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.**
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