HBO’s Love­craft Coun­try deliv­ers a fierce broad­side against bigotry

Ear­ly on in the pilot episode of HBO’s Love­craft Coun­try, pulp paper­back fan Atti­cus Black (Jonathan Majors) mus­es that ​“sto­ries are like peo­ple: they’re not all made per­fect. You just try to cher­ish them, over­look their flaws.” The young Black man is jus­ti­fy­ing his affin­i­ty for one of Edgar Rice Bur­roughs’ ​‘John Carter of Mars’ sto­ries, in which the main char­ac­ter hap­pens to be a for­mer Con­fed­er­ate cap­tain. He’s capa­ble of appre­ci­at­ing the character’s hero­ic der­ring-do while real­is­ing that the guy fought to keep his ances­tors locked in the bondage of slavery.

This same quandary, of how a per­son can love art made by or about some­one who would have hat­ed them, more direct­ly con­cerns the life and works of the show’s true focal fig­ure, HP Love­craft. A vir­u­lent racist, his visions of eldritch hor­ror nonethe­less com­mand a con­flict­ed fan­dom even today from genre nerds of every colour and back­ground. He’s what we know now as a ​‘prob­lem­at­ic fave’, a con­tra­dic­to­ry con­cept that would appear to be the big con­cep­tu­al knot these sto­ries (the 10 episodes adapt a short fic­tion col­lec­tion from 2016) will endeav­our to untan­gle. Instead, that sim­ple ratio­nal­i­sa­tion from Atti­cus turns out to be all this one needs.

This fric­tion between the allure of sci-fi and the often ugly pol­i­tics under­gird­ing it should have been enough to pow­er the main nar­ra­tive of Atti­cus’ search for his miss­ing father (Michael K Williams) with the help of gal pal Leti (Jurnee Smol­lett) and uncle George (Court­ney B Vance). In prac­tice, showrun­ners Misha Green and Jor­dan Peele take a sim­pler tack and exter­nalise the dark­er impli­ca­tions of Love­craft­ian lore in mini-sto­ries that make this ele­ment more eas­i­ly opposed. In a ​‘sun­down town’, for instance, the ingrained racism takes the form of many-eye­balled mon­strosi­ties that our quick-wit­ted heroes learn how to turn against their white tormentors.

A lat­er episode in which a Black woman (Wun­mi Mosaku) finds that she can become white and goes about inflict­ing her inter­nalised racism on those now beneath her social sta­tion forges into thornier ter­ri­to­ry, and sug­gests a stronger, more inci­sive back half. But in the first half of the series, that foun­da­tion­al short­com­ing often hob­bles the flashier genre plea­sures: dop­pel­gänger mis­di­rec­tion; ghost­ly appari­tions; flesh peel­ing off of human bod­ies like so many lasagne sheets. (It’s not to this show’s ben­e­fit that its sin­gle great­est sequence, a dream that sticks Jack­ie Robin­son and Cthul­hu in the mid­dle of the Kore­an War, occurs in the first five minutes.)

More­over, on a pure­ly func­tionary nuts-and-bolts lev­el, the episodes don’t always hold togeth­er. The scenes con­cern­ing a clan­des­tine cabal of white suprema­cist weir­does (includ­ing Abbey Lee) some­times feel hap­haz­ard­ly arranged, as if we’ve missed cru­cial con­ver­sa­tions that have already tak­en place. The recre­ation of the Jim Crow-era South lands clos­er to what might be described as ​’50s cos­play, with everyone’s out­fits look­ing more like a 2020-approved nos­tal­gic throw­back than the gen­uine article.

Mean­while, the deliv­ered-with-a-wink sound­track con­trast­ing imagery of the good ol’ days with anachro­nis­tic cuts from Car­di B and Frank Ocean suc­ceeds only in elic­it­ing groans. The lat­ter artist’s ​‘Bad Reli­gion’ scores a gay sex scene so clum­si­ly exe­cut­ed and tonal­ly con­fused that the great Cheryl Dun­ye hav­ing direct­ed it emerges as the series’ most shock­ing twist.

It wasn’t so long ago that HBO weighed racial iden­ti­ty against oth­er alle­giances, with last year’s out­stand­ing Watch­men inter­ro­gat­ing the fac­tors com­pelling Black sol­diers to die in a war for a coun­try that couldn’t have cared less about them. Rather than con­tin­u­ing that dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tion, Love­craft Coun­try slight­ly retreats from it by short-chang­ing its own argu­ments. The show deliv­ers a fierce broad­side against big­otry, but that’s only half the mat­ter, and not even the more com­pelling half.