular piece of genre fiction – Doctor Who, Marvel comics and films, Batman, Sabrina, The Evil Dead, just about anything that Guillermo Del Toro or John Carpenter have ever done – and you'll find some Lovecraft in there. Which presents a pretty complicated issue. There is so much of value in those stories, mixed with so much ugliness and prejudice, that Lovecraft truly is the ultimate problematic classic author, whose legacy is very tough to reconcile. Plenty of marginalized writers and filmmakers – people of color, queer people, immigrants – have tried to reclaim the good parts of Lovecraftian horror while rejecting Lovecraft's own racism by turning his themes on their head, and using his narrative style to tell stories about the horrors of racism or homophobia or misogyny or being othered. The horror of being on the receiving end of the fear and hatred of people like Lovecraft who see you as “the unknown” (Guillermo Del Toro got his Oscar by doing exactly that). But still, most of these works use the Lovecraftian themes and styles and tropes without explicitly calling out Lovecraft himself as a racist and xenophobe, and take the approach of more or less not directly addressing the problematic nature of the author, and trying to just take his themes into the future while leaving him in the past. Which is fine and well, but it doesn't confront that uncomfortable truth that genre fiction has some really racist skeletons in its closet, and as we reckon with the systemic racism still so deeply entrenched in every aspect of our culture and society, genre fiction needs to have its reckoning too.
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| Courtesy: HBO |
Enter Lovecraft Country,
the new TV series by showrunner Misha Green and producers Jordan
Peele and J.J. Abrams, based on the book by Matt Ruff. Here we have a
series that deals with Lovecraft's problematic legacy in the best way
possible: head-on, at full speed, by telling a Lovecraftian horror
story that is all about the racism in his writing, from the
perspective of the characters of color who were treated so horribly
by his stories themselves, set in the Jim Crow America of an era not
that far past Lovecraft's death, and not that long ago. It's a series
that calls him out, by name, as a racist, and directly addresses the
racism of American genre fiction with a main character who loves
sci-fi, but has to wrestle with the ways in which it does not love
him in return. When one of the first scenes of the series features
our protagonist talking about the troubling racist undertones in
genre fiction that he otherwise loves, and a subsequent scene finds
him flipping through a volume of Lovecraft stories and reading with
disgust the titles of one of the author's racist diatribes, it's pretty
clear that this is going to be a Lovecraftian tale like no other.
Atticus
Freeman (Jonathan Majors, The Last Black Man in San
Francisco) is a sci-fi-loving
Korean War vet in the 1950s who comes home to Chicago after getting a
mysterious letter from his estranged father, and then learning that
his father has disappeared. Joining forces with his uncle George
(Courtney B. Vance) and his childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee
Smollett), Atticus sets out to find his dad, and solve the mystery of
the cryptic “birth rite” alluded to in the letter. But following
the directions in the letter will take them straight to “Lovecraft
country:” the part of rural Massachusetts that inspired Lovecraft's
fictional towns like Arkham and Dunwich, and which is also a violently racist part of Jim Crow America. The journey will pit them against
two different kinds of danger: the very real, very brutal racism of
1950s America, and the hideous monsters that dwell in Lovecraft
Country, which turn out not to be fictional after all.
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| Courtesy: HBO |
Lovecraft Country's
series premiere is an extremely ambitious, and absolutely excellent,
hour and ten minutes of television. There is a lot going on in this
episode, and showrunner Misha Green's outstanding script balances it
all pretty perfectly. The balance she strikes with the tone of her
writing is masterful: the episode deals quite explicitly with the
racism that is entrenched in so much classic sci-fi and horror, with
Atticus and George both being genre-loving bibliophiles who talk
about the work of Lovecraft, Bradbury, Conan Doyle, and others quite
a bit, yet the show never crosses the line into feeling
self-referential or overtly postmodern, and it certainly never pulls
the viewer out of the narrative. Quite to the contrary, despite the
analysis of genre fiction from within a piece of genre fiction, Green
creates a world which feels extremely real, and totally grounded in
reality. She is never in a rush to get to the horror, and isn't
afraid to take the time she needs to establish the characters and
their world. For most of its runtime, the episode feels much more
like a drama about these characters navigating the dangerous world of
Jim Crow America, and not like the first episode of a horror series,
and taking this time makes all the difference. In each of the
episode's major locations, Green creates a real sense of place,
giving us the intoxicating, liberating feeling of a summer-night
block party in a black Chicago neighborhood, and then making us feel
the ever-mounting terror of being in a sundown town as the white
locals count down the minutes till sunset and relish the opportunity
to get violent. As a drama about racism in America, Lovecraft
Country works very well. And
when the horror kicks in, it enhances those themes and adds another
layer.
Which
brings us to the other really impressive thing about Lovecraft
Country's balancing act: the
series is clearly a rebuttal of Lovecraft's racism, and the racism in
classic sci-fi and horror in general, but it also is an excellent
piece of Lovecraftian horror in its own right. As horror movie fans
who have read any Lovecraft know all too well, very few films
ostensibly based on his work actually manage to capture the essence
of Lovecraftian horror; many/most of them are just content to imitate
the gory and bombastic splatter-horror of Re-Animator
(a very, very loose adaptation in tone, style, and plot) and call it
a day. This series gets it,
in the same way that Guillermo Del Toro, John Carpenter, and Richard
Stanley's recent Color out of Space
get it. Green nails that creepy, ominous, slowly-building sense of
profound unease, leading up to a crescendo of cosmic horror. She
puts it to use when capturing the horror of the racism and threats of
violence the characters face, and she puts it to use even more so
when the supernatural horror kicks in. The atmosphere is outstanding,
the creature design is great, and genuinely Lovecraftian in its
grotesque bizarreness, and it doesn't lean too hard on those effects,
but uses them to enhance the horror of the situation.
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| Courtesy: HBO |
I must
say here for full disclosure that I have not read Matt Ruff's novel.
I have seen a complaint from a few who have read the book that the
book takes more time in these early sections of the story than the show does, and that the show leaves some things out or moves a bit too fast in order to
end the first episode where it does. This could be true; I have no
idea. When you love a book, seeing any material from it get cut for
the screen adaptation can of course be a disappointment. But as
someone who did not read the book, I thought that the pacing in this
episode felt great, that it took as much time as it really needed to
build the world, and that almost nothing felt like it was missing or
rushed. My only small complaint is that I wish we got to know Leti a
bit more before she very suddenly joins Atticus and George's road
trip; her fast introduction to the other characters (which relegates
her childhood friendship with Atticus to a two-sentence exposition
dump) is the one thing that feels like it needed more time. But I
fully agree with Misha Green's decision to structure the episode how
she did, so it could end where it does: it definitely feels like the
right way to build the world, establish the characters, and set up a
tease for the season to come all in one episode. Fans of the book may
have differing opinions on this matter, but as someone watching the
show strictly on its own terms, I thought it was great.
Lovecraft Country's
first episode gets this show off to an excellent start, and thus far,
this seems like an outstanding series. The principle cast is great:
veteran character actor Courtney B. Vance is as strong as ever, and
Jonathan Majors and Jurnee Smollett are both pretty perfect as the
younger leads. Majors and Smollett both bring wonderful depth to the
characters, with Majors in particular really impressing in this
episode. He really digs into Atticus's complex layers as someone who
looks and acts the part of a muscular, confident war-hero because
that's the persona that self-preservation has required him to take
on, but underneath that facade is a sensitive, geeky intellectual
still trying to heal from familial trauma. The show is gorgeously
shot, with beautiful art design and cinematography that is crucial to
the sense of place that Misha Green creates. And given how many
popular HBO shows by male showrunners earned reputations for
including plenty of gratuitous female nudity just because they can,
it's refreshing to see Green flip that script and shoot this show
very much from the female gaze.
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| Courtesy: HBO |
So far,
Lovecraft Country is a great series: a powerful drama looking
at the racist legacy of America itself, and a very smartly-written,
clever, and compelling dissection of the racist legacy in our horror
and sci-fi literature. It understands, and genuinely captures,
everything that is good and creepy and compelling about Lovecraftian
horror, while also calling out and confronting the racism running
through Lovecraft's work. As such, it does one of the best jobs we've
seen yet of reclaiming Lovecraftian horror from its notoriously
problematic creator, and starting a brutally honest conversation
about the skeletons in the closet of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror in
the process. This was easily my most anticipated new TV series of
2020, and so far it lives up to, and possibly even surpasses, all my
expectations.
Score:
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Christopher S. Jordan
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