Carnivale

This column first appeared in the Age on December 18, 2004

"To each generation is born a creature of light and a creature of darkness," says Sampson, (Twin Peak's Michael J. Anderson) the head of the carnival - and so begins a journey across the dustbowls of American. The year is 1934 a time when poverty and over-cropping led to massive dust storms that filled people's lungs with dust, and had the weight of the apocalypse.

Carnivale is the new series from HBO, and it won five Emmy's in this year's Creative Arts categories. The Art Direction, cinematography and costumes are wonderful. Attempts to pretty things up have been avoided: freaks, psychics, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, strong men and snake charmers dress as their poverty befits, allowing the characters to provide dignity through sheer force of personality. Dust billows across the landscape, beautiful and menacing.

If Carnivale was on the commercials you'd be chasing it anytime from 10.30 pm on but on the ABC, we get to see it without ads, at 8.30 p.m., on a Sunday night. The series is impressive in so many ways - which is why its substantial failings are so disappointing. What we have here is perfect miniseries material, stretched to 12 hours (run as two hours over six Sundays) and apparently beyond (a second series is in production). Carnivale has a density of performance, visual style and emotional intensity over which a plot is thinly and frustratingly drawn.

The series premise is a big one: the final conflict between good and evil on earth. But for a show that suggests it will tackle God head on, it wallows in vague, and unresolved ambiguities. At first you wonder whether this ambiguity is to make a theological point but in the end it just feels messy. Instead of Milton's Paradise Lost, or even Angels in America, we have Freaks meets the X-Files. Much as the residents of Carnivale reside in limbo, the show itself is trapped between high and low culture, without drawing on the strengths of either. Its production values are high culture, but the script lacks the associated complexity. Nor does Carnivale allow the emotional pleasures of character identification or resolution more popular shows reward their viewers with. The result feels highly theatrical and distancing.

The central chracter is Ben Hawkins (Nick Stahl), an escapee from a chain gang, who is plagued by violent nightmares. On the day he buries his mother in the hard earth outside her shack, he is picked up by a travelling carnival. It quickly becomes clear that he has a healer's powers, powers his mother refused, even when dying, because she felt they were the work of the devil. In a separte but we assume, related plot, Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown), a small-town Methodist pastor, is also plagued with apocalyptic dreams and visions and also has physic powers. He has an evil air, that contrasts with Ben's grumpy saintliness.

For me the real soul of the show was not to be found characters, like Ben, who are meant to be dealing in soul, but in the Carnival inhabitants; Ruthie, snake charmer and mother to the strong man; Lila, the bearded lady; Jonesy, Samson's right-hand man and the gruff manager; Sofie, the tarot card reader and medium for her comatose mind-reader mother, Apollonia; Gecko, deformed with a rare condition that resembles the skin of a lizard and the emcee father Stumpy whose wife, Rita Sue, and daughters Dora Mae and Libby, are exotic dancers who turn the occassional trick. It is they who give Carnivale heart, while the batttle between dark and light blows around them like so much hot air.

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