HBO's 'Carnivale'
Wren, Celia
Celia Wren DWARFS & SUCH HBO's 'Carnivale' A woman vomiting coins. A carousel whirling in a parched Midwestern desert. An embalmed human embryo blinking awake inside a jar. HBO's occultism-laden...
...They're sleepwalkers-we wake them up" the tomboyish tarot-card reader Sofie (Clea DuVall) says of the carnival's Depression-era spectators...
...Familiar historical events mask an esoteric spiritual reality, the tarot montage suggests, setting the tone for the cabalistic soap opera that follows...
...After the great war between heaven and hell," Anderson intones grimly at the start of episode 1, staring straight into the camera against a black backdrop, "to each generation was born a creature of light and a creature of darkness, and great armies clash by night in the ancient war between good and evil...
...It at least forces one to do a little thinking...
...Brother Justin thunders in a sermon, and though he's referring to the dismal weather conditions that generated the Dust Bowl, his rhetoric could refer to the other eerie goings-on depicted in the series...
...On the other hand, you have to admire HBO for producing a series that works the "religious" dimension so integrally into the plot- a series that's so unabashedly weird, to boot...
...Most important of all-are we ever going to understand what is going on here...
...Set in the Dust Bowl in 1934, the series (which kicked off on September 14) interweaves the tale of a sinister evangelist with the adventures of a teenage fugitive who joins a mysterious traveling carnival and reveals that he's endowed with supernatural powers...
...To judge by initial episodes released to reviewers, Carnivale doesn't offer the humor and the comforting moments of innocence that made it fun to hang out with Twin Peaks eccentrics-no cherry pie with so-square-he's-hip FBI special agent Dale Cooper here, just the bleak Great Depression vistas and a brooding aura of supernatural ugliness...
...Where's Mel Gibson when we need him...
...How about the taciturn young fugitive Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl, who resembles a young Russell Crowe...
...And, while we're at it, how does a sword-swallower, you know, keep from cutting himself, anyway...
...HBO's occultism-laden historical drama Carnivale teems with surreal images-and a good thing, too, since it makes it easy to respond on at least a visceral level to a story that's as cryptic as it is bizarre...
...She might say the same of audiences glued to their televisions today...
...Is the charismatic Methodist Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown) working toward good or evil ends...
...Ben Hawkins really can work miracles, and Justin's metaphysical powers seem equally genuine...
...Is the mysterious off-screen "Management" that runs the carnival on the side of the angels or the devils...
...Instead of contemporary New Jersey mobsters, we have sideshow freaks during the Great Depression...
...There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of on other cable channels...
...Instead of pricey handbags and Sarah Jessica Parker, we have paranormal visions, revivalist fervor, and a cast headlined by Michael J. Anderson, that dwarf from Twin Peaks...
...The unflattering implication- that this kind of populist piety is a particularly exploitative kind of show biz-flutters in the background, but it's balanced by the narrative's constant assertion that real spiritual forces are at work...
...Will HBO's series-created by Daniel Knauf and scheduled to be directed by Rodrigo Garcia (The Sopranos and Six Feet Under), among others-alienate its viewers as Mark Frost and David Lynch's eventually did, by wandering aimlessly through mystery with no end in sight...
...Freighted with apocalyptic references and an ominous atmosphere, the resulting saga seems altogether an astonishing venture for the cable giant that gave us the trendy Sex and the City and The Sopranos...
...The presence of the diminutive Anderson isn't the only Carnivale element to echo the dazzling, befuddling Twin Peaks, which flirted with the paranormal in an equally evocative and sphinx-like way back in 1990...
...This theological vision, which glimmers darkly through the scenes of Carnivale, gets a metaphorical airing in the handsome credit sequence, in which tarot cards mutate into black-and-white photos from the 1930s-a soup line, a blimp, a dance marathon, the Ku Klux Klan...
...What are these things...if not harbingers of the Apocalypse...
...Does he intentionally inflict horrifying vice-flooded visions on the residents of his small California town...
...On the one hand, Carnivale does exploit religion on the level of pure color: the character of Brother Justin serves as flavoring for creepy entertainment, and his thaumaturgical powers, like Ben's, may finally amount to no more than sus-penseful mystification...
...With its behind-the-scenes shots of roustabouts and sideshow grotesques, Carnivale does sweep its viewers into a tight-knit subculture in the way The Sopranos and other HBO dramas do, but the new series explicitly broadens its scope to embrace world history and interprets the cosmos through an unnerving Manichaean lens...
...In one of the show's early episodes, when the leaders of one town forbid the carnival to open its doors, the performers ingeniously present themselves as a religious revival, offering faith healing to attract the desperate local populace...
...Or are we going to be strung along through twelve beautifully shot episodes of omens and circus-tent inscrutability...
...Religion figures prominently in this paranoid aesthetic...
Vol. 130 • October 2003 • No. 17
