HBO is worth the subscription for John Oliver alone. If you like sci-fi, Westworld is incredible. For EXTREME weird, Doom Patrol is a lot of fun. Overall, I cancelled Hulu and kept HBO and Netflix (I also don’t watch network tv, though, so wasn’t a hard choice…)
ETA: I should really read the whole thread before replying…
You know, I never seem to remember white people complaining about the historical accuracy of the racism depicted in the constant stream of white savior movies. I wonder why that is…
Based on the comments made in this thread one would think that if I pop open an old thread about The Help or Hidden Figures I would find a steady supply of white forks crying that the ever present white savior isn’t historically accurate depiction of America’s racist past and that we need to ugly up many of the white/black interactions to more accurately depict the times. Nor do you hear about how those inaccuracies harm the message that is being sent.
So why are accurate depictions of America’s racist past only important when white folks are painted as the bad guys?
So no discussion about episode 4? I would’ve thought the whole riff on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in the story would’ve warranted at least some comment.
So this is what the thread is gonna be about, cool…
Ep 4 left me a bit flat, but maybe I missed something? Part of the gimmick of the show is to run takes on horror and adventure tropes filtered through a historic Black experience/racism lens. This did not come off as a particularly inspired riff. But again I could have missed clever allusions! Glad they are having Leti be more the same woman who drove the car and less someone who just screams a lot. Her telling the ghost to get the fuck out of HER house seemed to be a turning point for the character.
Pretty obviously white people ARE the bad guys of America’s racist past. And present.
I haven’t seen anyone in this thread arguing otherwise.
There probably are some posts on this site that point out the distortion of history represented by the White Savior genre.
Should there be more of them? Very possibly. The entire topic of “distortions of history in movies, television, novels, and other story-telling media” is quite under-served in general. I’d like to see more of it.
So far as Lovecraft Country is concerned, though:
I’m not the person whose main reservation about the show was the historical inaccuracy, and obviously I can speak only for myself. My reservation was about the show’s apparent implicit message. I take that message to be that white people lack any positive traits.
While considering this topic I remembered with interest that Jordan Peele’s two directorial efforts (released so far), 2017’s Get Out and 2019’s Us, contain between them not ONE white character with positive traits--------------and yet I do NOT see those movies as bearing the implicit message that white people lack any positive traits.
Now why I see LC in a light so radically different from that in which I see Peele’s movies, isn’t yet clear to me. I see Peele’s movies as being not only skillful and moving works of art, but also as being fundamentally humanist. I see LC as being at a much lower level of achievement.
The reason for this disparity in assessing these works, which all feature the ‘no white people are good people’ element, isn’t yet clear. At the moment the closest I can come is to observe that there’s greater intelligence at work in Peele’s work than in LC. Of course that’s not particularly illuminating or even helpful; this question requires more thought.
Well, the episode definitely showcased the large budget of the show, and how well it’s being deployed. Several scenes (particularly the Marshall Fields and museum ones) were astonishing in their evocation of period. Someone’s going to win an award for this.
The ‘under the museum’ scenes also looked expensive. I hope the actors were well-paid–wow, they spent a LOT of time in that water!
So far as the plot is concerned: we got more ‘Leti is a badass’ and ‘Montrose’s secret is going to lead to a lot more danger (and probably more death, too),’ if I can say those things without spoiler tags.
The special effect that started with the gang approaching the corpse seated at the table was genuinely startling. That one looked like awards-season bait, too.
***To add to my previous post: I do know that Jordan Peele is a producer on this show. I still see major differences between his own movies and the show, and the show comes up short in that assessment in my view.
This is not how I see it at all. If there’s a message framed in this way, I think it’s more like “the culture and laws that enabled segregation and Jim Crow lacked any positive traits”.
As the poster who brought up concern about what I would call the comic-bookizing of real historical events that must be remembered and appreciated, I do not see that as the “message” either. Not sure if this is a horror tropes through the lens of experienced racism, or a view of racism through a horror trope lens. But white people bad is NOT a message I as a white guy experience and was not my concern.
FWIW by now I take special effects as a given. Having them as something I notice rather than just pulling the story along would be a fail to me.
The characters and the story are what matters more. In that regard it’s of interest that I’m finding Tic to be the character of least interest. Even Montrose has more to him. I’m much more curious to discover the path to come for Hip and Diana.
Felt less Indy and more National Treasure to me - and in a good way. I loved those films. This episode was a fun yarn though I dunno if it was as good as previous eps.
Hey man, I didn’t broach the subject, I just provided my opinion. If that’s a problem for you I suggest you do a little root cause analysis and take it up with the poster that started down this particular rabbit hole.
I see Lovecraft Country as a way to combine the two most memorable things about HP Lovecraft: his fantasy writing and the virulent racism he espoused in real life. As a result, I see every white person in the show (so far) as a stand in for HP and I think they react the way HP would have liked to react if black people had the audacity to try and star in (or survive) one of his stories. I don’t think the message they are trying to send is “white people lack any positive traits” so much as Lovecraft was a real life racist piece of shit so it’s only natural that all of the folks in Lovecraft Country who personify him also behave like racist pieces of shit. Now tell us, between the fantasy horror and the racism, which is scarier for the black folks navigating this story?
As a black person who enjoys the fantasy genre I have been told all my life that I need to simply ignore all of the racist beliefs and actions of content creators like Lovecraft and just enjoy the story. This show might be the first media depiction that doesn’t require me to do that
Episode 4 left me a bit flat as well.
So we’re just gonna call people racist in code here?
Mod Note:
This thread is going to be charged clearly as so much of the show is about racism in America.
Lets keep the snide remarks and veiled insults out of it please. I still don’t have my jack boots so I’m going to plead for civility. I would like to see the thread stay about the show.
Omniscient, your remark was pretty snide and BeagleJesus your reply could easily be taken as an insult. Lets refrain from both please.
Reminder: A Mod Note is just that, a note or an instruction. This is not an official warning or anything we track.
100% Scooby Doo IMO.
I agree. And the thing about systemic racism is that individuals who may have better morals are swept up in the evil of the system. Generally in Jim Crow America, black folks are going to have negative interactions with white people. And ESPECIALLY if a black person moves to the wrong part of town. A lot of ordinary white people kind of just let Jim Crow happen in day to day interactions - so black folk would have run into the guys who let their horns go off 24 hours a day, or burned crosses on their lawn. The white folks who said ‘that’s too much’ privately weren’t going to make much of an impression on black people - and they weren’t going to walk up to the black folk to explain how much they disagreed with it either.
I enjoyed Episode 4. It was the dramatization of my favorite chapter in the novel. And it made it more rational. In the book, the pendulum blade was a winged automaton that flew around and attacked the heroes, which was just too wiggy.
And it gave a nice scene to Evil Magic White Girl’s Evil White Male Badass Assistant, who needed to be a stand-in for the novel’s Evil Magic White Boy, so you could have the seduction scene with Letitia’s sister. This will lead in to the next episode, which will star Letitia’s sister (Dora?), and is the one that the advance reviews said ruined everything because it took the narrative away from Tic, Montrose, and Letitia. It was my second favorite chapter in the novel.
Possibly, Episode 5 will instead feature Hippolyta and the orrery, which was another fine chapter.
This is a fascinating idea. I would guess that a large percentage of the LC audience has never read Lovecraft and knows nothing about his life (though many will have heard of Cthulhu), however.
If 10,000 viewers of LC who happened never to have read Lovecraft were asked ‘does this show dramatize the way Lovecraft felt about black people?’—how many would react with bafflement?
In other words, I wish the showrunners would take your idea and make it a conscious element of the plots.
When I first heard about the book/show and the fact that it featured black folks in a Lovecraftian environment I assumed that it was going to be a contrast between story book horror vs. real life horror of the black experience in America’s past. I never read the book but the black/white interactions on the show are playing out almost exactly the way I envisioned.