Business as Usual?

 “Carnival Row,” Season 2 only, created by R. Echivarria and T. Beacham, 2023

This historic urban fantasy is like a thermometer dipped into the near present. It’s a depiction of racist oppression and even class struggle. We’re thrown back into a Dickensian, steam-punk city under Victorian control, dressed in a throw-back aesthetic.  A ghetto has been created in the city on ‘the Row,” like a Jewish ghetto during WWII, the immigrant detention camp in Children of Men or the prison neighborhood in Cloud Atlas.  

Human-like fairies (fae), human-like goat and sheep-headed creatures with hooves (fauns) and some zombie-like beings with bare, stringy heads populate the ghetto, taking the place of Jews … or whatever minority you might imagine.  There is also a centaur, a werewolf, a witch, a gay relationship and many Scottish or Irish accents.  These ‘Fae’ or ‘Pix” are imprisoned by the humans, who have police, an army and all the power, in a government called the Burgue.  They walled the ghetto and strung barbed-wire above so the fairies can’t fly out.  In one gruesome scene, they use a swinging axe blade, as in some Poe story, to cut off 5 innocent heads at once.  Remember, the guillotine was a punishment favored by the French ruling class before it was repurposed.

There is an inept ruler of the Burgue who follows the machinations of a woman politician of the opposing party.  She wants a war to fill the coffers of all the armament factories she owns. The central figure is Orlando Bloom, no longer a delicate elf but a hulking, tough guy.  He is an efficient policeman who is found to be a ‘cross-breed’ between human and a Fae and who also has divided loyalties.  He is thrown off the force due to the brutal caste-like treatment of all oppressed, though he had passed for a time.  Miscegenation is especially despised.

In the colonies a revolt has started under the New Dawn, a revolutionary group somewhat modeled after the Bolsheviks, led by a woman faun with a broken horn, Leonora.  They call each other comrade and dance to Russian tunes.  They overthrew the local aristocracy and expropriated their wealth.  They are for equality and equal shares to all, so everyone works and those who don’t work, don’t eat. They are against ‘race’ prejudice, so their ranks are made up of humans, fauns, fairies, pix, fae, pucks, critches and any other imaginary beings who want to join.  Those from the aristocracy usually cannot be transformed and ‘re-educated,’ as class sticks. We see an example of this. 

There is also a secretive anarchist group within the Row called the Black Ravens – flying fairies who resist the Burgue because of the imprisonment.  They later work with New Dawn.  A temporary ally of the bourgeois Burgue – which looks like a stand-in for top-hatted England - is a more war-like country called The Pact - a bunch of Germanic Junkers dressed in military red.  The Germanic Pact wages war on the New Dawn with weapons supplied by the Burgue.  The Pact burns their city in the colonies with bombs dropped from dirigibles. 

There is also a plague within the Row; a series of gruesome murders which Bloom is trying to solve and a gut-eating, flying monster called Desparis that hates humans – or certain humans.  Every character has a unique, cool and meaningful name, per normal in a world-building fantasy story.

POLITICS

The treatment of the New Dawn is partly sympathetic.  Then an episode shows a huge marsh full of the bodies of the rich they have killed.  Earlier all the ‘officers’ on a seized civilian ship were machine-gunned.  The Bolsheviks never executed the rich or civilian sailors as a program. So this bunch have a touch of Pol Pot, though the peasant Khmer Rouge just made the rich and city folk work back-breaking rural jobs with almost no food.  The Black Ravens also seem to be sympathetic, until they bomb some ships that could prove beneficial to the citizens of the Row.  But then a logical reason emerges – the ship was a cover for a Burgue invasion of a former colony.  So the writers are hostile to the ‘hurricane’ of red revolution and the bomb-throwing of a band of anarchists.  This makes sense as the writers are liberal and ‘neutral’ artists.  The sympathetic characters are a female fairy that quits the Black Ravens for a time (Hollywood’s Cara Delevingne); Bloom, the half-breed with divided loyalties; and a clever liberal advisor to the Burgue who tries to help the imprisoned.  He’s a sort of a Tyrion Lannister knock-off.  What is interesting is how a class revolution has intruded on the imagination of Hollywood writers and show-runners again, somewhat like the Hunger Games.    

The show’s season was shot in the Czech Republic – in Prague and surrounding areas.  What it really reflects is a thinly-veiled look at present-day politics across world capitalism.  The reality of class and ethnic oppression, war, fascism and revolution are the uber-topics, even though the script is 17 years old, probably inspired by the 2008 capitalist meltdown.  It should be dated but it’s not. It did not do well on Rotten Tomatoes.

Predictably when the revolution comes to the Row, most of the lead characters fight against it – their Kerensky move. It’s about saving lives – though whose lives is up for debate.  They are more about individual lives like the beautiful witch or the rich faun - so it’s really about class peace.  Revolutionaries are stock characters portrayed as bloodthirsty, and that is the moral core of the season.  The monster Desparis is depicted as the bloody Id of the revolution.  The silver-tongued Leonora is the hypnotic leader. The film acts as if revolutions are plots, even in the Row. There seem to be no workers among the ordinary population to recruit, so it’s a revolt of the most oppressed identities only. The rich faun says the Burgue is flawed, but he’s been over the world and seen worse.  He’s black and earned his wealth through slave trading.  He always sounds like a reasonable, well-educated fellow who predictably says ‘change is slow.’

The set-up is in place.

REVOLUTION?

The battle is joined.  The New Dawn mutilate a captive. The Black Ravens gruesomely burn out a police bar with a group of racist cops inside. In spite of that, the Burgue parliament decide to hear the New Dawn’s offer of peace.  An angry human-supremacist fascist mob has gathered at the gate to the Row, in bowler hats waving hammers.  The New Dawn plan to liquidate them by luring them into the Row.  With the agreement of the police, they are let into the ghetto to carry out a pogrom.  It ends with a ridiculous deus-ex machina that wipes the whole story. The liberal, wealthy faun plays a police role in the battle and wonderfully, starts an electric company as a successful capitalist entreprenuer.

The liberals win with a plea for tolerance and an attempt at a new Obama-like chancellor – and nothing more.  Somehow the Fae have gotten out of the Row, the walls and barbed wire were removed and the inhabitants go about their happy business, like some Renaissance Fair… still unable to vote and in poverty.   “The seeds have been sown” says Leonora, though most viewers will ignore that.

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Cloud Atlas,” “Game of Thrones,” “People’s Future of the United States,” “A People’s History of the Russian Revolution,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “The Hunger Games,” “October – the Story of the Russian Revolution,” “Blade Runner,” “Children of Men,” “Divergent-Insurgent,” “Mad Max Fury Road,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “3%,” “Fugitives of the Forest.”   

The Kultur Kommissar

June 5, 2023