Triumph of the Franchise.
The COVID-19 pandemic put paid to the traditional
twentieth century distinction between the big and the small screen, making the
ontological identity of the two types of art and entertainment obvious. Feature
films and television series belong to a single mode of representation –
representation by displays of moving pictures – and the context of their
production and consumption have become increasingly similar in the last
twenty-five years. Twenty-first century cinema has adopted the franchise model
to minimise risk and maximise profit, films are increasingly watched in the
comfort of our own homes, and mainstream films have been produced by streaming
services since the pandemic. I take the franchise model to include sequels,
prequels, remakes, reboots, and retcons (short for ‘retroactive continuity’),
in which case Box Office Mojo’s Worldwide Box Office statistics for the last
decade are revealing – if not startling. The highest-grossing standalone films were
ranked as follows: sixteenth (Elvis, 2022), sixteenth (Encanto,
2021), fifth (Tenet, 2020), twenty-first (Alita: Battle Angel,
2019), sixth (Bohemian Rhapsody, 2018), eleventh (Coco, 2017),
fourth (Zootopia, 2016), seventh (Inside Out, 2015), tenth (Interstellar,
2014), and eighth (Gravity, 2013). If one removes the children’s films,
which have always been disproportionately lucrative, this leaves a total of five
standalone films in the top 10 from 2013 to 2022: Interstellar, The
Martian (tenth in 2015), Bohemian Rhapsody, Tenet, and Uncharted.
Franchises have become so big that it’s difficult to keep track of each
instalment. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), for example, includes
thirty-one films at the time of writing and there are at least another nine due
for release in the next three years.
A franchise is, of course, little more than a
licensed series and this movement from standalone to serial film has been
complemented by the evolution of television into a serious and mature art form.
Twenty-first century television is revelling in a golden age that began at the
turn of the century, series are being watched on increasingly bigger screens
with increasingly higher resolution graphics, and Hollywood A-listers are
almost as likely to appear in a television series as they are in a franchise
feature film. This merging of the big and small screens into one another
doesn’t even take franchises that include both into account, like the MCU, Star
Wars, the DC Extended Universe, Star Trek, and many others.
Television shows like The Sopranos (1999–2007), Band of Brothers
(2001), 24 (2001–2014), The Wire (2002–2008), and Carnival Row
(2019–2023) were unthinkable in the eighties. The monotonous desire of the audience
for (much) more of the same is matched by the production of sequels, prequels,
and tie-ins and Martin Scorsese published in article in the New York Times
in 2019 in which he argued that superhero films are simply not cinema. They
are, in other words, a distinct type of art and entertainment, one which is
crucially – perhaps even essentially – shaped by the franchise model. Television
series in particular (although film franchises as well) are routinely run into
the ground, with seasons continuing until the diminishing qualitative returns
produce diminishing financial returns. When the last season was so poor in
terms of quality that the risk of loss is increased beyond an acceptable level,
the series is finally euthanised. There are many exceptions, but the pursuit of
profit by means of open-ended series has to at least some extent undermined the
golden age of television, which is much the same point that Scorsese is making
about feature films.
This is the artistic economy within which the first
season of Carnival Row was released in 2019. It was one of the most innovative
and compelling television series I’d watched in a long time and I immediately
reviewed it for Theaker’s Quarterly, exploring its allegorical depth by
focusing on its character as a work of occult detective fiction. As regular
readers of the magazine will know, occult detection is one of my favourite
genres and the subject of several of my reviews, the most comprehensive of
which are of Alan Parker’s 1987 feature film, Angel Heart, and William
Hjortsberg’s 2020 novel, Angel’s Inferno. Occult detective stories usually
begin in imitation of crime fiction, with a private or police detective
investigating a murder or missing person, but are able to deploy plot devices
that are unavailable without the intrusion of the supra-human. Where the
mundane detective is restricted to investigating someone else, the occult
detective can also investigate another occult detective or even him or herself.
Carnival Row 1 was an example of
the former in pitting two occult detectives – Piety Breakspear (played by Indira
Varma) and Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom) – against
each other. Angel Heart was an example of the latter, pitting Harry
Angel (played by Mickey Rourke) against himself, concluding with his discovery
that he tried to renege on a deal with the devil. I had intended to explore
Carnival Row 1’s dual detective structure in more detail, but turned my
attention to the ways in which the season’s multiple and intervolved layers of
representational and extra-representational meaning shed light on the
complexity of urban life instead, publishing an article in an academic
journal in 2020 and developing that article into a short monograph called Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism in 2021.
The depth of meaning and value in Carnival Row 1 is quite
incredible, which brings high expectations for the second and final series,
whose production and release were delayed by COVID-19. As the setting of season
2 is established by the conclusion of season 1, a brief summary of the latter
is necessary. Carnival Row 1 is set against
the battle for Tirnanoc, the land of the Fae, which is fought between
two human powers, the Burgue and the Pact. As the war progresses, the Fae flee
to the Burgue for safety and the stream of refugees increases with the Pact’s
victory. When the series opens, many of citizens of the Burgue, spanning all
social strata, are displeased by the influx of ‘Critch’, a derisive term used
to describe all Fae regardless of their species, and pursue some combination of
making their lives as miserable as possible, proposing anti-immigration
legislation, and using all available means to keep them offshore. The series takes
its name from a street in the Burgue that is the centre of what has become a
Fae inner city, populated by faeries, fauns, centaurs, trolls, kobolds and
other refugees. There are two protagonists: Philo, a mixed-species police detective
who conceals his origins in order to avoid falling foul of the Burgue’s
speciesist laws; and Vignette Stonemoss (played by Cara Delevingne), a faerie
refugee. Philo investigates a series of murders committed by a Darkasher, which
was created by Piety – wife to the Chancellor of the Burgue – to discover the
identity of her husband’s illegitimate son. Unbeknownst to Philo, he is that
son and the competition between the two occult detectives is for Philo to
identify Piety as the murderer before she can identify him as the son. Meanwhile,
Vignette escapes her indentured labour to find that she has only two options
for survival, sex work or crime, and joins the Black Raven, a Fae organised
crime group. Philo outwits Piety, but the season ends with a magnificent reversal
of fortune in which Piety is revealed to have been manipulated by Sophie Longerbane
(played by Caroline Ford), the Leader of the Opposition, for the purpose of
appointing Jonah Breakspear (played by Arty Froushan), Piety’s weak-willed and
irresponsible son, as Acting Chancellor. Jonah and Sophie join forces in the
bedroom and in parliament, passing emergency legislation to intern all the Fae
in Carnival Row, which is sealed off from the rest of the city and transformed
into a ghetto.
Carnival Row 2 consists of ten episodes, as
opposed to the first season’s eight, each of which are between 48 and 60
minutes in length. The season attempts to reproduce the allegorical depth of
its prequel, developing themes at both the psychological and political levels
and linking them by means of an occult detective plot. ‘Subplot’ is probably a
better description because the series of murders fades almost completely into
the background for several episodes. Similarly, there is little integration of
the personal with the public because the global politics in which the Burgue
has become embroiled quickly takes a centre stage that it never relinquishes.
While Sophie was setting her ultra-conservative takeover of parliament in motion,
the Pact was collapsing in the face of a civil war, following a revolution by a
communist movement called the New Dawn. The Pact is, in consequence, unable to
complete the colonisation of Tirnanoc or continue the war with the Burgue and
seeks to withdraw from the former and enter into an alliance with the latter. The
Pact was widely despised for its perpetration of genocide in Tirnanoc, but the
New Dawn does not recognise international borders and most of the Burgue’s
elite are happy to ally with the Pact if it prevents their own proletariat from
revolting. There is a really interesting development in episode 3, ‘The
Martyr’s Hand’, which almost made me forgive the CGI-heavy extended action
sequences of episode 1 and gave me hope that season 2 might almost achieve the thematic
richness of season 1.
At this point, there is a class-based revolution being
led by the New Dawn, narrated in the Pact port of Ragusa, from the perspective
of Agreus Astrayon (played by David Gyasi) and Imogen Spurnrose (played by
Tamzin Merchant), who have fled the Burgue. In Carnival Row, Vignette has
renewed her allegiance to the Black Raven, whose popularity is in the
ascendence as the only organisation capable of defending the ghetto’s inmates.
The Black Raven is debating whether to start a revolution of their own, which will
be species- rather than class-based, uniting all Fae against their human
oppressors. As I discussed in my academic writing on Carnival Row 1,
‘species’ is symbolic of ‘race’ (or ethnicity) in the series such that the Fae on
screen symbolise people of colour off screen. The proposed Fae revolution is
thus a revolt for racial justice. The third and final development is in the
Burgue’s corridors of power and concerns Sophie. Her ultra-conservative speciesism
(racism) always seemed to be a means to an end rather than a heartfelt
conviction, an expedient exploitation of interspecies (interracial) hatred for
the purpose of securing dynastic rule. It is now revealed that Sophie’s
Machiavellian machinations were not in fact selfish, but part of a revolution
for women’s rights whose goal is the inauguration of a woman as Chancellor. She
is actually pro-Fae and has maintained a close friendship with her faun maid,
Jenila (played by Sinead Phelps). Sophie and Jenila are prepared to do anything
and everything it takes to put a woman in charge – regardless of whether that
woman is human or Fae or rich or poor – and are planning a revolt for gender
justice. From this point onwards, there are thus three revolutions either being
planned or already in progress, each striving for its own model of social
justice and prioritising class, race, and gender respectively. What is so
interesting is that the fictional world holds a mirror and a microscope to our
own, where well-motivated struggles for social justice often cut across – and
sometimes even undermine – one another. Once all three revolutions were in
motion, I expected a sophisticated and nuanced comparison and contrast of the
merits and flaws of each and was intrigued by which the narrative would
ultimately endorse. Alas, the answer is none, as all three are soon represented
as misguided at best and morally reprehensible at worst. Given Amazon’s role in
shaping the artistic economy and world-system in which we live and its track
record with its own employees, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that its
studio warns us against the dangers of meaningful socioeconomic change. But I
was – surprised and disappointed.
As already mentioned, the occult detective subplot
is eclipsed by the global politics of the season and fails to suture the
personal to the public. Aside from the pressure created by the narrative
imbalance between politics and psychology, the murder mystery is perfunctory
when compared to its counterpart in Carnival Row 1. In episode 5, ‘Reckoning’,
the murders are disclosed to have been committed by a sparas, a Fae
shapeshifter whose species was decimated during the Pact-Burgue war for
Tiranoc. The mystery is then what identity the shapeshifter has assumed and what
his motivation for the murders is. Sparas are one of the new species of Fae somewhat
gratuitously introduced in the second season, along with minotaurs and (I
think) goblins. I suppose the sparas has a purpose in sustaining the mystery, but
I couldn’t see the point of minotaurs and goblins suddenly appearing on
Carnival Row when they had never been there before. Also, they seem to have
appeared at the expense of the disappearance of other species – gone, for
example, are the centaurs (unless I missed them, which seems unlikely given
their size). The reshuffling of the Fae is nearly as random as the sparas’
choice of victims and there is a sense of arbitrariness that detracts from any
mounting tension as to whodunit – or whydunit. Unlike its predecessor, this
occult detective story fails to stage any conflict between the anthropocentric
and the supra-human and keeps any commentary on ecocide as a mass harm firmly
at what film critic Mark Bould calls the Anthropocene Unconscious in his
2021 monograph of the same name. The best thing I can say about Carnival Row
2 is that for all my criticism, it does at least bring the series to a
conclusion. If nothing else, this bucks the increasingly-common pattern with
which I began this review, the never-ending-franchise or the franchise-ever-at-the-point-of-euthanasia.
All of which to say, I’m not sure whether Carnival Row 2 is a missed opportunity
or just completely gratuitous.**
