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Phillips, Maya . New York Times (Online) , New York: New York Times Company. Oct 19, 2020.
FULL TEXT
The HBO series, which just wrapped up its first season, aimed to upend stereotypes and create a heroic Black story
set in Jim Crow America. But it delivered a muddled narrative with sloppy execution.
This essay includes spoilers for the first season of “Lovecraft Country.”
H.P. Lovecraft was both a founding father of modern horror and a deeply committed racist, a symbolic portent of
the general disregard the genre would have, for most of its history, for creators and performers of color.
The HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” created by Misha Green and based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name,
aimed to pull off a clever trick: to use Lovecraft’s themes (ancient cults, the cost of magic) and aesthetics
(creeping dread, oozing monsters) to create a heroic narrative about the very race of people he so grossly reviled,
and in the process expand the Black horror canon. In the show, which wrapped up its first season on Sunday,
Lovecraftian terrors appear in 1950s Jim Crow America, where a Black family faces racism, wizardry and
mystifying beasts.
However, “Lovecraft Country” mostly delivers a muddled narrative with sloppy execution. The series seems to want
to upend racial and sexual stereotypes by providing nuanced, complex characters but more often ends up
reinforcing those same stereotypes, serving offensive messages about Blackness, queerness, sexuality and gender
in tasteless, gratuitous ways.
The story begins with a Black Korean War veteran named Atticus (Jonathan Majors) going on a journey with his
childhood friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) and uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to track down his missing father.
He’s led to Ardham, a nexus of supernatural happenings in backwoods Massachusetts —an analog of the Arkham
from many Lovecraft tales —where they discover an ancient cult of white magicians who need Atticus for their
nefarious plans. It’s an encouraging start, promising the kind of interwoven supernatural and societal horrors that
Jordan Peele, an executive producer on the series, employed adeptly in films like “Get Out” and “Us.”
And yet, it doesn’t take "Lovecraft Country” long to cross the line between mining the past and exploiting it for the
purposes of its convoluted fiction. The series shamelessly name-drops events and figures from Black history as if
crossing off squares on a racial Bingo card.
In Episode 3, Leti buys a house that’s haunted by the ghost of a white doctor who performed heinous experiments
on Black people, and by the spirits of the victims themselves. One of the ghosts is named Anarcha —a reference to
an actual slave who endured surgery, without anesthesia, by the white doctor J. Marion Sims, whose medical
advances earned him the title of the father of modern gynecology. But “Lovecraft Country,” which essentially uses
her name as a kind of macabre Easter egg for its own purposes, ends up doing not much more than the history
books that have overlooked her.
Anarcha is not the only victim. Episode 8 begins with Emmett Till’s funeral and references his murder several
times, but it has no bearing on the actual narrative; the series shows no awareness of how dropping in the tragedy
for no apparent reason, other than to signal social relevance, is a graceless act of sensationalism. A jaunt back in
time to the Tulsa riots also plays as an unabashed attempt to get points for relevance. (See a different HBO series,
“Watchmen,” for a more intentional and nuanced incorporation of Black history into a fictional narrative.)
“Lovecraft Country” is a perfect example of a series that uses Black trauma as narrative currency. The real
DETAILS
Subject: Girls; Trauma; Racism; Race; Oppression; Black history; Rape; Sexuality; Stereotypes
Identifier / keyword: Television Green, Misha Lee, Abbey (1987- ) Majors, Jonathan (1989- ) Mosaku,
Wunmi Smollett, Jurnee Vance, Courtney B Williams, Michael Kenneth Lovecraft
Country (TV Program)
Section: arts
LINKS
Find It at University of Chicago Library