September 2, 2024

Homer Hates Your Emo Mythology

Happy Labor Day!

I have no money, my reading was cancelled, my family isn’t local (or alive, for the most part), and my apartment is small so I can only clean it for so long or so often, which is why I did what one does when there is nothing else left to do with a weekend: I binge watched something on Netflix. Thankfully, I did have a box of frozen taquitos in the fridge, and so thanks to them (and all of the above) you’re getting this review of KAOS, which is the new Netflix series in which Charlie Covell brings their particular brand of (I think it’s supposed to be) social (or is it political?) satire to a subject nobody has ever written about before (least of all me): Greek Mythology.

Look, um, it’s not great. It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s less good than Covell’s other projects, and in many ways it’s sort of a bingo card for everything currently bad about Netflix, and mainstream television in general. It’s more pretentious than smart, and at eight episodes feels overly long, convoluted, and ultimately reductive, both of Greek Mythology and the human experience. It’s less a reinterpretation of Greek mythology or reinvention of specific stories and characters, so much as a bunch of references, many of them lazy, like naming a gas station Tyndareus, or Zeus’ dead puppy “Hestia”. In tone it clearly owes much to the television series of AMERICAN GODS, while in content it borrows very heavily from Phillip Pullman’s HIS DARK MATERIALS, and you know I didn’t care for something when I almost say something nice about HDM. It’s not a total loss, and some ideas (the Trojans as refugees living in Crete, the ferryman of the dead being replaced by an actual commuter ferry) are interesting and work, but in their rush to make obvious connections to the contemporary western world Covell’s script quickly dispenses with or just flat out ignores anything from Greek mythology (let alone religion) that doesn’t fit with their agenda of using the Olympian gods as an allegory for The Opressor, (which is either the Catholic Church, the Uber Wealthy, Government Beauracracy, or some combination of all three, depending on where Covell is in the story, and what conflict they need to keep it all going).

So, we get Hera attended by what are essentially tongueless nuns and providing confession/absolution to worshipers. Though Zeus can control the weather, and Poseidon (we are told) is still god of the sea, the various nature deities and celestial gods are noticeably absent, as are all of Zeus’s children who aren’t Dionysus. Though at one point he calls them on the phone, and the season ends with Hera on her way to meet one of them (my guess is Ares or Hephaestus, as a knife she gives King Minos to kill his son, she mentions is made by her own child), there is a sense that Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes, etc. with their generally more sympathetic human interactions and governance of those abstract ideas which actually define our humanity, are too nuanced for Covell’s ham-fisted approach. Hades is specifically defined as the god of death, even though he is actually the god of the underworld, not Death Itself (that would be Thanatos). All of the primordial and most of the cthonic gods are missing, except Persephone, who we are told, is not “family”, though apparently still immortal. Covell even gives us a scene where she goes out of the way to explain that her marriage to Hades is not only romantic (something which is suggested in many classical texts) but seemingly unconnected to the seasons. In fact all of the myths, we are told, are basically lies, though we’re never given a real reason why. I mean, I’m sure it’s going to turn out to be Patriarchy (the early 21s century’s go to explanation for anything it doesn’t like) or Facism or mind control of some kind, but I suspect it’s really because Covell just couldn’t be bothered to think through the complexity of a world where the Gods are not just flawed and complicated, but also necessary and as woven into the fabric of the universe as everything else.

But for Covell, the gods (or at least the Olympians) need to not only be a force of oppression, but one that exists for no other purpose than to oppress mortals. Their very existence is parasitic, as the plot makes clear, justified by propaganda that says only through faith can humans expect to be “renewed”, essentially reincarnated (not outside the bounds of Ancient Greek religion, but certainly not a core belief) but with “a better life” as a reward for their piety, rendering the shadow of the religion in the world of KAOS essentially Christian, if nominally Hellenistic. Covell’s characters even repeatedly use the phrase “Oh my God!” even when they purport to be believers of a religion that is polytheistic. Not that anybody in the story is a non-believer. Humans in the world of KAOS seem to be divided into those who obey the gods, and those whose rebellion largely consists of saying “Fuck the Gods!” Why exactly, when the gods, while not exactly responsible in KAOS, seem largely unconcerned with humanity as a whole? Well, “Because humans do terrible things to each other in the name of Olympus!” says Caeneus (Misia Butler) to Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), both of them mortals destined to help bring down the current divine dynasty, while falling in love, of course, and in spite of having zero chemistry and Eurydice being married to Orpheus (Killian Scott). And though these three, along with Leila Farzad as Cretan princess Ariadne (whose name is annoyingly shorted to Ari, just like Eurydice’s is shorted to Riddy, and Tisiphone’s is shortened to Tisi, and Lachesis is shortened to… Lacky) are supposed to be the rebels we root for, it’s hard not to notice that all their problems are actually with their parents, people who frequently had to make choices at gunpoint. “You always have a choice!” Ariadne screams at Minos, right before she kills him and takes the throne his choices preserved for her.

It’s all very, um… Millenial.

The cast is a who’s who of who is hot and cool (either legitimately or as camp), especially in the queer acting community, but while Misia Butler looks fantastic (his scenes are almost entirely shot in black and white and his skin looks like ice cream) and does his best with a total wet blanket of a character (who I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to ultimately see as The Hero), only Janet McTeer (Hera) and Nabhaan Rizwan (Dionysus) truly rise above the mediocre writing to consistently make it work, with McTeer bringing the gravitas and Rizwan the bulk of the humor that actually lands. It pains me to say this because I fucking love Stephen Dillane but he’s almost unwatchable as a smug Prometheus plotting the downfall of the gods (even though he is one?) and it doesn’t help that he’s forced to do the narrator who breaks the fourth wall shtick that every other show since FLEABAG has done, but this lands closer to ENOLA HOLMES (i.e. worst 4th walk breaks ever) on that continuum. On the stunt casting front, Cathy Tyson shows up (far too briefly) as Alecto, Billie Piper plays the Billie Piper Role TM (Cassandra) in a really adequate way, and Debi Mazar is also here, under utilized in the role of Medusa: a gun set up and never fired (but so little pay off happens in this season of the show that one suspects it isn’t messy writing, just really self-indulgent writing). Most notable is Suzzy Izard, who along with Sam Buttery and Ché, plays The Fates as if they were judges on RuPaul’s Drag Race: fabulous, condescending, and just a little too much, paradoxically making their otherworldly characters feel like somebody you buy coke from. Jeff Goldblum stars as Zeus because even though half the characters are queer and nobody but Zeus and Hera (and Poseidon, who is having sex with Hera) is in a relationship that isn’t interracial, somehow the show still manages to be mostly about a cis hetero white man.

Which was kind of my beef with KAOS from the start, but increasingly so with every episode, as the show tries very hard to feel fresh while all of its major aesthetic pillars (diverse representation in cast, irreverent treatment of classical source material, Fuck the Patriarchy politics, bitchin’ soundtrack of songs from previous eras of social change but refitted for a new generation, captions that FUCK!) feel tired and just the new checklist of must haves for “cool” tv that still wants to be prestige television. Which makes sense because the show wants to sell you radical cultural politics on streaming television and featuring stars that, while perhaps pushing the buttons of whatever Boomers would actually watch this show, are still mostly pretty faces.

And to be clear, it’s not that I have a problem with all the queer representation and inclusive casting- I love it. Mythology- ALL MYTHOLOGY- can and should belong to EVERYBODY. Nor do I have an objection with ancient stories being repurposed to talk about current events and struggles- folklore remains relevant exactly because it uses archetypes and tropes which can expand to encompass a wide variety of details. What I do have is an objection to depicting anyone who isn’t queer and/or of color as either evil, or ignorant, or incompetent, and that happens a lot in television these days, and kind of with a vengeance in KAOS, where ALL the cis het white men are either antagonists or tools, and most of the cis het white women are too (there is one exception, who is a purely sympathetic character, and he gets fed to Scylla). It’s the kind of casting that would get called out were it in reverse, and rightfully so, seeing as its not just character shorthand relying on cultural prejudice, but feels progressively judgemental as the story plays out. It’s also predictable, because assigning character traits and narrative roles sourced in race, gender, and sexuality isn’t just bad politics… it’s bad writing. Even in archetype centric literature like mythology and folklore, the archetypes only become interesting when they’re being challenged by the individual circumstances and personality of the characters.

The Greeks got this. That’s why their Gods were never flawless. They were never all-powerful either. They couldn’t die (in the mortal sense) and they didn’t age (in the conventional way) but they could certainly be contained, stopped, thwarted, defied, pitted against one another, and frequently were. And they had rules they had to follow, just like everyone else. And things they couldn’t change no matter how much they wanted to. It’s the thing contemporary adapters get wrong about… so much, honestly, but especially so when it comes to the Greek Gods and how they weren’t just essential to the human experience: they were the human experience, a personification of all we feel, see, endure, desire, lose, gain… and have to accept. Everything we’re afraid of in ourselves, and everything we aspire to. Without them, the stories of the mortals whose lives they interact with lose not only color and tension, but also a lot of their wonder, poignancy, and relevancy. And while it’s obvious KAOS thinks there must be relevancy (why else give us yet one more retread of this material- especially Orpheus and Eurydice, maybe Greek mythology’s most adapted story?) so much is being lost in the gods vs. humans narrative that is dominating season one, removing not just the nuance from Greek mythology, but from social, cultural, and idealogical conflicts of our contemporary society.

“Tell them to live, but not for the Gods… for themselves,” Caeneus, a person whose favorite thing about being alive was the smell of freshly watered plants, implores Eurydice when it is revealed that she will, in fact, get to accompany Orpheus back to the surface. “Tell them all the best things are human.” Well, sure, many of them are. But so are most of the worst things. And guess what is kind of both, at the same time, and thus more human than anything else?

The Gods.

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Thank you for reading!

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Stuart