The Gods of America

I've been catching up on American Gods, the prestige TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's book, by cult favorite Bryan Fuller, of Pushing Daisies and Hannibal. It's a combination made in indie Heaven, but the show has gotten rather little traction.

Which is unfortunate, because it has two sizable virtues that set it apart from the fairly generic Gaiman novel that puts folklore scholars in a disdainful lather.

First, its imagery. Only about half of any episode is about plot and characters, but just as great a portion is scenes of some American subculture and gods associated with them. The show combines fluorescent American "kitsch" and modern day depictions of what a god would be like, extremely well. You can see it in the intro credits:



Where you have this totem pole made of religious iconography, turned into neon regalia reminiscent of a fifties diner. All of the religions are like this, with saturated imagery representing both "America as it sees itself" and "the otherworldliness of gods." It combines really well, and is worth watching for this aspect well beyond its generic plot.

Check out for example, the contrast of the Mexican-version-of-Jesus, alongside the decorated rifles used to shoot at him.



Every episode covers a different subcultural religion this way, portrayed alongside Americana like this.

This aesthetic applies to the "New Gods" as well, who represent forces like media and technology. They're done up in an extremely 80's technicolor way, with bad CGI and David Bowie ripoffs.



It's perfect for this hyperrealism which the Prequels and Prometheus approached. They're larger than life manifestations of our modern pathologies, and they're drawn brighter and larger in order to capture that.

This is frankly, the opposite of Gaiman's normal Gothic aesthetic which is dark and fairly drab (see Neverwhere, or Dream from Sandman.)

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The other large part of American Gods is class. Gaiman is a British writer, so he writes in his novels about class the same way American liberals write about race: he openly acknowledges it a great deal, usually making his hero from the oppressed group and his villain from the oppressor group, but it's very shallow and condescending portrayal. It's decaffeinated class - Other deprived of its Otherness. This stays the same even as Gaiman writes about America, with characters like Shadow and Laura nominally being from the lower-class and mixed up with prison, but acting and talking like a New York power couple who are suitably diverse, empowered, and self-aware. There is never anything intimidating about Shadow's Otherness (either his race or his class.) He's just a guy like you and me, and not super different from Mr World.

Bryan Fuller took this nominal inclusion of class, and made it a visceral theme of the entire series. Laura really is a nihilistic trailer trash fuck up (and a zombie to boot.) Shadow is still frankly a decaffeinated black man, but Wednesday, Mad Sweeney, Salim and most of the characters from the god-of-the-week short stories actually take care to depict a different, uncomfortable, and somewhat threatening manner that reflects how we actually feel about the lower class.

It's very hard to do this story without class really. Gaiman is describing an axis of the world portrayed more comprehensively in Max Gladstone's novels with lower-class tribalists who worship their fallen, old gods with blood sacrifice, social conservatism, and communal sharing, who are in various stages of conflict with upper-class ascendant lawyers who have crushed the gods and seek to structure society and reality around absolute rules where the most ingenious can flourish and be free of prejudice. More recently, columnist Ross Douthat described it as "ethnonationalist backlash against cosmopolitan finance capitalism."

So the ascendant New Gods are best represented as these upper-class figures. Which Gaiman does with his normal "dark and mysterious aura of entitlement to control everything." Fuller updates them to the current modes of the American upper class and the dialect they use, being less about shadows and luxury, and more about moral presumption and fashionableness.

For instance, after Kid Technology has hung the protagonist Shadow from a tree, he later is forced to apologize for this:

I'm sorry. For lynching you. Hanged a dark-skinned man. Ugh. Was in very poor taste. We're in a weird, tense place racially in America, and I don't want to add to that climate of hatred.

Which is a perfectly hilarious sendup of "I just brutally tried to kill you, but let me frame it in terms of racial symbolism" which our upper class is much more comfortable talking about. (And if it is at all unclear, this is definitely depicted as an insincere, cop-out apology.) It's glib and distancing from the real pain, like a corporate diversity seminar at a company that manufactures tasers.