Premiere of ‘Lovecraft Country’: Monsters fantastic and all too real

Towards the end of the premiere of HBOs Lovecraft Country, a cop car crawls to a halt on an old, winding road in Massachusetts in the 1950s. It’s sunny, and three Black travelers have pulled themselves together to observe the adjacent forests. Two of them – the main characters of the show, Tic (Jonathan Majors) and Leti (Jurnee Smollett) – stand on the side of the road, staring at the mass of trees. Tic’s uncle, George (Courtney B. Vance), rests wearily in her car. That’s when he sees the police car approaching.

What follows is a well-known narrative. The officer, who is white, runs to her car with a loaded rifle in hand. He demands that the group report their business and inform them that if they are not out of the province after sunset, it will be his “sworn duty to hang each of you on these trees.” As they try to escape the province, he follows close behind, sometimes crashing his front bumper into the back of their car. It is not a false image. Things like this the happen, in places like these.

That’s the point Lovecraft Country builds up in its initial installation. In about 40 minutes beforehand, we are introduced to a world of rigid extremes. Segregation and sundown cities exist because of exceptional racism. Black people are being held back by a riot of over-racist whites. Killer cops, arsenic firefighters, teenagers with panthers performing monkey impressions – they all ride this world. The spectacle of whites at its most vicious rules is supreme.

The first time we see Tic, it’s in a dream. He’s a soldier in a battlefield that resembles a scene from War of the worlds. After a UFO descends a woman painted in red and a Kraken-like monster bursts from the ground (a reference to the show’s namesake, HP Lovecraft), a stand-in Jackie Robinson kills the creature and splits it in two with his baseball bat. But the monster forms again, because of course it does; the game is rigged. Then Tic wakes up.

The episode begins, in real life, on a segregated bus that Kentucky has just entered. The scene is the first entrance in the world that Lovecraft Country hopes to send on screen. The bus breaks off, and Tic and another Black traveler are forced to enter the city – the emergency shuttle is for whites only. We learn that Tic is a Korean war veteran and an avid fan of pulp horror novels, despite knowing their racist tribe. “I love that the heroes take part in adventures in other worlds, defeat unpredictable opportunities, defeat the monster, save the day,” he explained, unaware that he was accidentally describing his own fate. Tic returns from Florida to Chicago to search for his father, who is mysteriously missing. The last Tic to hear from his father was through an early letter urging him to request a “long-lost inheritance” from his family of his deceased mother in fictional Ardham, Massachusetts. The relationship between these two men is a cloud that hangs over the series.

In Chicago, Tic’s Uncle George is the author and publicist of the Safe negro travel guide, a fictional spinoff about real life Negro motorist green book, or in short, the Green Book– a guide for black travelers to avoid segregated restaurants and hotels along the great American plaza during the Jim Crow era. His wife Hippolyta wants a bigger role in the publishing process, as at least George accompanied on the research missions for the manual. He evades at first because of the ‘danger’, but relays later. Diana, her daughter, is an aspiring illustrator who sketches comic books for each of George’s road trips. Showrunner Misha Green structures the neighborhood in which she lives as a place of rest in a world where families like hers are uniquely vulnerable. Unfortunately for them, this is a story about other dangerous and unknown worlds, and we do not stay long in Chicago – George agrees to help Tic find his father, while Leti, a childhood friend whose backstory is glaringly unexplined.

During the travel part of the episode – as the group travels from the Midwest to the Northeast – a monologue by James Baldwin plays in the background. The group stops at segregated restaurants and orders at ‘colored’ entrances, while Baldwin notes that “the inequality of the negro in the United States has hindered the American dream.” At a gas station, a white teenager howls like a monkey at Tic, who eats a banana while pumping fuel. At one point, the group passes a long line of Black women and men, waiting at a bus stop directly in front of a sign depicting a white family in a car. The sign, which has been used in other pieces of pop culture over the years, reads “There’s No Place Like America Today!”

The Baldwin monologue ends abruptly just before the Simmonsville group enters, where they are immediately chased out of town by a group of German shepherd-owning firefighters. Subsequently, these images show a constant, endless gauntlet of a world – one that serves the group as a mere fact of its existence. For Tic, Leti and George, meeting the police officer on that old winding road in Massachusetts is no anomaly; it is a normal, daily occurrence.

There’s a moment, right after the group fails to escape the sheriff, that should be the crescendo of the episode. They are escorted by him and his deputies into the forest, where they will be killed. But like the Baldwin clip that precedes it, the scene feels nowhere incomplete. Instead of focusing on the everyday people who condone and promote segregated landscapes like New England’s, Lovecraft Country centers the group’s journey at least among them, which are cartoonishly evil. In the final minutes of the episode, when a suit with poly-eyed Lovecraftian vampires interrupts what the group’s performance might have been, the show, essentially, shows the older question of the horror genre. : ‘Who, really, are the monsters here? “The problem for Lovecraft Country is that they, in defiance of the mundane functions of American racism, have created two equally burlesque horrors.

History lesson: Sundown Towns

This episode is aptly titled “Sundown,” a reference to the dark history of “sundown cities” in America. Despite the popular Hollywood story, segregation was not a very southern phenomenon. After the Civil War ended, and the racial breakthroughs of the Reconstruction were lost by a combination of white backwardness and apathy, cities of northern, western and midwest began to expel their Black populations. In those decades, by historians called “the Nadir”, the seeds of Jim Crow were planted all over the country. That distinction is integral to the world that Lovecraft Country trying to portray.

In the South, during this period, institutional racism was defined by a combination of exploitative labor practices (lease and charm of convicts) and rampant racial terrorism (lynchings, the emergence of the KKK, “racial riot”). And although many of these things happened above the Mason-Dixon Line, the main area of ​​contention in Northern race relations during this period was housing. During the same time frame in which white Southerners returned duly elected Black government officials, threatened Northern and Western cities and, in some cases, to kill their Black neighbors in the hope of massively purging the areas in which they lived. With the removal of its Black population, rural towns and municipalities around the country have passed laws making it illegal for Blacks to own property, or even go to sundown. Many cities have explicitly warned neighbors that Blacks should not “leave the sun here on you.”

Sundown cities existed in every Northern, Western, and Midwestern state in the country. Even now, their legacy lives on in the form of de facto segregation. Because generations of Black families were excluded and cleansed of Northern white suburbs and rural communities, now – even though laws explicitly prohibiting Black residents are illegal – the descendants of those excluded Black families have a fraction of the generations wealth that do their white opposites. Because local governments still lack the means to integrate these precious suburban and rural cities (and in combination with race management into real estate), the modern American landscape is still inextricably linked to the legacy of sundown cities.

The physical terrain that Lovecraft Country relied upon for its institutions is to blame for the same history. A trip from Chicago to Massachusetts in the 1950s – as the Tic, Leti and George began – would have been impossible to make without sundowning a city. That’s why George would publish The Safe Manual for Negro Rain in the first place: to help black travelers avoid the spaces on the map in which their citizenship is most doubted.

Book report: The Count of Monte Cristo

About halfway through the premiere, there’s a scene where Tic walks into his father’s abandoned apartment. He takes a book from one of his father’s shelves and takes it with him to the bedroom. The book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Roughly speaking, the book revolves around a member of the French elite who, a few days before his wedding date, is framed for betrayal and thrown in jail. Eventually he escapes and (after finding buried treasure on a deserted island) he renames himself the Earl of Monte Cristo. Influenced by his newly acquired resources, the count spent decades searching for revenge against the men responsible for his imprisonment.

One of the biggest themes in Dumas’ book is injustice. The count is a person of color in ancient French society who is wrong and unable to turn to the law for help, and therefore must do his own justice. The character was inspired by Dumas’ father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas – a man born into slavery who rose to the highest rank of Black military in the Western world (up to Colin Powell). If there is one link between the book and Lovecraft Country it is this: All these characters – Tic, the Count, Leti, George – must create their own justice in a society that moves them to destroy them. Doing so has driven them and morphed into something other than what they would have been if they had had the privilege of not fighting. If Dumas’ work is a clue to viewers, it’s that Tic, Leti and George somehow all have to deal with what they had to become in order to survive.

One long question

Here’s where we stand after one episode. The group – Tic, Leti, George – has survived a truly horrific road trip. They were insulted, abducted and shot. They were held at gunpoint by a white sheriff who was so racist that even after biting his shoulder by a vampire, he was somehow still able to throw more slurps at her. But just when it looked like they were all coming, a bunch of strange dog whistles went off into the surrounding woods and the vampires just … ran away. The next morning, our crews, still awake in blood, head over to a giant house and are greeted by a blond-haired, blue-eyed mystery man who indicates that “they” have been waiting for them. So this is the question: If the monsters in Lovecraft Country really are the people, why should Tic, Leti and George have to trust their newfound saviors?