Enough with the fucking allegories already
if you haven't heard of Amazon Prime's Carnival Row, that's because it sucks
*The original version of this post was published on Patreon on June 23, 2022. Thanks to Adrian Rennix for editing! You can check out Adrian's terrific (and free) newsletter about immigration policy here.
I try not to get too judgy about other people’s TV choices—or any media choices really—because people are attracted to stories, in their various forms, for all sorts of reasons. But I’ve heard some grumbling regarding the (apparent) preference that People These Days have for TV over other forms of storytelling. Why will people eschew a critically-acclaimed 2-3 hour movie and instead watch 8-10 hours of a mediocre TV show? Why will they say “oh I don’t have time to read a novel” and binge multiple TV series instead, an act which probably takes the same number of hours?
I have a half-baked theory (not even a fully-baked Grand Unified Theory, just a collection of dry and wet ingredients) that there are just some types of storytelling that lots of people prefer. I think serial storytelling may be one of these types: many people want to hear about the continued adventures of beloved characters, whether it’s Odysseus or Coyote or Sherlock Holmes or Snooki (all tricksters in their way). This is reasonable enough, and so it seems absurd that the critical disdain for very popular media franchises has generally been directed less at the corporate overlords who buy up particular universes and resell them like they’re flipping houses, and more at the sheep who dare to go see a movie about Spider-Man because they happen to like Spider-Man. (As I mentioned in another post, this disdain tends to go out the window when the critic is writing about the characters and universes that they happen to have bonded with personally; this hypocrisy is rarely noted.)
But it’s true that I get tired, sometimes, of everything being part of a universe I already know, and characters who are only rehashes of people I’ve already met. So when I hear about something new, something original, I naturally get excited. This is true even if I’m very late to the party, as I was with Carnival Row, which came out in 2019. Co-created by René Echevarria (frequent writer for TNG and DS9!) Carnival Row is a totally original neo-noir fantasy steampunk series, not based on a novel or any other pre-existing IP. Yes, it’s produced by Amazon, the Ann Veal of streaming services, but they do tend to throw a lot of money at their projects, however dull they (usually) end up being. Surely this one had to be at least okay?
Carnival Row is at least okay. It is, however, not good. I did binge all of the first season, and while I can blame my dog for some of that (he loves a good dark screen) he isn’t the only reason I kept watching. There were pieces of the show that I genuinely liked—plus, it’s a story about fairies, and I’m extremely silly for stories about fairies. The pieces of it that are bad, however, are mostly the same bad pieces you’ll find in many other TV shows and movies and novels these days, whether they have been produced as part of a larger corporate IP universe or as “original” works. So it’s an excellent show for dissection (NSFR—Not Safe For Rennix—warning: the show does feature some dissections.)
The basic premise of Carnival Row is that a London-ish city-state called the Burgue (pronounced the same way Jerry Seinfeld says the surname in “Alec Berg”) has been warring with other nations for control of fairyland. In this world, fairyland is a physical place across a sea, which can be journeyed to and colonized. Thanks to centuries of colonization and proxy wars, fairyland has been devastated, and much of it has fallen to a mysterious human nation called the Pact (the Pact feels vaguely German and totalitarian so far, though I have an itchy CIA-is-that-you-behind-the-curtain-of-all-American-media-properties feeling that they’ll end up being communists.) Many of the fairy people (“Fae” in the show) have relocated to the Burgue as refugees, living as an oppressed underclass in the equivalent of a late Victorian British society.
An interesting premise, right? The actors are all talented and attractive, and the production design contains some lovely elements. The different types of fairy folk are visually striking: we have the faun-like Pucks, with big horns and goat hooves; and also the fairy Pix, with slender bodies and dragonfly wings. There are even centaurs, werewolves, and tiny cute kobolds. Magical creatures! I love magical creatures! What could possibly go wrong?
Fantasy is Not the Same Thing as Allegory
If the title of the piece didn’t make it obvious, I am really fucking tired of allegory. To be clear about what I mean by allegory: it’s a type of story in which all storytelling elements can be boiled down to a straightforward set of variables which are meant to serve as a key to a philosophical, political, or religious argument: Character X=Concept Y. In this formula, Character X only really exists as a vehicle by which to express Concept Y: Character X is not real, in the way that novel characters are taken to be real. Only Concept Y really matters; Concept Y is what the story is about. Allegory was popular in the Middle Ages, and continued into the early modern period to some degree1, but has been mostly out of fashion until quite recently. Even J.R.R. Tolkien, who otherwise borrowed heavily from medieval tradition, avoided using allegory. In the introduction to many versions of The Lord of the Rings, you can find him disagreeing with critics who viewed the story as an allegory for World War II. “[The Lord of the Rings] is neither allegorical nor topical…The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron…In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.”
Now, in this house, we respect the death of the author, and never yield to authorial “expertise.” We don’t do this out of a lack of respect for writers, but from an immensity of it—we believe in writers as artists, and artists are rarely able to explain what they’re doing. If novelists perfectly understood their works in their totality, they would not have needed to write them; as Ursula Le Guin writes in her introduction to the Left Hand of Darkness (an essay I quote from a lot): “If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel…” But there are a few situations in which I think the writer’s opinion of their own work can be allowed, such as, for example, Le Guin’s introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. Tolkien’s introduction to The Lord of the Rings is another allowable authorial opinion, I think—not because he said it, but because his point is hard to dispute. If The Lord of the Rings were an allegory for World War II, then it would have followed a different storytelling pattern. Elements of the story are of course suggestive of World War II, as they are of World War I, the industrialization of England, 19th century racist beliefs—but they are not allegories for those things. As Tolkien puts it, “many people confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
Carnival Row, like too many fantasy and science fiction works these days2, isn’t written applicably: it’s written allegorically. It’s not really meant to be interpreted, but to make a clear and obvious point. “The Fae” are not really fairy people: they’re stand-ins for contemporary human refugees and immigrants. The newly-arrived Fae are taking human jobs because they’ll work for lower wages; they’re forced into menial labor because of bigotry; they’re being deported because they don’t have the right papers. Of course, nonhuman characters in fantasy and science fiction are always, to some extent, a metaphor about human beings: we are never really telling stories about aliens, only about ourselves. But nonhuman characters in these stories are generally still people: their circumstances may be applicable to human circumstances but they are not—usually—pure symbols3. They may be nonhuman, but they exist according to themselves. They aren’t just cardboard cutouts for human beings to stick our faces through.
The fairy people in Carnival Row simply never achieve reality. They have a few bits and pieces of culture: a shred of religion here, a hairstyle there, but there’s very little depth to it, or plausibility. The Pix get the most attention, but for all the time spent watching various Pix characters suffer, we learn very little about them as a people. It seems like they might be matriarchal, and they’re free about their sexuality—or at least less repressed than the uptight Burgishmen—but if those qualities have led to any differentiation in family structures or gender identity, it’s left unexplored. Since the Fae are a colonized and exploited people, you could argue that they might have forgotten how they once lived, but it would be easy to write characters who did remember, or who were trying to recover (or invent) what was lost. The Pix gang called the Black Raven could have been one such group of Retvrn to Pix Glory, but they spend most of their time running petty scams and killing each other. Depicting oppressed people as nonhuman is always a bit of a risk, because in the actual, real world, oppressed people are frequently depicted as less than human, incapable of developing a genuine culture of their own, and always devolving into counterproductive gang violence. I think the people behind Carnival Row probably have good intentions, but they’ve accidentally depicted a colonizer’s fantasy: where the colonized are indeed inhuman, cultureless, and easily trampled underfoot.
Even Carnival Row’s otherwise exquisite production design breaks down when it’s time to depict nonhuman civilizations. The mansions of the wealthy Burguishmen are gorgeous and lavishly decorated: at the sight of a carriage lined with studded black leather like a Chesterfield sofa, I gasped out loud. But even when we get to see pieces of the fairy people’s preserved culture, it isn’t much to look at. Back in fairyland, Vignette—the main Pix character—was the guardian of an ancient library, though what we see of it is grimy, poorly-lit, and uninteresting. Later on in the show, she’s horrified to find that her library has been taken apart and moved en masse to a Burguish museum, but the gilded museum itself is more gorgeous and thoughtfully-designed than any of the fairy treasures contained within it. Male and female Pix clothing is displayed on stands within the stolen library, but it isn’t beautiful or particularly memorable—I can’t describe the colors to you, or what the cuts were like. (Compare the elves in the Lord of the Rings movies: you can probably imagine Galadriel’s white dress, as well as the production design of Lothlorien and Rivendell.) There’s a kind of smudged blankness over the entirety of fairy culture in Carnival Row, which I suppose makes the Fae work better as an allegorical stand-in for all oppressed people. But robbing them of specificity also robs them of life. They exist only to be used by us.
Sex is Not the Same Thing as Sensuality
The best thing Carnival Row has going for it is the sex: only here did the showrunners display some real creativity when it comes to fairy culture. (Pix wings light up when they orgasm, but supposedly only when they’re fucking other Pix.) What happens when a sexually relaxed and possibly matriarchal culture encounters a repressed British-like patriarchy? I’d certainly like to see it! We don’t really get to see it. Many female Pix become sex workers because it happens to be the kind of job they can get: in their crassness and dull resentment they’re indistinguishable from popular depictions of Victorian prostitutes. Burguish society does display considerable fear of Burguishmen debasing themselves with female Pix, and half-breeds are widely despised by everyone—story elements which influence several major plotlines. But there’s a rather large and looming sexual possibility that the showrunners have simply ignored: namely, what if the fairies are fairies.
“Fairy” became slang for gay men in the late 19th century, aka, approximately the setting of the show in terms of its technology and general Vibe. And yet, we have nary a single male Fae prostitute, or at least not any that I noticed. What we do have is the fastest “bury your gays” on record: a human man is murdered, and then we find out another man had secretly been his lover for years, and then the second man is immediately murdered as well. Vignette has an on-again, off-again, sexual relationship with her female prostitute best friend, but don’t worry, she straightens out for a man as soon as the plot wills it. (Her best friend is a little sad about being dumped but mostly fine, because she is a crass and dully resentful prostitute.) Vignette might have sexy sex onscreen with another lady, but she was always going to be really in love with a man, because—as is common with bisexual women in movies and TV—relationships with women are for play, while relationships with men are for real.
But does it matter? Does everything have to be gay? “Are magic elves gay?” I imagine Riker Googling. Magic elves are, in fact, gay4. “Fairy” wasn’t chosen as slang for gay men by mere coincidence—I wrote about this at greater length in my recent article about the elves, but fairies have long worked as metaphors for that which can’t be discussed openly. (By “metaphors” here I mean something different than allegories: images with multiple meanings, not 1:1 equations.) And of course, much of what can’t be discussed openly are alternate sexual relations. Carnival Row is happy to talk about alternative sexual relations for heteros (what if you fucked a chick who was really thin and hot and also had wings but your relationship was forbidden for reasons) but is nervous when it comes to the gays. Lesbian relationships are unserious, and gay men are dead the moment they’re acknowledged. But what if queer relationships were a real part of Fae society? Wouldn’t that represent a threat to the patriarchal Burguish? Wouldn’t they be afraid that these fairies were going to turn everybody else into fairies?
Season 1 of Carnival Row ends with the Fae locked up behind barbed-wire fences in a sort of ghetto/concentration camp setup—they really are an all-purpose allegory for the oppressed. But what we don’t get is a sense that the Fae can do much to change their circumstances. Now, at least one more season of Carnival Row is on its way, and it’s possible we’ll get some kind of Fae revolution,5 but this is really the core of my issue with a lot of contemporary “political” art: it can depict suffering, but it doesn’t know what to do with it. There’s no real way in most of these stories for the oppressed to overthrow the machine. Star Trek: Picard eschewed both metaphor and allegory altogether to tell us that ICE is bad—and then, nothing. Nothing happened; nothing was really changed. No wonder Carnival Row had to dismiss or kill the gays. All it knows how to do is shake its head and tell us that homophobia is bad, real bad, but what can you do?
SEO isn’t the Same Thing as Storytelling
I haven’t talked much about the plot of Carnival Row, because the plot is a huge fucking mess. There’s a tangle of characters and storylines that all intersect eventually, and often clumsily, because their real purpose isn’t to tell a coherent narrative but to remind you of Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders and other prestige TV shows involving lots of characters plotting lots of things. There’s even an incest storyline for absolutely no reason I can think of other than to make the viewer say “incest! Just like Game of Thrones!” A few of these mini-narratives are actually quite compelling, and could have benefited from being allowed to breathe, but Carnival Row isn’t interested in letting them breathe—it’s interested in justifying its investment. CGI-ing all those Pix wings was very expensive, and there’s a bundle of money to be remade.
Contrary to popular opinion, the trouble with Everything These Days isn’t that so many stories take place in pre-existing universes, or that writers have overly “woke” politics—it’s that almost all media is being produced by large corporations with search engine optimization (SEO) brain. It isn’t enough for someone to create a good story—that story has to be recognizably like other stories, to the point where the workings of the streaming service algorithm behind it is almost detectable (“viewers who liked A will also like B!”) I think it’s true that many narratives are increasingly “political” and allegorical, partly because writers are worried about being socially useful in a time of upheaval, but also because producers know that an unmistakable political message is a keyword that will generate attention and controversy and easily-written headlines. Poor Carnival Row is simply a little too like other things—and a little too wimpy in its politics—to stand out from the crowd. Like its gloomy, beaten-down fairy folk, it lacks independent reality.
Rennix points out that however annoying Pilgrim’s Progress might be, it was wildly popular and influential for many years after its publication in 1678.
“Comrade Yui” says on Twitter that horror movies have a similar allegory problem these days: the “elevated horror” movie trend has resulted in a lot of films that rely on a simple metaphor which can only be interpreted in one way, rather than centering on a complex image which carries multiple meanings.
There are, of course, exceptions. Classic Trek is full of allegorical storytelling: the original series episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield features two races, one that’s paper-white on the left side and jet-black on the right, and the other which is white on the right and black on the left. The story functions as an obvious allegory for racism. So why does it get a pass? One, because old Trek was cute; and two, because it’s a one-off episode. Once the audience has figured out Alien Species X=Human Social Problem Y, the equation is solved and there’s not much left to say: the plot withers, because there’s no more information imbalance. Allegory is much stronger when it’s quick (a lesson Don’t Look Up could have benefited from).
“Magic elves are gay? What about The Lord of the Rings? What about Legolas?” What ABOUT Legolas indeed. Also Orlando Bloom plays the other protagonist of Carnival Row, bringing us full circle.
There are some broad hints in the final episode of Season 1 that the Fae will eventually be liberated by savior cop Orlando Bloom. I know, I’m mad too.