That's my favorite running schtick from
Carnivàle, the deadpan announcer introducing Brother Justin's radio evangelism faking enthusiasm and drawing out the word "air." Made me giggle every time.
Carnivàle ran for two seasons, ensorcelled many, confused many more, got cancelled. One of the attorneys from the Medium Sized Law Firm where I used to work said it was his favorite TV show of all time, so I figured I'd finally check it out. It was the only one of the major HBO dramas (barring recent additions) I'd never seen, and I wondered whether it'd rearrange my estimation of their programming. The top three of
The Sopranos,
The Wire, and
Deadwood are, for me, many cuts above everything else -
Oz, which I managed to catch a few seasons of,
Six Feet Under, the first season of which I thought was pretty good but rapidly started hating what followed,
Rome, which I saw one episode of but frankly just can't get myself to care about, and so forth.
I'd say
Carnivàle is somewhere in between, but closer to the second group than the cream. The production is gorgeous (well, gorgeous for the Dustbowl), and there's a texture to much of the camera work that, lacking the relevant technical information, I don't know how to describe, but I rarely see its equal on TV; by memory, my three top HBO series get there but rarely, but
Battlestar Galactica seems to hit that spot a lot. The production is gorgeous and the acting is first-rate, especially Clancy Brown as Brother Justin Crow and Michael J. Anderson as Samson. The show also featured, in two major roles and one minor recurring role, three bit players from
Seinfeld: Bizarro Jerry (Tim DeKay, fantastic as Jonesy, ex-baseball player and leader of the roustabouts), The Wiz (Toby Huss, fantastic as Stumpy, paterfamilias of the cooch show), and Lloyd "Why can't you be more like Lloyd Braun?" Braun (Matt McCoy, fantastic at...looking like Lloyd Braun). And everyone else is good, even Meatloaf's daughter (seriously).
It's the writing. Oh, the writing. The pace of the show is glacial. (OK, so I'm going to start with the editing.) On a basic level, there are long moments of silence meant to create suspense, or meaning, or just atmosphere, and sometimes they work but often they bore. When - look, spoilers are going to abound, in case anyone's curious I'll try to avoid the truly essential revelations, but plot points are going to get mentioned - when Jonesy reveals that his injured knee is healed, the scene feels like it takes forever, like it actually takes the amount of time it would take a real person to undo all the laces on a leg brace and remove it. The audience already knows the knee is healed, so we feel no suspense, just boredom. This is elementary filmmaking; you get economy and a sense of narrative thrust if you show him starting to untie the laces and then cut to him removing the brace, and don't eat up the twenty seconds of screentime it takes to do it. So there's that. There's also a lot of staring on the show, but whatever. Also glacial is the pace at which the story advances. In actuality, despite the pace of the editing, there's usually a fair amount of plot laid out in each episode, it's just that the show is driven by the unfolding of a larger story and it's *that* story which oozes like molasses. Most of what happens in a given episode is circuitous and irrelevant - think Ptolemaic/Copernican epicycles instead of a nice straightforward orbital ellipse. There are about two episodes which exist because Sofie refused to give Ben a tarot reading; when he does get the reading, he gets a solid clue on where he needs to go next and takes it, advancing the plot. What happened in those intervening episodes? Uhm, a lot of cool imagery. Seriously: he tracks down a woman who turns out to be his creepy blind (?) grandmother, sees what appears to be a plaster death mask of his father, tracks down the guy who made the mask, has what appears to be a hallucination of the guy drugging him and making a mask, only it turns out that it really did happen and Brother Justin winds up getting the plaster Ben-mask in the mail. Justin holds the mask up to his face, sees through Ben's eyes for about twenty seconds, and then the mask breaks, Justin drops it, and the episode ends with a puddle of blood oozing out from the broken mask. Which looks cool, but we didn't learn ANYTHING here (well, we learned a little about Ben's grandmother, but only about ten minutes' worth). Ben doesn't get any closer to finding what he's looking for, and our time is wasted since the masks turn out to be of no importance. Also towards the end of this episode Sofie finally reads the cards, Ben has a vision of Damascus, Nebraska, and away they go, without so much as an apology for wasting our time.
And that's kind of how the plot goes. It's not an especially rewarding experience hour to hour, although there are standout episodes (Season One's "Babylon"/"Pick a Number" two-parter is mighty affecting and creepy) and lots of standout moments. The scene in the last episode where Ben uses his healing powers on as many people as he can, intentionally drawing the life force required out of a trapped Brother Justin, is exhilarating because without any effects it easily communicates the wonder of the moment, and serves as a release for the pent-up frustration of Ben being so cautious about the use of his gifts (although the healing of Jonesy from a few episodes earlier is like the warmup for this moment).
Hold on - he can heal people, but only by taking the life force from someone else? Yep: welcome to the mythology of
Carnivàle. That's just one of the many cool ideas underpinning the show: Ben Hawkins is gifted with the ability to move life-force from one place to another, but he cannot create it. In the pilot episode he heals a girl crippled from birth, but the crops around her must die; he brings Jonesy back from the brink of death (and inadvertently heals his knee in the process) by getting him way out into the desert and letting Jonesy's body attract a flock of vultures, who serve as the sacrifice. This is powerful, elemental stuff, as is Brother Justin's primary power of manipulation, which early on usually takes the form of causing others to have controlled visions, particularly of their great sins.
Both Ben and Justin's powers continue to grow, because as it turns out they are the latest in a line of not-quite-human creatures called Avatars, descended from the first of their kind, a woman who lived before the Flood and is known only as the Alpha. Her descendants all have the potential to express these powers, but only the males, and only two per generation in a given line, actually manifest them. Also, one of the Avatars is a Creature of Light and the other one is a Creature of the Dark, and they are mortal enemies, but the Light/Dark aspect isn't genetic; the Light Avatar of one generation could be born to the Dark Avatar of the prior one, and vice versa. (This turns out to be the case on
Carnivàle.) The seniormost living Avatar one either side is called The Prophet, and he has much greater power by virtue of his preeminence and his special blue blood, which in practice looks sort of like shower gel; the junior Avatars are called Princes, and they can only become the Prophet by killing the current title-holder (in the Light/Dark continuum, not their genetic father) in such a way that he either gives his powers up willingly or is taken by surprise and incapable of putting up psychic defenses. There will eventually be a Dark Avatar with special powers known as the Usher, as in the Usher of the Apocalypse, and there's also a shadowy figure called the Omega, which in the universe of the show everyone with knowledge of Avatars assumes the Usher and the Omega are the same, but
they're actually not! (Except we never meet anyone who explicitly tells us that they're surprised to learn the Usher != the Omega, so this piece of information is useless.)
There: I've just told you roughly 45% more about the mythology of
Carnivàle than you'd learn if you carefully watched every episode of
Carnivàle. Eventually Ben Hawkins learns everything there is to know about the whole Avataric business, which is nice because heretofore pretty much all the characters we have access to as audience members are in the dark about it as well, but: he gets it by psychic transfer, so we never hear it explainedto him, and it continues to be mysterious! All the shit I just explained comes from show creator Dan Knaupf, who released the background on a lot of this mythology after the show was canceled. It's a lot of byzantine mythology that isn't endeared to me by being inaccessible without doing outside reading, and it's clear that Knaupf still kept a lot of stuff to himself.
For instance: the first scene of the show tells us that the first nuclear explosion (the "false sun" detonated in the desert at the Trinity test site) is a line of demarcation, when [paraphrasing now] Man forever gave up Wonder for Reason. Or something like that. Well: is that a good thing, or a bad thing, or an indifferent thing? On the one hand I'm being unfair because Knaupf only got to spill out the first third of his projected story, but on the other hand I think a lot of this mythology is uncompelling and/or poorly thought out when subjected to scrutiny, and further information would need to either retcon what we already though or keep pulling back layers to which we were never privy. So:
There's a struggle between the Light and the Dark, but the nature of these concepts aren't spelled out. Ben is provided visions of Trinity and it's
implied that this is a disaster that he's supposed to stop, except that we know he didn't (they did develop a nuclear bomb), so did the Dark win? Or maybe all the characters are wrong and the Bomb/Embrace of Reason is a Good Thing, and the Light won. Except that it's not clear why either the Light or the Dark should have a vested interest in ushering (!) in modernity, when their whole gimmick relies on the deployment of magics that, by the show's own lights, have been abandoned for science. So maybe the Bomb is in fact the Nobody Wins conclusion to a deadlocked (and pointless?) struggle. There are hints, expanded on by lots of fans who've gone much deeper into the show's mythology than I particularly care to, that the show has a Gnostic concept of Light and Dark, which is to say that they're equally opposed mirror images, and not the traditional Christian (say) relationship where the Light is superior in moral strength and more powerful, necessarily triumphant. (Like I said, there are people who've gone much deeper into all of this than I'm going to, but that's part of the problem: I'm a smart guy who's fairly comfortable with a lot of the meta-mythological concepts floating around here, and the idea is that carefully watching twenty-four hours of the show and doing a few hours' worth of extracurricular reading
isn't enough for me to get a handle on what's going on?) And that's an interesting idea that's pretty well borne out for the first season and change, where Ben and Justin both seem to be more complex than simply Good and Evil (although Knaupf is right to be surprised that people spent the first season wondering if they really knew who was Light and who was Dark: in the pilot episode Ben heals a girl's legs and Justin makes an old woman vomit up coins). Brother Justin eventually becomes more and more transparently Wicked, though, and the manifestations of the Dark powers are kind of goofily lopsided: when they really get going, Dark Avatars' eyes become entirely black, while Light Avatars look...the same. Also, Dark Avatars are physically disturbed when a Light Avatar makes significant use of his powers (like, Ben heals Jonesy and five hundred miles away Justin starts writhing in pain), but when the roles are flipped, there's no apparent effect on the Light side. So it would seem that the Light and the Dark aren't evenly balanced, and the Light is better, which is significantly less interesting.
Especially since the Brother Justin side of the story tends to be a lot more engaging, probably because it's simpler and less opaque. Justin is a minister gaining power and influence, he and his sister Iris have a creepy borederline incestuous relationship, Iris is torn between absolute devotion to her faith and absolute devotion to her brother (Amy Madigan's portrayal of Iris' evolution as she realizes that these two allegiances are in opposition is one of the best acting jobs on the show, actually), and lots of milk gets spilled. (Really.) Conversely, the Ben storyline, wrapped up with the carnival, is responsible for much of the boredom, long stares, and so forth. For all the ostensible attention the milieu of the carnival with its freaks and aberrations and hey they're just like normal people gets, the freaks per se play a minimal role. Samson, a dwarf (played by a dwarf) is a major character, but the only other freak with a plot is Lila the bearded lady (played by a non-bearded lady wearing a prosthetic). Several people with real physical deformities crop up (and there are minor characters played by physically normal actors who portray physical deformities), but 95% of the non-Ben carny plot is taken up with the cooch show (i.e., a family of strippers/prostitutes) and the dynamic between Jonesy and Sofie (who may or may not have mystic powers, but whose mother is one of the few carnies who does have genuine abilities), and the eventual collision of these two plotlines. In other words, there's a lot of regular people playing exactly the sort of storylines you'd get on your average relationship-drama, except with more nudity and less bathing. Yes, there was more to a carnival than the freak show, but we don't even get to see a Geek except in jittery flashbacks. Come on, now. Why bother with the carnival at all?
Labels: TV
