As allegories go, Amazon’s Carnival Row is on par with celebrated space series Battlestar Gallactica and The Expanse for depth and complexity. Unlike Tolkien’s trilogy, these three programs wear their politics on their sleeves. Tolkien, at least in my scattered readings, was more circumspect about the meanings of his books.
Carnival Row is a thoroughgoing fantasy thriller set in some mythical world where storybook creatures walk (or fly in the case of the Faeries, or Fae) among men. These non-humans have fled war in their own lands, sought asylum and been ghettoized in dank and dangerous districts away from humans, who detest them and debate their fate in Parliament.
Because of the costuming, art direction and British casting — Orlando
Bloom (LOTR's Legolas) as the conflicted police inspector Rycroft
Philostrate and Cara Delevingne as his winged ex-lover and revolutionary
Vignette Stonemoss (the character names are marvelous and ridiculous) —
one might assume the setting is Victorian England but the location is
as murky as the mysterious creature disemboweling city residents and
casting entrails about the vacated carcasses.
It’s all ghastly and gruesome and set against the backdrop of xenophobia and immigrant panic. Its strange appeal is suspended in the air, like the statues of the bound and hanged martyr erected in the churches in this seriously effed up world. This last device was a startling reminder to me that, though we’re inured to them, crucifixes are pretty barbaric religious emblems, for real.
It’s all ghastly and gruesome and set against the backdrop of xenophobia and immigrant panic. Its strange appeal is suspended in the air, like the statues of the bound and hanged martyr erected in the churches in this seriously effed up world. This last device was a startling reminder to me that, though we’re inured to them, crucifixes are pretty barbaric religious emblems, for real.
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