every prophet in his house: carnivale

If destiny exists, it exists for the malefactor, same as the godlike. You read about Hitler's life and find a chilling and unmistakable air of vocation in it; apparently he had a calling every bit as strong and mystical as any saint's. ETHOS ANTHROPOI DAIMON, Heraclitus said some 2500 years ago, a statement which usually shows up in English as, "Character is fate," but translates literally as, "A man's character is his daimon." According to Plato's Republic, each of us chooses his Daimon prior to birth, a being both subjective and objective, abstract and real, both within us and beyond us, some combination of guardian angel, touchstone and life-path. Our Daimon keeps us to our chosen purpose when we stray, sometimes gently, sometimes driving us with brutal force. The Greek word EUDAMONIA, which finally grew to mean something like happiness, earlier meant "having a good daimon." If you've chosen a good daimon, your life will tend towards the smooth and blissful, and if you've chosen one choleric and surly, things won't come easy. Yeats (who had a turbulent but acknowledged relationship with his Daimon) said, "Each DAIMON is drawn to whatever man... it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man," and "...there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny... [yet] a man loves nothing but his destiny."

These last words might be splashed across a title card at the opening of Carnivale. Set in the dustbowl of the 1930s, it tells the parallel tales of Ben Hawkins and Brother Justin Crowe, twin avatars, one the servant of light, the other of darkness, and nothing is black and white. The world of Carnivale is dirt and sepia coloured, like the Great Depression itself. Nobody ever gets completely clean. Blizzards of dry topsoil blow across the land like Biblical furies. When we meet these men, one is earnestly seeking to follow God's will and offer hope to the many homeless and destitute, the other is skulking and mistrustful, his legs still sporting the chains of an escaped murderer. One finds a family amongst carnies and roustabouts, the other begins his true ministry while locked in an asylum. Both spend much of the first season trying to escape their individual destinies. Brother Justin, until he accepts his mission as "the Left Hand of God," wants only to do good works; Ben Hawkins wants only to be left alone. Questions arise, up into the last moments, about where the evil resides, how much is there, and how much of it is inevitable.

This was an extraordinary moment in television. It lasted for two seasons, twenty-four episodes, all told. Talk about bold: the first season is all exposition, all set-up for the second. Amazingly, it works. We are introduced into the time and the lives of the characters, and we watch as these mirror avatars are roused up from their mediocre human lives, each to travel through his own peculiar Chapel Perilous, never meeting but sharing overlapping nocturnal dream-lives. In the second year, they are drawn together into an inevitable but unpredictable piece of armageddon between God's two warring hands.

Here are a handful of champion performances: particularly by John Carroll Lynch as Brother Justin's chief henchman, John Hannah in the best two episodes ("Babylon" and "Pick a Number") as the doomed and cringing barman in a Texas helltown called Babylon, and Robert Knepper as a radio journalist who becomes entangled with Brother Justin's story. The best,--in fact, possibly the best performance I've ever seen on the small screen--is by Toby Huss as the weak and good-hearted carnival-barker Stumpy. Surrounding these champion performances are a host of very fine ones, and the women are a downright revelation. With minimal makeup and no trick lighting, women who would normally fall into the unsexed category of the too-heavy, too-natural and too-old are given full sway in displaying their considerable charms. Pushing 60, Adrienne Barbeau's face is creased and worn and lovely, her sensuality as powerful as ever as the strong and virgin (in the old, pagan sense of being unowned by man) snake-dancer Ruthie.

One never sees God in Carnivale. There are characters with preternatural traits: the mysterious Management, who runs the carnival with an iron hand but never emerges from his trailer, or Sophie (Clea Duvall) who has a disturbing empathic connection with her comatose mother (unsettlingly played by Diane Salinger). No character ever sees God, but Destiny is nearly a character in itself, it is so fully present. The first episode kicks off with a dark and manic dream sequence, every flashing image of which is part of the greater destiny of Ben Hawkins, only we don't know it until much later. There's not a loose end here; the writers knew every nuance of the world they were creating from the first words and images. Nobody ever sees God, but there is no question that someone is there. Some puppet-master with a heightened sense of mischief and at least a little bent toward sadism is the organizing intelligence behind this vast and fascinating chess-game.