Carnivale and Tarred and Feathered

All, I’m watching Carnivale tonight and I’m wondering something.
Spoiler below this line:
When the toughs come by and Tar and Feather Jonesy…is that the way it really happened? Holy Crap! Growing up, I’d always thought of being tarred and feathered as more of a prank.

In the show, they poured hot tar on his body, then because he was talking back…poured some more down his throat. After this, they opened a down pillow and scattered the feathers all over him.

If it’s a factual way of torture…it has to be one of the most suffering things I can think of.

-K

And when the tar cools enough, you will have to scrub a good portion of your skin off to remove it.

That’s the way I see it too. It seems like a sure death, especially in those times.

Tar hot enough to be easily poured on to someone is likely to cause blistering. You then take a lot of your skin off with the tar leaving you incredibly open to infection. I actually have an ancestor who died from being tarred and feathered. Not a fun way to go.

Here’s a website about it which says that “tarring was not usually fatal”.

Thanks for the cite! Ok, I’ll agree that it usually wasn’t fatal. I’d bet that it was rarely poured down the throat as was done in the show. Surely, that’d have to be near certain death for the victim.

Yep

An annotated Huck Finn that I read in high school had similar descriptions.

Here is another one, too :wink:

When (the girl, damn damn damn can’t remember her name all of a sudden,) was sitting there before Ben showed up, started to peel away a piece of tar you could see the chunk of flesh peeling away.

When I first saw the whole thing it was a definate sit up and go WOW moment. I’ve seen a lot of funky death and mutilation on the screen before but that was something new.

Now, how do they explaine his knee to the rest of the Carnies?

‘You had a bum knee!’

‘It got better.’

On Jonesy explaining his healed knee…

From the looks of the previews for next week episode, I have a feeling Jonesy might not survive the encounter with Stroud, perhaps he’ll return the favor and somehow save Ben for his coming encounter with Justin in the process…

…despite Ben’s rescue this week, I still have the strong suspicion that the Jonsey/Libby pairing is not destined for happiness.

I agree. I’m just glad that Jonsey didn’t die that way.

I honestly wasn’t that impressed with Anwar last night. It was okay, but it wasn’t something I’d buy.

Oh, hell, I’m sorry about that, everyone. I am loving Carnivale though. All the elements are great, from acting to lighting. Something did occur to me last night while Jonesy was being healed and the Usher was suffering. I thought it would be neat if, in the inevitable final matchup between Ben and Brother Justin, that Ben kill him by healing everyone around him. In fact, the scene could be Justin doing fake healings in his tent, when Ben walks in. Everybody has something or the other wrong, and if he heals the whole bunch except Justin, then Justin might die.

Something about the tar and feathering scene made it one of the most gruesome things that I have ever seen on TV. Maybe it was the year long attachment to the characters? Maybe it was that I had never considered that the tar would horribly burn the victim?

This season seems to be really good so far.

This website does offhandedly comment “tarring was not usually fatal”, but provides no evidence of this, nor how or why it may be true, other than it shouldn’t be. The same article goes on to say, “the practice was occasionally very violent and resulted in death, but most of the time the purpose was humiliation” So it would be more accurate to say that people were dieing as a result of being tarred, however the perpetrators may have said “oh, sorry…our bad” when this happened, as torture rather than death was the specific goal.

In the context of Carnivale I would say that it was rather violent in nature, especially as they covered his whole body with BOILING tar (as evindenced in the scene), as opposed to just hot. At the 20’s level of medical care, a body completely covered with tar and resulting 2nd or 3rd degree burns would not have much chance of survival. The serverity was made clear by the fact that flesh was peeling off as a result of the tarring.

I suspect that when Bro Justin kills Scudder, he will, like Ben, attain his full power.

I wonder what Ben will feel when Justin kills Scudder?

After watching the episode, I, too, did some research on T&F, and found a site that said that if the perpetrators weren’t out to kill the victim, they’d apply the tar over his clothes. Still really unpleasant, no doubt, but probably not as damaging.

I’m a week behind in the show so just saw this episode. Excellent episode. The tar and feather incident was very distrurbing, mainly because I always viewed it as something not as painful as it really was.