Lovecraft Country is an edgy horror show, just concluded on HBO after 9 or ten episodes. The Vow, on which I have earlier written, is a documentary about a human potential cult, a congeries of TED talks gone berserk, that has also ended after nine episodes. Both shows demonstrate different ways to fail in the extended series format. And, both, fail in ways that are quite profoundly irritating -- the show's don't just vanish into TV's standard abyss of insignificance; rather, both programs demonstrate a very healthy self-regard and project an aura of importance. You walk away from both of these programs dismayed at the time that you have wasted watching them. TV is mostly escapist entertainment and if a program is amusing, it doesn't have be be artistic or profound -- it just needs to distract you from the Covid-19 and the infernal politics of the day for a half hour or so. But these shows, trumpeting their "woke" and timely significance, are something worse than failures -- they are failures with a nasty, inauthentic, and mean-spirited edge.
Lovecraft Country starts out as a witty and grotesque mash-up of racial satire and horror, much-influenced by the films of Jordan Peele (Get Out and Us) -- in fact, Peele is one of the show's producers. The premise is that an African-American Korean war veteran has returned traumatized to Chicago, a town festering with overt racism. It's the mid-fifties and the hero's uncle (I think -- the show is full of collateral relatives that I couldn't quite place, a situation also complicated by disputed paternity) has vanished. This man produces a "green book" -- that is, a volume that advises Black people as to where they can safely travel in the United States. The war veteran tracks the missing man to Ardham, Massachusetts where he encounters a group of viciously racist cops. The cops are tormenting the African-American heroes when a group of slavering porcine monsters devour the bad guys. The fleeing heroes enter a strange Moorish mansion that looks something like a Masonic Temple incongruously set in the middle of the New England woods. The temple is populated by a group of bone-white witches and warlocks who speak the language of Adam (it sounds like Yiddish) and who are engaged in some kind of cosmically evil scheme. The show works out the consequences of this situation for ten episodes, each show weaker and more desperate for the viewer's attention than the last. Ultimately, the series degrades into gory nonsense involving people mouthing spells to summon all sorts of horrors but to no clear effect since the last episodes, in particular, are completely incoherent. By the end of the show, the viewer has forgotten how the characters are related to one another (or lost interest in figuring out their intricate lineage) and, further, since anything is possible -- there's lots of time travel and adventures in alternative universes -- nothing is interesting or, even, suspenseful. It's just one ridiculous thing after another. Periodically, the show touches on racial issues, always in the least interesting and most exploitative way possible: poor Emmet Till is buried, the Black neighborhood in Tulsa is destroyed once more, and the noble characters all suffer the slings and arrows of White racism, usually in vulgar over-produced sequences that are so melodramatically over-the-top that the audience is de-sensitized to this oppression and comes to expect it as a predictable plot devise. Every White cop leers and uses racial slurs. White plutocrats keep tortured African-American slaves in closets or perform horrible medical experiments on them. Lovecraft Country in keeping with Peele's use of punning titles is a place where African-Americans live in perpetual terror of a vast, grandiose system of cosmic oppression -- America is "Lovecraft Country", that is, a place where the monsters have seized power and wield their influence to murder, maim, and torture inoffensive Black folk. (The show is not content to parody White oppression of African-Americans -- we also get a poor oppressed Korean girl, some homosexuals who are victimized by everyone, some women who are subjugated by men, and, even, a Native-American princess who has been mummified but comes to life to kick ass and suffer racist indignities all over again). The show is spectacularly violent -- heads get crushed in big close-up, people are burned alive, Black faces get grafted onto White bodies, monsters with tentacles slice people into gobbets of quivering flesh, and so on. Some of the special effects are extremely effective and there are levels of mayhem and gruesome mutilation in this show that I haven't seen before. But the plots are increasingly chaotic and the trials and tribulations of the characters so absurd -- a number of the protagonists seem to die in gory ways about every episode and, then, come back to life -- that you watch the thing with increasing dismay and, ultimately, indifference. The show panders to its audience in such extreme ways that it devolves into nothing but a sophisticated form of Blaxploitation. When an episode shows heroic Black women warriors carving a Confederate Army of men in grey (charging under the stars and bars battle-flag) into raw meat such as you might find on the floor of particularly insanitary abattoir, the combination of brutal wish fulfillment, computer-generated special effects, and idiotic plotting becomes close to unbearable. American history is full of barbaric episodes, but the show's approach to this barbarism is often just to erase it -- the Black heroes kill an army of Confederates and, thus, cancel out the Civil War and slavery as well, I suppose. The answer to racism isn't protest or the vote or even targeted terrorism-- it's just killing White folks by using silly incantations and sorcery. White guilt kept me watching the show -- it's designed in such a way that it dares you to turn it off: shut off the TV, or switch to another channel and, thereby, prove once and for all that you are a racist. Several effects are startling and once seen, can't be unseen -- the comely Korean lass is a "nine-tail fox"; this means that, while having sexual congress, she extrudes tentacular furry tails from all nine of her orifices (you have seven in your head: two nostrils, mouth, two eyes, and two ears) which wrap around victims and tear them to pieces. Several of the whiter than White Caucasians conceal under their pale skin, black people who appear when the characters writhe in seizures or orgasm, their skin unseaming and unzipping like a gory meat coat -- this is very impressive effect, but, of course, the fourth or fifth time that this happens and a naked black body wriggles out of a heap of pale pork chops, you start to lose interest.
The Vow is an endless documentary about a NXIVM, a human potential seminar run by a smarmy little bastard called Keith Ranieri. Ranieri figured out a way to seduce his followers into organizing a harem of sex slaves, branded in their pubic area with his initials. The villain is a dumpy little man with a bad haircut and a soft-spoken manner that represents the loathsomely manipulative Socratic method exaggerated into utter madness. He gets his followers to doubt everything but his charisma, an appeal that is noticeably lacking on-screen -- indeed, the source of Ranieri's Svengali-like influence, particularly on beautiful, if child-like Hollywood actresses is inexplicable, at least on the evidence presented in the film. The man is a former Amway-salesman and his pitch is a combination of Charley Manson and pyramid-scheme recruiter. The riddle that the show presents is how so many people could have fallen for such a transparently manipulative con-man. The show is irritating in that the directors, anxious to dilate material good for a freakish Sixty Minutes episode, or, at most, an hour or two, expand the documentary into a nine or ten hours and, then, don't bring the show to any satisfying conclusion. Instead, to the viewer's horror, The Vow threatens, at least, another ten hours of self-serving and hyper-narcissistic self-justification by all of its characters, not the least Ranieri who now suggests that he'll participate in the show as well to "make it a better" and more profound documentary -- of course, he'll have to participate from his prison cell but this seems feasible in light of the fact that the cult-leader and his apostles seem to have filmed literally every move they made over a period of ten years. What's nightmarish about the film is the craven dishonorable betrayal that every frame exhibits. These people are all pretty with good figures and photogenic faces and they seem to have swarmed around every camera at every gathering involving Ranieri or any one else associated with the cult. The result is a nauseating glut of imagery, millions of hours of stuff apparently. Ranieri's moronic self-serving rants and harangues have all been preserved as if his words were the stuff of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Everything has been filmed, even arguments among the apostles and, of course, all of this culminates in pornographic collateral that Ranieri collected on film and video as a means of extortion and intimidation like a demented latter-day Andy Warhol. (Sadly, we don't ever get to see any of the juicy stuff.) The documentary is female in perspective -- it luxuriates in sentimental nostalgia about the good old days before Ranieri started demanding that his concubines brand one another with a cauterizing iron; there are layers and layers of soporific analysis of "relationships" and enormous tracts of futile navel-gazing. The victims of Ranieri, of course, enthusiastically leaped into this Hell and seem to have voluptuously (and masochistically) savored the various torments that Ranieri inflicted on them. Indicative of the film's rampant narcissism is Mark, a South African filmmaker, who is the very picture of preening self-regard. Mark says this: "No one joins a cult. People join a good thing. None of us thought we were joining a cult; we thought we were going to save the world." This justification, which every Nazi could have echoed, is shown several times. However, the last time the quote is used, we get (as Paul Harvey used to say) "the rest of the picture." We hear the words again but this time with an appendix, as it were -- the rest of the utterance not previously revealed to us. Mark's lines are played again but, then, he adds: "But I should have known years ago, when I had my wife, whom I love, sleeping in a dog bed next to our bed -- she was doing what we called "penance" -- that things had gotten out of control." Indeed. The show fawns on the rich and powerful: Catherine Oxbridge who is some kind of minor Hollywood actress but actual royalty -- her mother is the Princess of Rumania -- says at one point that she should call her cousin "Charles" to get him to help in the crusade to retrieve her daughter, India Oxbridge, from the clutches of the cult. The producer asks: "Charles? Who is Charles?" It turns out that she is referring to Prince Charles of Great Britain. Catherine Oxbridge, who is fascinating in an offputting snobbish way, is the most interesting person in the film and she gets lots and lots of coverage as to her efforts to rehabilitate her daughter who is a branded sex slave of Ranieri. To save the village, sometimes, you have to destroy it and Oxbridge ends up accusing India of sex trafficking to get the FBI interested in busting the whole nest of cult members. The show seems to be leading up to the perp-walk of Ranieri and his subsequent trial and imprisonment -- this is the only reason any sane person would watch the last five episodes which recount in tedious and inscrutably repetitious detail Ranieri's various depredations. But the show is all tease. It ends with Ranieri arrested, off-camera, and the promise (or threat) that there will follow another nine or ten more hours of stuff. In order, the expand the show to its gargantuan length every single episode is, in effect, fractal in that it duplicates every other episode in the series -- we see Ranieri playing volleyball, his way of bonding with his disciples, various of his lectures and harangues, pretty girls falling for him, and other cult members scheming to betray him; each episode ends with the revelation that Ranieri's handmaidens are branding one another with his initials. This material, breathlessly presented, occurs over and over creating an effect of strange and dismaying paralysis -- nothing moves forward, the show is resolutely non-linear, things just keep repeating. It's as if the screenwriters decided their material, really quite thin, should be given a fully Proustian work-up: memories trigger memories and locations summon back old and remote recollections and, throughout this all, we subjected to hours of Ranieri's philosophy -- sometimes shrewd in a puerile sort of way, but mostly just self-serving abuse spewed out on his willing followers. After awhile, I began to suspect that The Vow has a hidden agenda -- we get so much of Ranieri's preaching that we start to believe the nonsense that he is promoting. After listening to him for a few hours, you start to consider whether your own marriage might not be improved by making your wife sleep in a dog bed as penance for her infractions.
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