Review: "American Gods"

FULLER, Bryan, & Michael GREEN, “American Gods”, Fremantle Media North America, 2017.

We live in a world which celebrates the rise of Homo economicus, the capitalist human. We have been taught to fear the monetarily unquantifiable - that which cannot be reduced to a bunch of digits preceded by a dollar sign. An offer of assistance, an act of charity, the preservation of a wilderness area, or the saving of a single animal species – none of this is considered economically viable and our leaders shy away from such things instinctively and as an act of policy. Communities turn into wastelands as absentee slum-lords raise rents and turn villages into negatively-geared ghost towns; property developers are regularly escorted away from speculating on school playgrounds. 90% of the world’s wealth is held by only 10% of the population and it is they who regularly instruct us to behave just like them, to blame the poor for their multifarious problems, the homeless for not having houses, when the merest shift in government economics, or a rate increase, was the act which proved how tissue-thin is the security which we call ‘home’.

What “American Gods” is predicated upon, is the notion that the world’s deities have arrived in the New World on the coat-tails of the faithful and have languished, as faith – the power which keeps them real – falls by the wayside. In the canon of fantasy writing, this is not such a new concept, and it fails absolutely to factor in a major point: America already has a God – the Greenback; the Sawbuck; the Benjamin. Specifically, money.

I read a lot of journalistic hyperbole about how shocking and fresh this series is and, having finally come to it, I find it’s both pointless and dull. There was a time when Neil Gaiman was a name to conjure with, but folks, his time has passed. If nothing else proves that he has lost his grip, it’s this vehicle. In between the sordid frippery of this show, there’s some indulgent musing about how “America doesn’t know what she is” but, in the full-flight of Trump’s “AmeriKKKa” we can positively claim that assertion to be a fallacy. The US knows exactly what it wants and Gaiman’s relevance to that goal is non-existent.

This is not to belittle any of Gaiman’s other work. When he roared out of the darkness in the 1980s, he was able to savage Thatcher’s Britain like no-one else, with major works like “Neverwhere” and with his work in “Constantine: Hellblazer” – I will always champion the genius which is the standalone issue of that series entitled “Hold Me”. However, there comes a point in success where the author starts to sniff what they’ve been shovelling and things go off the rails – it happened to Stephen King; it’s happened to Alan Moore; it’s happened to Neil Gaiman. Once able to make us guffaw out loud with the magic that was Good Omens, now we get “American Gods”.

The issues abounding on this show fall into two halves – the concept, which I’ve touched upon above, and the production which, despite involving Gaiman as Executive Producer (along with six other guys), cannot strictly be laid at his door. In terms of production quality, this show feels like yet another series of “Supernatural” circa Season One, when it was grittier and darker without the later teen-appeal. On top of this, the violence and sex has been dialled up to 11 which, I have to say, leaves me bored and queasy by turns. The action sequences obviously involve people off-screen tossing buckets of red paint about and the infamous sex-scene with the ‘Love Goddess’, Bilquis, is just old hat: come on people – have none of you seen “The Kingdom”? In fact the nudity is just curious: there’s the odd bared nipple, but female anatomy seems to be coyly obscured or hinted at, while we’re subjected to rampant boners at every turn. It’s like there was a lunchtime meeting of the producers where the waiter said “do you want extra cock with that?” and there was an overly enthusiastic response.

Added to this, the repeated scenes of cows being clubbed or bolted to death in episode two, I have to say this show is not going to rate highly with me. The first thing I do when this happens is check the animal cruelty disclaimer, mainly to see if there is one. Even with that though, the producers get around this by saying, “these animals are going to be killed anyway, so it’s just a touch of documentary filming in the midst of the story”. No. It’s pornography. It’s snuff filming. Yes, a lot of people on this planet need to get over themselves and learn where their food comes from, but this isn’t the vehicle in which to educate them about that. Allow fellow creatures the dignity of their deaths, as you would like to be allowed the dignity of your own. And what about the actors who are being asked to do these things, to participate in these acts? Again, it’s the capitalist principle at work – strip off and take part in an extended no-holds-barred sex-scene, walk around with your dick at full-mast, club a cow to death with a sledge-hammer, otherwise we’ll find someone even less principled who’ll step in. There’s no shortage of people out there willing to prostitute themselves.

The language is confronting as well, which never sits well with me. The writers seem Hell-bent on throwing every four-letter word that they can think of at the viewer and often it’s just for the sake of the effect. At other times it works – as when the spider-god Anansi talks to the slaves on the Dutch slaving ship (although, this whole scene also seems like an extended advert for Gaiman’s Anansi Boys, which, as obvious promotional material, cuts it off at the knees from the get-go). The concept extends to every part of the film where everyone seems dribbling in an effort to degrade every sacred cow that they can get their mitts on – Gillian Anderson was great as the deity Media, fronting-up as Lucille Ball, but they lost me the moment she offered “to get her tits out”. And the character of Mad Sweeney seems to be just a stereotypical excuse to get as much profanity in the script as possible. In fact, against the background of all this twisted concept-work and foul-mouthed, death-fetishist, soft pornography, the only character that comes across as remotely sympathetic is our protagonist Shadow Moon.

(As an aside, Neil Gaiman has always had a tendency to try and show off how much he knows in what he produces. That’s fine, but when it amounts to second-string characters dropping terms like Lex Talionis, or Shadow Moon referencing Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” after almost being lynched, I find myself rolling my eyes quite a bit. Yes, these sidelong references allow us to join the dots, but it’s already clear from the context and doesn’t need this underlining. It’s TV, Mr. Clever-clever – show us, don’t tell us.)

In short, this show has been rolled over by the true gods of the money-machine, packaged, pre-chewed and drained of all of its poison. It’s spectacle – bread and circuses – and it’s doing the job of stopping outrage, killing protest and soothing the masses. Give us erections and blood-baths and we’ll give you our hard-earned cash. On top of all this, the money vortex has clearly sucked Gaiman into its maw and drained him of all potential – I hope he enjoys rolling around on his pile of cash. If you have to watch your television and you want to watch something that speaks to our world and comments on our society, watch “The Handmaid’s Tale”, or even “Preacher”, which actually says something about the nature of faith – this show is simply distracting you from the urgency about us.

Homo economicus are killing us along with our planet; they want to reduce everything to coinage; to dismay and distract any opposition; they want to play golf while cities collapse in ignorance, destitution and violence. They’re out there and they walk amongst us, in our governments and our council offices. You can spot them because of their rampant greed and their ability to rationalise everyone around them – the elderly, the poor, the homeless and abandoned – to a point where they’re an inconvenience, or an obstacle to be moved, or ignored. They will reduce us all to numbers in the end: the sale price for the Statue of Liberty after it gets sold off for scrap metal and the development opportunities generated by raising a shining beacon to the “smart money” at Grenfell Tower…