Dec 25: Will Slattery, Pray and Work

Pray and Work

Will Slattery

*

When setting out to find a topic for this year’s Advent Calendar/Media Club essay series I noticed that the 3 most aesthetically rewarding games I’ve played over the past half-decade—Disco Elysium (a post-Soviet, Marxist humanist cRPG about an alcoholic disaster of a police detective), NORCO (a point-and-click cyberpunk Southern Gothic bayou-noir fever-dream “search for a missing brother” visual novel—incidentally also recently discoursed and Advent’d by Ander a few days ago here on Essay Daily), and Pentiment (a narrative adventure game involving interlinked alpine murder mysteries in Reformation-era Bavaria) —share a set of common features: intricately detailed settings & a protagonist-detective (professional or ad-hoc) investigating the contours of those settings. This piece is set to complete our annual Advent series (a daily-posting conceit in imitation of a liturgical calendar) on Christmas Day (a central Christian holiday) so it seems only fitting to dive into the pages of Pentiment, a remarkable game with unparalleled poly-vocal poly-textual poly-textural poly-typographic depictions of the relationship between religion and daily human life.

In its most basic sense Pentiment is the story of Andreas Maler, a 16th Century journeyman limner & painter from Nuremberg who finds himself trudging through a series of contracts at a scriptorium (a monastic workshop where priestly scribes copy and decorate manuscripts; by the time of Pentiment the scriptorium is nearing obsoletion and facing replacement by secular urban workshops) in the double Abbey of Kiersau, home to a set of Benedictine monks and Benedictine nuns in adjoining cloistered buildings. The abbey houses both the scriptorium and a small relic site for pilgrims, and it sits atop a high hill adjoining the town of Tassing, an isolated but important mountain pass stopover town in the Bavarian Alps.

Kiersau Abbey.

Andreas is a temporary visitor to Kiersau and Tassing, and in several ways his life in rural Bavaria kind of sucks. He needs to finish a masterwork to move upwards in his artists' guild, but he gets very little time to work on his own projects in the scriptorium. As a site of production, the monastic scriptorium is dark, cold, isolated, under-resourced, backwards, a dying economic model & a thoroughly strange place for a modern, educated, urban artist like Andreas to end up. Everybody else who works in the scriptorium is a priest with Benedictine garb & the deliberately unflattering clerical haircut we call the tonsure. 2 of these priests are kindly but age-hobbled; 1 of them is a young Burgundian seething with omnidirectional resentment at the prospect of spending the next 40 years of his life hunched over an easel, drawing margin decorations in one of the continent’s last scriptoriums (imagine, for modern comparison, a young man from the Bay Area whose family sought to get him an internship but instead locked him into a lifelong contract designing rotary phones). Elsewhere in the abbey the abbot is a dick, and the head of the priory is a dick. It is 1518 A.D., one year after Martin Luther begins circulating his 95 Theses, and so all the clergy and the educated strata of Bavaria are mired in contentious theological debates that Andreas struggles to sidestep. To continue moving up in his guild Andreas also needs to acquire a good Christian wife and produce a good Christian child. His family has already arranged a marriage to solve the first of these, and the uncertainty that shrouds his fiancée and future marriage is a constant source of stress. The townsfolk and peasants who live near the abbey are sometimes friendly, sometimes not, and each down to the last faces or participates in the dramatic, violent social upheavals that will later be known as the Protestant Reformation and the German Peasants’ War.

Poor Andreas!

The scribes at work.

Amidst all these grim personal conditions, Andreas Maler finds himself forced to play detective for multiple murder mysteries in Kiersau Abbey and the town of Tassing. Andreas’ murder investigations become an occasion for us, the players, to investigate the historical and social conditions in which the monks, the nuns, the townsfolk, and the rural peasants navigate their lives. In his life Andreas solves (or tries to solve) mysteries and as a vessel for us he opens the mysteries of 16th Century life.

In that bigger sense Pentiment is many, many things: a fictive documentary about late-medieval and early-modern manuscript production; a series of micro-portraits of grief and loss; a tableaux of priestly personality types; a nun-heavy sex comedy; a collection of manual-labor-themed point-and-click mini-games; a debate over the metaphysical nature of the Eucharist; a set of small-town Bavarian romances; a snapshot of the formation of a new European middle class which will eventually wreck feudal systems and transform them into a new political order; a psychological profile of an anchoress who bars herself up alone in a room to spend the whole of her life apart from the world contemplating the divine; a revenge tale about the demise of a baron rapist; an archaeology of Roman settlement in southern Germany; a lament for the suffering of the peasanty; an ode to peasant revolts; an anecdote about a near-blind nun who can tell her neighbor-artists apart by the scents their preferred pigments and paints leave behind when smeared on their hands and clothes; a chronicle of a clandestine gay affair between monks; and an investigation into a small town's sense of public memory.

Pentiment affords so many rich and diverse readings because of the density and specificity of textural details about 16th Century Bavarian Catholic life it provides. The game's visual style and user interface recall the manuscripts and woodblock printings of the late medieval and early modern eras (consider for reference the late 15th Century Nuremberg Chronicle, not coincidentally also the location of Andreas' hometown). Reproducing the style, the coloration, the line work, the position and spacing between text and image, etc of the period's major works in the game's interface allows us to feel embodied in that world of text and image in a way that reproduces some degree of what a real-life Andreas would have felt.

Andreas' in-progress masterwork.

The Fifth Day of Creation in the Nuremberg Chronicle.

In lieu of voice acting Pentiment offers a system of typographical characterization. Each time a character speaks you hear the onomatopoetic scritch-scratch of a writing instrument and see the letters of their reply fill in left-to-right one by one. Every character uses an individually modified version of a different typeface which reflects both their social standing, their educational background, and their relationship with the written words of this world. Shop-keeps and craftsmen use a simple, quick, efficient scribe script. Farmers and day-laborers dash off text that sometimes features phonetic spellings or hasty re-corrections. The learned clergy, steeped in centuries of manualist-scholastic tradition, favor a slow, dense, spacious Gothic blackletter font whose level of ornament is sometimes difficult to read. Educated city-dwellers like Andreas, influenced by the new learning of the Renaissance, use a sleek, precise script with elegant i and j dots. All this script play isn't just novelty. It's an essential representation of the relationship between each character and the intellectual forces of their world. Each time they speak they re-inscribe on the page the superstructures of education, theological tradition, and social position that locate, categorize, and specify them in their world. For a more detailed account of the creation of these typefaces, take a look at the creators' account here.

The major script types.

Monastic gothic script.

Andreas' Renaissance-influenced humanist script.

The most stunning moment of typographical characterization in the game comes when you first meet Claus Drucker, the town's modern, warm, reform-minded-but-not-radical printer and pamphleteer. His text renders through a different, very fast process--you see a row of inverted characters and a flash of dark squares and then his statement appears all at once rather than letter-by-letter, mimicking the physical process of mechanical type stamping ink down on a page.

Pentiment's gameplay zone is a 2d plane framed by the user interface as a text (with zoom-out marginalia, of course) and it uses this frame to provide instructive-but-not-didactic contexts on the game's deep historical content:

Sometimes this plane reproduces historical sources, as when Claus comments on the 12 Articles of the Peasants, a list of theological, political, and economic demands circulated during the German Peasants' War which Andreas will eventually find himself swept up in:

Andreas' interior states are given textual and painterly representation in the same manuscript plane. From time to time he drifts off to a Memory Palace/Court of the Mind, where he meets personifications of the various virtues of his age in figures recognizable to his cultural and intellectual background: Prester John (a mythic Christian king associated with bravery and heroism), Dante's Beatrice (emblematic of Christian grace, kindness, and charity), Socrates (philosophic wisdom and higher learning), and St. Grobian (a fictive folk saint of the coarse, the vulgar, the rapscallions, the thieves, and the fools of the world). From time to time these figures sound off in his head, offering advice or reproach, representing the push and pull of different influences from all the images, texts, and traditions colliding at the specific historic coordinates of one Andreas Maler.

Holding court.

Grobian and his ship of fools.

The court at work in Andreas' mind.

Sometimes the manuscript plane becomes a shared mental or cultural space. Sister Illuminata, one of the librarians at the abbey, wants to confiscate and burn a certain heretical text that has been banned for years by at least 3 different bishops. Andreas has the chance to plead with her on the book's behalf, and the conversation expands to one in which Illuminata and Andreas discourse the role of women in Catholic tradition and the legitimacy of ecclesiastical authority over texts. Illuminata's positions don't parse neatly into modern equivalents (she gives a moving account of the plight of women in the patriarchal feudal system and rejects the historic tendency to demonize women as seducers, as weak, as prostitutes, as the source of sin--but she also sincerely and enthusiastically supports the authority of the bishops to ban and burn books). As they talk Andreas and Illuminata slide in-and-out of the manuscript planes of the exemplar texts they discuss.

A scene from the Aeneid

Andreas and Illuminata enter the text.

Illuminata on the role of women in Catholic life.

Illuminata on literary depictions of women in the West.

Illuminata is no fan of chivalric romances.

Illuminata and a willful Andreas.

No tolerance for heresy.

A small but marvelous sequence of shared cultural space involves Brother Sebhat, a priest visiting from Ethiopia who is drawn with different proportion, shading, and outline than everyone else in the game. 

This is because Sebhat is drawn according to the artistic traditions of Ethiopian manuscript art rather than the Western traditions Andreas participates in. (For a more detailed account of the stylistic differences please consult this excellent article by art historian Blair Apgar).

Sebhat teaches and comforts the people of Tassing by preaching of two miracles: the multiplication of the loaves and fishes to feed many thousands & the raising of Lazarus from the dead. These are familiar stories to the people of Bavaria--they represent in plain, literal, undeniable terms Christ's victory over hunger and Christ's victory over death. As Sebhat preaches, the Bavarian Christians find themselves stepping into a visual story at once both familiar and different, as the miracles are rendered in an Ethiopian manuscript style:

Brother Sebhat preaches of Christ multiplying loaves and fishes.

Brother Sebhat preaches of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead.

The abbey is a repository of learning, and a site for the production and reproduction of beautiful and sacred texts. It is also, in the context of the pre-modern feudal Bavarian economy, the literal landlord to most of the town. The clergy as a class, in addition to having the privilege of compelling certain rents, tithes, and forms of labor from the townsfolk, are ensconced in symbiotic political and economic relations with the armed nobility who use brute, physical force to maintain social order. When Andreas isn't diving into the pages of illuminated manuscripts in the library or scriptorium he has more immediate tasks at hand: namely, solving time-sensitive murder mysteries whose repercussions will affect the entire social order of Tassing and Kiersau. Pentiment constructs an interesting and essential counterpart to all the lofty intellectual and textual history we see above. It uses the same detective-investigating-historical-conditions conceit and the manuscript plane of game space to illustrate the quotidian economic realities of life and labor for the villagers and peasants down the hill who support the abbey's way of life.

Life in Tassing and Kiersau runs along the rhythms of the Divine Office, a set of structured prayers (lauds, matins, vespers, etc) said at specific points in the day. The Divine Office isn't quite a clock, but it determines what times of day are used for what tasks in both the abbey and the town. The structure of the day and the passage of time in Pentiment are illustrated with a revolving wheel showing the sections of the Divine office.

The Canonical Hours

In order to solve his murder-mysteries Andreas has to use his limited free time to investigate clues and speak with possible witnesses and suspects. This usually takes the form of tagging along while a villager either completes their daily labor or eats their daily lunch in order to pepper them with questions and hopefully get useful answers and clues. Andreas participates in the daily toil of the village alongside the workers while chatting with them and at mealtime he shares in whatever sustenance they have to offer. Both the process of work and the lunches themselves are rendered in the 2d manuscript plane in ways that highlight the textures of daily life with the same depth and richness that the manuscript plane uses to depict intellectual and spiritual life via illuminated texts. Working with the blacksmith is loud, fast, energetic, busy, buoyant, propulsive, a proto-industry; working with the women to spin thread is slower, more communal but strictly gender-divided (Andreas, as an unmarried man, must stand outside the room of weaving maidens and work in tandem while chatting through a window), a space to share gossip and news, but it also requires immense dexterity. If you visit the wealthy semi-feudal semi-bourgeois miller he invites you to go hunting with him (game hunting in the time period is a rare right, usually reserved for the most elite, forbidden by law to the peasants) and up in the mountains he unspools a set of loathsome, rapacious monologues that make it clear why the other townsfolk hate him. The lunch sequences require you to click through various foods that show what the daily bread of that character's particular class might be. All of these serve to ground the game's intellectual and theological content and remind us that the systems that produce manuscripts, theology, time for clerics to contemplate the divine, etc, are dependent on the daily labor of countless working people.

A modest lunch of bread, cheese, and almonds.

Working together to spin thread.

Andreas struggles with spinning.

The motto of the Benedictine orders (to which the nuns and monks of Kiersau belong) is "ora et labora", in English, pray and work. This seems a fitting note to end on, given that prayer and work in 16th Century Bavaria are what Pentiment so excellently explores. The traditions and rhythms of the abbey govern life in Tassing, but Tassing is not without change. The game takes place over several decades and no matter how you resolve the mysteries by the very end, past the Peasants' War and deep into the Reformation, time will mark itself not by the Divine Office but, for better or worse, by a new mechanical clock:

*

An Advent Coda: thank you all, dear writers and dear readers, for writing and reading our annual Advent Calendar. This is the final piece for this year, but we plan to continue our Media Club series into the next year. Feel free to find Will or Ander or both over to the right and send an email if you'd like to pitch us a piece. Happy holidays and Merry Christmas from Will, Ander, and all of Essay Daily!

*

Will Slattery helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on very rare occasion (wjaslattery) and posts sundry personal content on Instragram (wjasity) rather frequently.

Dec 24: Geramee Hensley, Digital Mind Wave

 

*

Digital Mind Wave

Geramee Hensley

*

"Too much hope is the opposite of despair... an overpowering love may consume you in the end." —Vincent Valentine, Final Fantasy VII 

(Note: Spoilers for Final Fantasy VII)

*

Searing through the sky, a terminal diagnosis burns red, blue, purple, pink. The third act of Final Fantasy VII begins after the heroes fail to stop the end of the world. Sephiroth, the antagonist—you’ve probably heard of him, even if you never played FFVII—summons a giant meteor. A calamity so large, it consumes the screen’s periphery as you zoom around the overworld in the airship you stole from the Big Evil Corporation exploiting the earth. Later, an inconsolable dirge supplants the optimistic and adventurous main theme you’ve been accustomed to so far. 

Memory is an image rendered by electricity and seen by the heart alone. The cosmology of FFVII states the planet itself has memory. All living things die, and their spirits return to the planet as currents of beautiful wispy green waves swirling under the dirt. An individual’s memories don’t die with their body; the planet folds them into its own. 

The Big Evil Corporation, Shinra Electric Power Company, constructs massive reactors to extract and process the lifestream into a usable form of energy. Shinra promises big dividends and jobs to the lifestream-rich towns who agree to the construction, and towns who don’t consent befall sudden and “coincidental” tragedies. Towns who do agree watch the landscape wither, drained of its memory and spirit. 

An act of ecoterrorism ignites the plot of FFVII. You are Cloud, an ex-SOLDIER. SOLDIER is a class of supersoldiers—the true elite of Shinra’s military. So, Cloud defects; he becomes a mercenary; and a childhood friend—Tifa—reconnects with Cloud and recruits him into a little terrorism. You have to blow up a data center—I mean reactor. 

*

When I was eight years old, my parents took me to see Moulin Rouge! in theaters. Satine, the heroine played by Nicole Kidman, falls in love with the penniless poet and hopelessly idealistic romantic Christian. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman really bring their A-game to the zany, tragic, campy, garish, all-over-the-place script but nothing, nothing, nothing outshines the music and their vocal performances.
     The Duke of Monroth arranges a contract to bind Satine to him in exchange for funding the Moulin Rouge’s extravagant theater production—a mise en abyme. In a silly little mix up, Satine mistakes Christian for The Duke, falls in love, and this error threatens the lives of our protagonists and the financial solvency of the cabaret. Very early on, the film establishes that Satine has consumption. She coughs blood into a handkerchief, and a terminal diagnosis burns red, blue, purple, pink. 

Satine tries to destroy Christian’s love for her to save his life. She picks The Duke, tells the writer to get lost, and she ultimately fails, when at the climax, Satine and Christian reprise the only original track written for the movie, "Come What May," in an utterly heartwrenching, effusive duet. Satine and Christian reaffirm their love; the ideals of the Bohemian Revolution—beauty, truth, freedom, and love—emerge victorious. The owner of the Moulin Rouge punches The Duke, and a gun flies out of The Duke’s hand, leaps out a window, and cartoonishly sails through the sky and ricochets off the Eiffel tower. 

Amor vincit omnia. The curtains fall. Satine, overcome with her illness, dies in Christian’s arms as he weeps helplessly into the cold and sweaty air. 

*

Ten years pass, and Square Enix releases a prequel to FFVII—Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. In Crisis Core, you play as Zack Fair, an excitable 2nd Class SOLDIER who aspires to reach the highest rank, 1st Class, like his mentor Angeal. All of the 1st Class SOLDIERS look like J-pop artists. They are boiz who like to hang out and get all sweaty together training including Sephiroth, who has not yet gone full-genocidal, but is a respected war hero—so still a bit genocidal.
     Final Fantasy VII as a series, like Moulin Rouge!, knows when to not take itself not-so seriously. Outrageous humor lines the impending doom of all you know. The original game features a cross-dressing minigame to break into a brothel-keeper’s den. Crisis Core goes into detail about Sephiroth’s hair care routine to achieve his luscious silver locks.
     Crisis Core also introduces a gameplay component called the “Digital Mind Wave.” The DMW represents Zack’s memories. It’s a slot machine spinning in the top-left corner of the screen with pictures of everyone you meet throughout the story. When the numbers stop and line up, you level up, get a temporary buff; or, when the faces match, you revisit a scene with that character then channel their memory into a devastating attack themed after who you remember. 

A hidden equation in the game’s programming forces its hand on the scale. Progress through the game, and your chance of leveling up increases. Meet a new character, and the game adds their portrait to your DMW. A plot point occurs with specific characters and the likelihood of seeing their face rises. At times a robotic woman’s voice announces “MODULATING PHASE” as the game zooms in on the DMW and you watch the pictures align—sometimes in a dramatic fashion: the slot machine is one off, and then BAM, it snaps-to and forces the reels to match.

During the most tense moments of the story, the DMW goes into a state of heightened emotions. The blue-ish green outlines turns yellow and red. The wheel accelerates, sparks fly, and memories cut into gameplay. Triggers, triggers, triggers. While you fight, images of your friends flash on the screen then fade to signal what’s going through Zack’s mind. Modulating Phase. The recurrence, the bright sounds, the flash—the player’s lack of agency in all this heightens the emotions for them, too. 

*

In 2025, I began EMDR therapy. EMDR introduces a gameplay component called “bilateral stimulation,” which in my case meant holding two buzzers like controllers that would alternate with vibrations in my hands as my therapist walked with me through my memories.
     We outlined my life. 

We identified moments of heightened emotions. 

I was told it was like a train ride. You travel the path, and things zip by you. You notice. You keep going. The slot machine spins. Sometimes it spins faster. Images flash. Bright, beautiful things. Your therapist asks what do you notice? 

*

Moulin Rouge! transformed me at an early age. Unasked, it loops and reminds me of my mother. The movie made me more like her—a penniless poet, a hopelessly idealistic romantic. A slot machine with the faces of everyone I love spins in my head.

*

I replayed FFVII a month after my mom died. Act 2 of the story closes with the death of one of the main characters, Aerith. It’s one of the most famous deaths in all of video game history, making 11-year-olds cry everywhere. Before this death, you leap on stones making your way to an altar. Leap on the first stone, and you can’t go back.
     You can’t go back, and if you’re replaying this game you know what’s about to happen. A terminal diagnosis burns the sky. 

*

In Crisis Core, your mentor Angeal does not shut up about protecting his honor, which is dubiously defined, but seems to mostly mean “follow your heart.” This honor—the heart—has a visual representation in Angeal’s “Buster Sword,” an iconic weapon fans know well as what Cloud will wield in the next game. When Angeal dies he bestows his honor, his dreams, and his big-ass sword to Zack, who must wield this honor as well as he can fight. 

Zack is an idealistic, devoted, energetic dude. We may as well call him a penniless poet. He earns the nickname “Zack the Puppy” from those less enthused by his energetic attitude. His last name, “Fair” is a direct foil to Cloud’s—”Strife.” Cloud, in Crisis Core, is a lowly infantryman who Zack befriends quickly through their shared childhoods in backwater towns—both sites of Shinra reactors.
     Because Crisis Core is a sequel, fans come in knowing how it all ends. Sephiroth loses his mind, conflagrates Cloud’s hometown, and Shinra rebuilds the town, pays a bunch of actors to inhabit it, then acts like nothing happened. Zack and Cloud are imprisoned, experimented on with weird alien magic by a mad scientist, and held in stasis for nearly four years, until Zack busts them out and hauls Cloud’s catatonic ass far-far away.
     Aerith, the one who dies in FFVII, is Zack’s girlfriend. She lives in Midgar, a huge city where Shinra keeps its headquarters. On the outskirts of the city, Shinra tracks you down, and you confront their entire army. 

You cannot go back. You cannot win. You fight infinite nameless soldiers, and don’t you dare bargain with infinity. While you fight, the DMW spins on. The faces of those you know slowly erase—white silhouettes spin outside memory’s sight. The battlefield narrows. Zack is strong, but he’s traveled a long way. Exhausted. Worn down. Memories loop and bust. They flash on the screen, interrupted by gun shots and gameplay. The DMW stutters. It rewinds. One face remains—Aerith. The DMW eats the screen, and memories cut in between your last breaths. The reels jam. The whole thing seizes, refusing to play the next memory. You hear her voice hellooooo, and then a final gunshot as green tessellation burns then fades to white. 

*

One month before my mom dies, she sits on my bed. She asks are you ready for what's about to happen?
     Looking at the memory together my therapist asks do you feel negative, positive, or neutral?
     A terminal diagnosis—

*

Zack dies but succeeds in rescuing Cloud. Cloud’s brain is fragile from mad scientist experiments and the trauma of seeing his town and nearly everyone he knows and loves mercilessly slaughtered by a super soldier. Cloud holds Zack as he dies, and Zack passes down the sword. He tells Cloud to protect his honor and his dreams. Protect your heart. You’re my living legacy. 

Through a complicated cocktail of alien magic and PTSD, Cloud’s mind absorbs many of Zack's memories and persona. Cloud forgets himself; his identity collapses into Zack’s; and, in the next game you become Cloud, who is kind of Zack until the end of the third act. In this act, you, the player, become Cloud’s best friend, Tifa, who, through means of the lifestream—the literal totality of all living memory swirling beneath the planet—travels into Cloud’s psyche to help him remember who he truly is.

Tifa guides Cloud through his memories while a massive transparent image of himself writhes in the background. You, the player, you, the Cloud, you, the Tifa. Tiny little buzzers in your hand vibrate. All versions of yourself collapse in on one another. Cloud remembers who he is. Do you? Does this make you feel positive, negative, or neutral?

*

Two years before my mom died we started working on a book together. We never finished it, but me and the version of her I hold within myself—a version both wholly her because the only version of people we get to hold of anybody is our version, and a version not wholly her—we will finish it. She worked on it until she couldn’t. The last full sentence she said to me was write it how you remember me. I remember. The slot machine accelerates. You’re my living legacy. I pick up the sword. 

*

I talk about EMDR with my partner. Or, I try to. I offer half a sentence. They invite me to say more. The slot machine jams up. The faces on it stutter.
     They are so patient with me. They place their legs across my lap and look at me with eyes that help me see myself better. In these tiny moments, I understand the kind of love that inspires people to have children despite the meteor igniting the skyline. I push through the memory, and love forces its hand on the scale.
     With tenderness, they look at me and ask would you like more coffee? 

*

Geramee is a penniless poet and a hopelessly idealistic romantic. They are in love. 

Dec 23: Alison Deming, On Binge-Watching

 

*

On Binge-Watching

Alison Deming

*

*

If you spliced together all the footage of Ross Poldark galloping along the seaside cliffs of Cornwall, great coat flying over his stallion’s flanks, you could fill at least one of the forty-three hours that the series commands. There may have been only one or two such sequences shot, copy-and-paste as needed. As with the clip of the stagecoach wheel dipping into a rain-filled pothole, a telling close-up that makes the viewer feel the passengers inside the coach jostle. That’s a keeper. No need to reshoot for the next stagecoach ride. To see the technique is to break the spell of the story, to imagine the cinematographer, the editor, the gaff and best boy, to appreciate the gears and wheels and scaffolds of the made thing.

*

I don’t know why I binge watch. I grew up in the fifties. Television was new and most kids in my elementary school had TVs before our family did. I remember in third grade kids coming to class on Monday all excited about “the toast of the town.” I had no idea what kind of toast they were talking about. Certainly not raisin bread. How long was it before I learned that was the title of the Ed Sullivan show? When we finally got a TV, it was stuck in a corner of the dark basement, a cot and chair for the renegade who dared enter. The parental attitude was one of disdain. Like the Sumerians who hated the invention of writing because it would ruin human memory. I braved the dark on Saturday mornings to watch Fury: The Story of a Horse and the Boy Who Loved Him. The American West, an untamable black stallion, played by the horse who had starred in Black Beauty. An orphaned boy adopted by a widowed California rancher. Opening shot: Fury leads a herd of wild horses through rocky hills and passes of the open range. He is magnificent and haughty and aware of his beauty. No one can tame him. Except the boy, who calls him by name, asks him to kneel, climbs on his bare gleaming back and rides off into an adventure. The horse becomes a hero, saving visitors to the ranch who get in trouble. He’s a little bit like Lassie, but a lot sexier. I don’t remember the storylines, but I remember feeling taken away by beauty.
     I always felt guilty watching television. That sense it is somehow a wrong thing got stuck in me at an early age. I think now that my parents’ antipathy came because television ruined my father’s career. He’d be a successful and beloved radio personality. He and my mother wrote scripts for radio dramas like The Shadow and sometimes played all the parts including sound effects in live performances. Hands slapping knees for hoofbeats, rattling sheet metal for thunder. But television was the new thing, everyone everywhere listening to same program at the same time was over. Visual spectacle had won, and my father’s work on the fringes of TV never had the same luster. But to binge. Now that’s the new thing. Watch whatever you want whenever you want for a long as you want. It’s hard to stop.

*

When Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall from America where he has fought for three years against the revolutionaries, he finds that his father has died, his inheritance shot, the family’s tin mines failing, their servants now wastrels allowing rats and goats to take over the house, and the woman he loved marrying his cousin. He had left for war as a Redcoat to escape hanging for brawling and free trading and fraud. He had fought so bravely in Virginia, as to become promoted to Captain. But he returns to England as a loser on all fronts. Nevertheless, he is magnificent and haughty and aware of his beauty. Given to brooding at the seaside, anchored by his tri-corn hat and gazing into the stormy distance.
     The first episode sets up enough tensions—elastic bands stretched between characters-- so that you have to follow to see if the band snaps, breaks, or slingshots one or another character into oblivion. There’s the unmitigated desire, thick as tar, between Ross and Elizabeth, his porcelain beauty of a jilting sweetheart, who turns out to be something of an empty vessel. There’s the enmity between Ross and Francis, the insipid but moneyed cousin married to his beloved, making it impossible for him to walk away. There are the starving tenant laborers on Ross Poldark’s mortgaged land, bringing the tensions of class struggle to bear. There is George Warleggan, the arrogant greed-mongering profiteer, who is repulsed by Poldark as he grows into being a man of principle and labors beside his tenants, working to benefit the poor and enslaved. George marries Elizabeth after Francis dies in the tin mine, giving Poldark sufficient reason to uphold his side of their mutual enmity. Desire never dies ever after Ross realizes he is better off with a woman who can skin rabbits and chop wood than with a fine lady in silk.
     And then there is Demelza, my favorite character in the series. The one who can skin rabbits and chop wood. She first appears as a street urchin in the market, her dog snatched and thrown into a dog fight, a circle of men lusting for blood. She’s dressed in burlap rags, hair bunched under a loose cap, face showing the bruises of her father’s daily beatings. She is a scrambling panicked mess, screaming to get back her dog. Ross saves them both. She grows to become Ross’s true love and mate, never shedding the fire and grit it took her to survive her childhood. It’s a scandalous marriage to the class-conscious Brits, Ross a gentleman of moneyed stock, if now struggling, and Demelza, daughter of a brutal miner with no stature other than her character and intelligence. They are both pleasantly complicated. Ross is principled but impulsive, a risk-taker, a man who moves easily among the working class and aristocracy, loyal but given to jealousy, eager and willing to name hypocrisy and fight for a moral truth, willing to lie to anyone and everyone for the sake of espionage on behalf on his nation. He becomes an eloquent spokesman for both free trade and the abolition of slavery. Demelza grows from illiterate urchin to a woman who can run household and a mine, in her husband’s absence. She is the one who hands out bread to the poor, who welcomes her brothers into their home when they too seek a better way than their father’s hard reign. And, yes, she chops the wood and skins the rabbits without complaint, when that is what’s called for. She is capable of heeding her passion, both in loyalty and folly, but finding her footing again and again in a sense of agency of which she was deprived as a child. And once her long red hair is unfurled, it too commands an audience as it blows in the wind when she stands gazing from the clifftop at the sea. The landscape here works to reinforce that it is a time of change and everyone is on the edge of that, no one is secure despite their sense of belonging in the place.
     I should mention the color palette of the series, because after all this is a visual spectacle that reveals itself through image and color. The poor are dressed in the color of bare, dry dirt. Buff, burlap, and rough. Even market day is a buff-colored spectacle of the poor milling about the street where vendors hawk salted fish and sacks of grain. There is no color other than the gowns and top hats of the gentry who float above the crowd even when their feet touch it. The homes of the poor are beige, their clothes are beige, their meals are beige, their tools and weapons are beige. But the gentry… well, just imagine the visual pleasure and envy of seeing those gowns and the roasted goose at Christmas and the spread of fruits and meats and oysters and flowers on the banquet table at the ball. When a tenant laborer picks a bouquet of wildflowers, that is a statement.

*

I am unlikely to read any of the twelve Poldark novels upon which the BBC series is based. British novelist Winston Graham lived in Cornwall for over three decades. The character of Demelza is based on his wife, who was native to the region. The last of these novels was published in 2002 just a year before his death. He also wrote an additional thirty novels, plus books of short stories and nonfiction, and four plays. It’s the kind of career that is so effusive it’s daunting to take on any one book. The historical novels are well-researched and take the fictional liberties one would expect for sake for dramatic interests. And drama there is. Turns and swerves and twists of action and intrigue, both political and romantic. And I’ve only mentioned the primary characters. The secondary and tertiary ones are strung into the weave with a tension that is hard to relieve, except by clicking on to the next episode. I love history presented as visual spectacle and character study. I love seeing emotion play quietly over an actor’s face. So much is said without words--and juxtaposed to history’s panoramic context. How will these people meet the challenges of their time? It’s the question we are all asking of ourselves in the darkening of the American prospect. Yes, we are all standing on a perilous cliff. 

*

My favorite moment in the forty-three episodes is in the last one. Ross’s espionage caper against the French has turned on him. In a stand-off with his adversaries, he is about to meet his end when two gunshots blast. Ross is stunned as he looks at his rescuer. More stunned is George Warleggan, his avowed adversary, who stands holding two dueling pistols with a look on his face that seems weirdly innocent, as if self-knowledge is utterly foreign to him. Throughout the series he has held his chin upward, a constant imagistic reinforcement of his arrogance. Here he is stunned at his own action in saving Ross. They drink a reluctant toast in the denouement. George, regaining the chin slant of his arrogance, tells Ross he did it not for him but for his nation. Ross, always ready with the right words and wry smile, says, “Well, then, shall we revert to our usual animosity?” George replies in the sneering tone of faux superiority we have come to know and detest in him, “With pleasure.” How crisp is the British enunciation. It’s an auditory image, wit and bite wrapped up in two perfect words.

*

Alison Deming is the author of many books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently the poetry collection BLUE FLAX & YELLOW MUSTARD FLOWER. She has a new nonfiction manuscript MOBIUS: A MEDITATION ON ART & SCIENCE currently out there looking for a publisher. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.