Stewart Hotston discusses the themes raised in the second episode of the new HBO/Sky Atlantic series.

 

The title of the episode, Whitey’s on the Moon, references a song by Gil Scott-Heron and its lyrics explain its heart so succinctly I won’t quote them here for sake of completely spoiling the show.

The cry of rage in the title (and the song) is not an impetus to action or a power which allows the oppressed to overcome. That rage is felt regardless of what can be done about it – instead the show reminds us that those under the press of power bulge in odd directions and it’s this which provides them the power to resist, in odd ways, through unexpected decisions. They might seem irrelevant, yet in the end it’s these tiny resistances which can unravel the greatest powers.

If episode 1 was about hope and, to a certain extent, triumph in the face of opposition episode 2 is about trauma and memory.

The shows starts with multiple perspectives and shows memory is unreliable right from the start, especially in the face of experienced trauma. Who has it right, this recall of horror? Who is the sensible one – the one who does not remember their pain and what led to it or those who cannot step away from its consideration?

It’s too easy to say this idea of memory and trauma is grounded in the experience of racist terror because the show is more nuanced than that and does a deft job of laying out the contradictions in other people’s experiences of living. Not least, the trauma of family, of where we come from. It asks us to think of how we navigate the truth that we can’t ever really know for sure who our ancestors were and what they did. It plays here with the trope of chosen ones, of special blood (from a White man of course) and then turns that around and asks us to wonder if all that weight of history and destiny can be undone by our choices here and now. It’s no surprise so many people venerate their roots, this yearning for a solid rock, a golden age in which the world was perfect, to which we can call back to, if not return. This yearning everywhere in popular culture and the show puts it front and centre and asks us to consider who gets deleted, erased or used up to ensure our histories are ‘just so’.

The show takes this pre-occupation and drags our protagonists into it, demanding they become embroiled in a history no one really knows, and no one can truthfully declare. Where marginalised people are concerned it asks us, where can we go to get our history? Where are our stories when so much of who we were has been deliberately suppressed or cut off from us by murder and massacre? Contrast that cultural orphaning with the fascination in so much White culture of being able to say ‘I can trace my lineage back to the Normans, the Vikings, the Greeks, the King of England!’

All through the episode our protagonists are offered distractions, perfections and power to both stop them digging at their traumas but also with the promise that if they only take notice of how life could be good for them now then the past will no longer matter.

The show lays out for us what as is so often the case; those in power are busy venerating that which did harm (but coincidentally got them their power in the first place) while simultaneously asking those who were harmed to stop remembering.

The racism here, which is as much patriarchalism as it is racism, centres everyone else around the wise male White leader, the chosen one, and if their world view is correct proposes that the rest of us are just animals of a lower strata to be used as seen fit.

It’s one of the reasons I hate ‘chosen one’ narratives and here the show demonstrates quite clearly the trauma OTHERS suffer for the chosen one to be chosen.

It also asks Tic, and us, do you really want to know what hurt you? What will you do with that knowledge when you have it? Will it benefit you to know the harm done to you?

In the end I felt asked whether it was better to know the truths hidden from us. Am I better off knowing traumas and secrets or am I better off ignorant? Can good decisions come from not knowing how we got here?

I have some minor grumbles about the speed the show moves in this episode. It’s doing a LOT of work – these are weighty issues and they’re dealt with very quickly. The cast continue to shine with the material they’re given, and I suspect if there are issues then they’re in the cutting room and not on the set. It could have been five minutes longer – to give us a better sense of those traumas and the reactions to them, but hey, there’s eight more episodes to go, this isn’t a movie where we have to wrap up by the end.

I hope these are themes to which we return.

Ultimately, the show doesn’t offer an answer, at least not a straightforward one. It shows us both that knowing the truth gives us the chance at agency, it gives us the context. But it also shows us that context can be like a web, trapping us in place and stopping us from seeing clearly or moving on. In the real world, the consequences of both approaches can be as positive as they are negative, but as you might have guessed by now, in Lovecraft Country the outcomes are never good.