| HOME | FILM | ESSAYS | WUYUETIAN |
If you're like me, your grandparents' houses were haunted. Not by ghosts, but by half-told stories. As hard as my elders may have tried to explain what life was like in the distant past, they were only building vast playpen for my fears and imagination. And the strange, mute artifacts of that age, stashed away in an attic or my grandfather's office, held even greater mystery. The HBO series Carnivale is about the skeletons in the closet of a traveling carnival, seen mostly through the eyes of a young man who joins the show and gradually discovers he isn't there by accident.
Traveling carnivals are great settings for drama and mystery because the performers give each town they visit a glimpse of the unknown while remaining mysterious themselves. Creator Daniel Knauf has found a great setting in which to tap into that energy by going back to the American West and Midwest of the Great Depression. In doing so, he's also cleverly chosen a setting that has at least some link to the world of many American TV viewers' parents and grandparents, including my own.
But atmosphere alone, no matter how close to an audience's own imaginations, can only carry a show through one or two episodes. Even Twin Peaks, which started so well, dissolved after a less than a season because it simply piled weirdness upon weirdness. Carnivale, which lasted two seasons (both now available on DVD) is well-grounded in strong characters, realistic relationships and excellent writing. At least in the first season, which I've watched on DVD, Carnivale wisely doles out new mysteries and hints like candy from that well-guarded jar on your grandmother's table.
Ben Hawkins (the excellent Nick Stahl), a young man with strange powers and a criminal record, joins the eponymous carnival after his mother dies and a bulldozer destroys his Dust Bowl home. He doesn't want to be with the troupe and doubly resists the strange things he starts hearing, seeing and doing, which seem to be tied into a recurring nightmare. Meanwhile, in California's Central Valley, a preacher named Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown, looking like a possessed Al Gore), starts having visions, too. The first few episodes introduce the remarkable cast of characters in the carnival, all wonderfully played, including diminutive ringleader Samson, strapping foreman Jonesy and Sofie, a young woman who channels customers' fortunes from her catatonic mother. Things get eerie fast and stay that way. Nearly every scene in these episodes is spooky to the core, not least the ones involving the apparently straight-laced, devout Brother Justin. Best of all is "Babylon," in which the carnies set up outside a quiet town despite a string of bad omens and later regret it. It's an hour of television that is dark to the core, a march into irredeemable gloom. Later in the season, Carnivale sometimes lapses into the episodic and slight, though relationship and work stories about these characters this well rendered are disappointing only in comparison to the evocative grandeur of the show's main plot.
Carnivale is like The Wizard of Oz if Dorothy had run off with Professor Marvel, or The Grapes of Wrath if John Ford had taken the book's Biblical imagery more literally. There are blatant references to both films, but the series isn't derivative. Rather, like those earlier works, it truly taps into the starkness, superstition, and religiosity of American rural life.