The Sandman S1.6
Oct. 6th, 2022 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI've been enjoying the new Netflix Sandman. It's very well cast, and it's done a good job of extracting a linear story from the extremely non-linear comic. The problem for me is that a lot of that linear narrative leans heavily on the Corinthian and I find the the Corinthian unwatchably terrifying! But of course horror is one of the things that Sandman is.
I'm not alone in absolutely loving episode 6, The sound of her wings; it has an absurdly high IMDB rating. But I really did love it, it's just a perfect piece of television. Also, I have thinky-thoughts about it.
So I love the montage where Death is doing her psychopomp thing. (Thank you coverage of the death of QE2 for reminding me of the word psychopomp, due to Paddington Bear being bizarrely cast into the role for Her Majesty.) It's a meaningful meditation on mortality, moving without being mawkish. I watched it a couple of weeks ago but it felt resonant with the sort of thinking about death that happens liturgically at this time of year.
But even though it's very well written, it threw up a lot of questions about how the theology of the Sandman verse is supposed to work. Like, there's a world where Death gently guides people on their journey into the "sunless lands". But there's also a world where the Christian Hell of eternal torment and demons and Lucifer actually exist (as we saw in the also brilliant 1.4, A hope in Hell). Dante's Hell, Milton's Hell, situated in a world where we have some evidence of polytheist gods, an occasional throwaway line which seems to suggest that the Christian God is real in some way. Except there isn't really any Jesus. There is default background Christian culture like churches and crosses and priests and Christian swears, but this Hell seems to exist in isolation with no textual possibility of anyone being saved from it. Are there any non-fallen angels? Is there any Heaven?
It's also a world where Dream can, in fact, make Hob Gadling immortal. I love Hob's storyline, I love it in the comics and the recreation in the TV series is lovely; you can see that the costume designers had a lot of fun portraying both Gadling and Dream himself through the ages! But Dream had already told Roderick and Alex Burgess in the earliest episodes that he doesn't have the power to grant immortality. In the same world, Cain keeps repeatedly killing Abel, buries him in under crosses in apparently Christian graves, and Abel keeps coming back to life. Is this because they are dreams, they are created not by God but by Dream? But they are clearly characters from the Bible!
And, well, one of the things I've always loved about Sandman is that there's just quiet background Judaism running throughout the story. It's a default Christian world, as well as being polytheistic and its own mythos, but there's a little bit of space for Judaism too.lannamichaels recently linked to an article by Dara Horn talking about
So here, in the series of little vignettes of people's encounters with Death, there's a stock character of a cultured elderly European Jewish man. This man loves Schubert in spite of everything, you assume, though it's never really spelled out, that he came to England as a refugee from the Nazis. (In fact the same stock character exists in Paddington, the elderly toyshop owner who is kind to Paddington, to return to a theme.) And when he meets Death, he asks for, and is granted, the chance to recite the deathbed Shema before she takes him. Which is lovely, in a way, and I felt very warm towards the show-writers for it. But again, it raises all kinds of questions. If this man has a marked German accent in his English, why does he recite the Shema in modern Israeli Hebrew? He might do; I'm not sure that using Ashkenazi pronunciation would have been more authentic, and indeed he might well have updated his Hebrew accent over decades living in England where the Israeli pronunciation is the most frequently used. Another choice that I noticed was that he says the Shema for real, he pronounces God's name as Adonai rather than using a euphemism. Which is ok by me but might offend some people as part of a piece of theatre. It felt like the little moment was an offering to people exactly like me, people who are Jewish and would say the Shema like modern-day English Jews, but because it was for me, I could easily imagine the alternative choices that might have been made.
Again, this runs into the theological difficulties of having Death be one of the Endless at all. What does it mean to be Jewish and recite the Shema in a world where Death takes you to the sunless lands? The skeletal or faceless figure with the dark robe and the sickle comes from Christian imagery, and Death-in-Sandman is clearly a riff on that figure. She wears an ankh, which is both a Christian symbol, a type of chi-rho cross, and a Kemetic one. Also I noticed that the Jewish man's request for just a moment to recite the Shema is granted, but when the other characters ask Death for just a moment (eg for the young Black man to unlock his phone for his wife), she says no, it's too late.
Another more minor quibble is that the time doesn't really work. This is part of the problems which arise from the Netflix series being set now, and not at the time the comic books were written. I think this is on the whole a correct choice; making the series a period piece would have distracted from the main point. But occasionally it matters that the 90s was 30 years ago (yes, yes it was). It means that the timings for Dream meeting up with Gadling don't quite add up, for one thing. And there's a slightly awkward extra generation inserted into Unity and Rose Walker's family tree so that the timings make sense. But it's really noticeable to me that the elderly cultured central European Jewish former refugees... aren't with us any more. In my community I grew up with a lot of people like that and almost all of them have gone now. It's just about possible that our dying violinist could be a hundred years old. Old enough to have been more than just a child at the time of WW2, just about young enough to have come to the UK with the Kindertransport maybe. But the people whose culture is primarily German or Austrian are usually people who came here as adults, and the numbers just don't add up any more, because 2022 is not 1992.
And it actually matters, it is really visible to me that in the past ten years or so, WW2 has effectively passed out of living memory. I'm not saying that the Sandman should have dealt with that shift. But it's noticeable that the relationship of the characters to WW2 is that of people from 30 years ago, and in some ways that feels more profoundly anachronistic than the updated clothes and sound track and the way that people have modern smartphones.
PS I'm only caught up to episode 8 so no spoilers for the last two episodes, please!
I'm not alone in absolutely loving episode 6, The sound of her wings; it has an absurdly high IMDB rating. But I really did love it, it's just a perfect piece of television. Also, I have thinky-thoughts about it.
So I love the montage where Death is doing her psychopomp thing. (Thank you coverage of the death of QE2 for reminding me of the word psychopomp, due to Paddington Bear being bizarrely cast into the role for Her Majesty.) It's a meaningful meditation on mortality, moving without being mawkish. I watched it a couple of weeks ago but it felt resonant with the sort of thinking about death that happens liturgically at this time of year.
But even though it's very well written, it threw up a lot of questions about how the theology of the Sandman verse is supposed to work. Like, there's a world where Death gently guides people on their journey into the "sunless lands". But there's also a world where the Christian Hell of eternal torment and demons and Lucifer actually exist (as we saw in the also brilliant 1.4, A hope in Hell). Dante's Hell, Milton's Hell, situated in a world where we have some evidence of polytheist gods, an occasional throwaway line which seems to suggest that the Christian God is real in some way. Except there isn't really any Jesus. There is default background Christian culture like churches and crosses and priests and Christian swears, but this Hell seems to exist in isolation with no textual possibility of anyone being saved from it. Are there any non-fallen angels? Is there any Heaven?
It's also a world where Dream can, in fact, make Hob Gadling immortal. I love Hob's storyline, I love it in the comics and the recreation in the TV series is lovely; you can see that the costume designers had a lot of fun portraying both Gadling and Dream himself through the ages! But Dream had already told Roderick and Alex Burgess in the earliest episodes that he doesn't have the power to grant immortality. In the same world, Cain keeps repeatedly killing Abel, buries him in under crosses in apparently Christian graves, and Abel keeps coming back to life. Is this because they are dreams, they are created not by God but by Dream? But they are clearly characters from the Bible!
And, well, one of the things I've always loved about Sandman is that there's just quiet background Judaism running throughout the story. It's a default Christian world, as well as being polytheistic and its own mythos, but there's a little bit of space for Judaism too.
lannamichaels recently linked to an article by Dara Horn talking about the enmeshed christianity in the english canon, and remarked that
of course you read it IT'S IN EVERYTHING, GET OVER IT.. Yup. Christianity, Christian allusions and assumptions, and all too often more or less overt Christian antisemitism, are in everything. It's very especially in fantasy because all fantasy is descended from Tolkien and Lewis who are Christian to the max. And one of the things I love about Gaiman is that his fantasy, well, it's not completely free of the anxiety of influence that is in all English-language fantasy, but it also just slips outside the parameters set by Tolkien for high fantasy or Lewis for portal fantasy.
So here, in the series of little vignettes of people's encounters with Death, there's a stock character of a cultured elderly European Jewish man. This man loves Schubert in spite of everything, you assume, though it's never really spelled out, that he came to England as a refugee from the Nazis. (In fact the same stock character exists in Paddington, the elderly toyshop owner who is kind to Paddington, to return to a theme.) And when he meets Death, he asks for, and is granted, the chance to recite the deathbed Shema before she takes him. Which is lovely, in a way, and I felt very warm towards the show-writers for it. But again, it raises all kinds of questions. If this man has a marked German accent in his English, why does he recite the Shema in modern Israeli Hebrew? He might do; I'm not sure that using Ashkenazi pronunciation would have been more authentic, and indeed he might well have updated his Hebrew accent over decades living in England where the Israeli pronunciation is the most frequently used. Another choice that I noticed was that he says the Shema for real, he pronounces God's name as Adonai rather than using a euphemism. Which is ok by me but might offend some people as part of a piece of theatre. It felt like the little moment was an offering to people exactly like me, people who are Jewish and would say the Shema like modern-day English Jews, but because it was for me, I could easily imagine the alternative choices that might have been made.
Again, this runs into the theological difficulties of having Death be one of the Endless at all. What does it mean to be Jewish and recite the Shema in a world where Death takes you to the sunless lands? The skeletal or faceless figure with the dark robe and the sickle comes from Christian imagery, and Death-in-Sandman is clearly a riff on that figure. She wears an ankh, which is both a Christian symbol, a type of chi-rho cross, and a Kemetic one. Also I noticed that the Jewish man's request for just a moment to recite the Shema is granted, but when the other characters ask Death for just a moment (eg for the young Black man to unlock his phone for his wife), she says no, it's too late.
Another more minor quibble is that the time doesn't really work. This is part of the problems which arise from the Netflix series being set now, and not at the time the comic books were written. I think this is on the whole a correct choice; making the series a period piece would have distracted from the main point. But occasionally it matters that the 90s was 30 years ago (yes, yes it was). It means that the timings for Dream meeting up with Gadling don't quite add up, for one thing. And there's a slightly awkward extra generation inserted into Unity and Rose Walker's family tree so that the timings make sense. But it's really noticeable to me that the elderly cultured central European Jewish former refugees... aren't with us any more. In my community I grew up with a lot of people like that and almost all of them have gone now. It's just about possible that our dying violinist could be a hundred years old. Old enough to have been more than just a child at the time of WW2, just about young enough to have come to the UK with the Kindertransport maybe. But the people whose culture is primarily German or Austrian are usually people who came here as adults, and the numbers just don't add up any more, because 2022 is not 1992.
And it actually matters, it is really visible to me that in the past ten years or so, WW2 has effectively passed out of living memory. I'm not saying that the Sandman should have dealt with that shift. But it's noticeable that the relationship of the characters to WW2 is that of people from 30 years ago, and in some ways that feels more profoundly anachronistic than the updated clothes and sound track and the way that people have modern smartphones.
PS I'm only caught up to episode 8 so no spoilers for the last two episodes, please!
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-07 01:45 am (UTC)Death serves as a psychopomp, who separates the person from the body. Where they go after that, it turns out, is based partly on where they expect to go. (She allows people more or less time to prepare the way people's bodies do, fast or slow deaths, expected or sudden.) Those who believe that they are destined for the Christian hell will find themselves there, whether or not other parties would say that they deserved it. And Lucifer and the other inhabitants of that hell also wander around, are active agents in the world, so one can wind up in that hell through running into them at the wrong time or in the wrong way. People can be saved from it by other people or powers going in and getting them out. This is also true of every other pantheon and mythos, though some are more active than others; in the comics the Norse and Greek gods are heavily interwoven with Dream's fate. Yes, there is a Christian heaven, and yes, there are unfallen angels. They are not active in the wider world, the only angels we see around doing things are either fallen or neutral (or can plausibly be argued to be one of the two; there are a couple who claim to be unfallen, but events do not necessarily bear that out). We do not see or hear about characters traveling in any way to the Christian heaven, and we do not know who or what is the deity there, or the existential status of Christ. The writers in charge of the overall multiverse are trying, I am not sure how successfully, to make the Christian heaven equivalent to, say, Valhalla, real but not necessarily relevant.
Cain and Abel (who had their own comics series before Sandman, not written by Gaiman, by the way, so are legacy characters written in) became such crucial figures to humanity's folklore that they have acquired a kind of shadowy existence in the realm of Dream. It's entirely possible that they aren't the 'real' Cain and Abel, but the archetypes of them in human story, which is why they are doomed to repeat their psychodrama eternally even as they exist in the space of Dream, and do not act as real human beings would. Adam, Eve, and Lilith may also all be encountered in the D.C.-verse on the borders between Dream and other realms, and many of the inhabitants of both the Christian hell and Dream are explicitly the children of Lilith.
And yes, Dream begs Death for a favor for Hob, and could not have made him immortal by himself, nor can he reverse it.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-07 03:04 am (UTC)