Race, Identity and Memory in Lovecraft Country: A Conversation (Part One)

Over the next two installments, I will continue my focus on some of the most discussed television dramas of 2020 with a conversation between Kyu Hyun Kim (a historian of South Korean politics and culture) and Shawn Taylor (one of the founders of Nerds of Color), about Lovecraft Country. These two writers explore the ways this remarkable series broke with earlier representations of Koreans and African-Americans in the horror and fantasy genre. My own sense was that the series took swing for the fences risks that sometimes paid off and sometimes didn’t, but that it was crammed full of provocative ideas that will shape my thinking for sometime to come. In some ways, it was more successful at the level of individual episodes, which made provocative interventions in a range of horror subgenres, rather than at the level of the serial, which was a bit incoherent up till the end and opened much that it failed to resolve. But we don’t need to see a series as perfect to find it sparks conversation as this and the next blog post illustrate.

Kyu Hyun Kim: Some parts of HBO’s Lovecraft Country has left me breathlessly excited and well-nigh speechless due to its sheer political audacity as well as pleasures derived from its crazy blending of different subgenres and styles— Afro-futurism, Gothic horror conventions, film noir— even when the cake mix sometimes does not quite rise as expected. Other parts of the series— thankfully minor in proportion— turned out ultimately disappointing for various reasons: the rather listless denouement rehabilitating that hoary cliché of a Christian patriarch sacrificing himself for the community, a non-resolution of the relationship between Ruby and Christina, for my money the most intriguing couple in the whole series, the curiously lackadaisical depictions of Lovecraftian monsters (is that multi-ocular, many-toothed thing supposed to be… Shoggoth?) and so on. In the end, though, I have little problem praising historical awareness, innovative approach and genre-savvy chutzpah of the showrunner Misha Green, who wrote the majority of episodes as well. 

For me, a South Korean genre enthusiast as well as a teacher of Korean culture and history, the big “uh-oh” moment arrived when the series segued into Episode Six, “Meet Me in Daegu,” devoted to the unspooling of the backstory between the protagonist Atticus (Jonathan Majors) and the Korean nurse Ji-ah (Jaimie Chung), during the Korean War. The images of idiotically grinning Asian men clad in loose pants and cotton jackets from M. A. S. H. and other too-awful-to-mention “representations of Koreans in American TV” passed through my head, but only for a moment. I told myself, OK, this is 2020. A South Korean film won the Best Picture Oscar only a few months ago, for God’s sake. I probably will not see a degrading Korean character speaking in pidgin English (unless such a speech pattern was integral to that character). I also probably will not see a generic Oriental landscape and 19th century Chinese houses standing in for Daegu, one of the major cities in South Korea and its very name fraught with historical and cultural implications, as “Chicago” or “New Orleans” would be for Americans. I also admit that I was intrigued to find out how Ji-ah as a Korean woman, living in ‘50s during the height of Cold War no less, would be portrayed. Would she disappointingly turn out to be just another token Asian presence, in the way multiple iterations of (with apologies to some Trekker friends I admire and respect) Star Trek have always treated “real” Asians (rather than Vulcans and Romulans “standing in” for Asians)? 

The verdict: it was significantly better than I expected. Not that the show got all period, historical and cultural details right: of course not. But overall, the episode was ambitious in the right ways and obviously trying to break new grounds, some of them in relation to depictions of East Asian cultures in the American TV, others in terms of recognizing with clear eyes the presence of US imperialism and horrible treatment of women by the hyper-masculine state (war regimes) in both Korea and the US. This adventurous attitude was in all honesty far better than being timidly "safe" by the contemporary standards of identity politics. 

And I was right: approximately sixty percent or so of the dialogue was in Korean. Of course, it would have been really great, and instantly impressed many Korean viewers, had Green and others paid a bit more attention to the Korean language and got Ji-ah and her mother to speak in Daegu dialect. Moreover, the episode in my opinion also displayed some evidence of the production crew or writers having studied the Korean horror and dark fantasy of the past two decades. The kumiho (nine-tailed fox) myth is probably one of the most frequently exploited subject matter for Korean horror/dark fantasy genre, and the Lovecraft Country team manages to mine its subtext of gender politics, an approach very much in tune with the evolution of the myth in New Korean Cinema as well as South Korean TV dramas. A bit head-scratching part was depicting the “nine tails” of Ji-ah the werefox as disgusting tentacular organs snaking out of various orifices of her body: a smart student of mine opined that this was perhaps influenced by the “tentacular” obsessions of some adult-oriented Japanese anime, which has little to do with the Korean myth. 

More importantly, the episode was critically reflective about American Cold War imperialism in the way that I have seldom seen in stateside productions. For some American viewers, hopefully it would have been jarring to see the hero Atticus presented as a cold-blooded torturer and executioner "just doing his job," then turn all gooey-romantic to trying to woo Ji-ah. In the similar vein, I was most impressed by the character of Young-ja, a Communist-sympathetic nurse (an excellent performance by Prisca Kim). Her character, morally sensitive and empathetic but also endowed with certain levels of urban sophistication, is very much the kind we would see in recent, notable works of New Korean Cinema dealing with the Korean War or North Korea (such as The Frontline [2011], Swing Kids [2018], The Spy Gone North [2018]) that have managed to humanize North Korean “enemies.” 

The production design was lavish and gorgeous, which is not to say there were no moments that reminded me of a ‘50s black-and-white Samuel Fuller war flick set in the Korean peninsula. Some of the flubs are probably difficult to notice unless you have actually lived in the country proximate to the era depicted. For instance, the Korean subtitles for American movies playing in movie theaters, used to appear vertically, not horizontally, as shown in the episode and today’s Korea. The costumes and sets sometimes have that slightly off-kilter, prefab vibes that might well have been an intended effect. By the way, I did not mind making Ji-ah a fan of Hollywood musicals, especially of Judy Garland. Some Korean viewers might object. It is, I would argue, clearly not a shallow infatuation with a slick American consumerist culture on her part. For this particular point, I hope that South Koreans of today try to recognize the unimaginable allure that old Hollywood could claim for their parents and grandparents.

Ironically, one of the most obvious cliches in the episode was the Korean-American character, Atticus’s buddy, who gives a neat position speech about how he is caught between two (racist) nations and rejected by both sides: these characters often function as an alibi for racial sensitivity on the part of the producers. If Green and others were serious about anti-Asian racism, they should have included the more overt racist treatment of “gooks” by American soldiers. 

Nitpickings aside, I enjoyed the episode (and the whole series) despite its flaws and disappointments. Things have improved much by 2020 but also much remains the same: witness the debacle of Disney sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into making the nauseatingly culturally-and-politically obtuse Mulan, the very raison d’etre of which is egregious pandering to the PRC market and state. I definitely appreciate Green et al.’s boundary-busting gutsiness in Lovecraft Country, which I believe is the greatest strength of the whole episode and the series.

Shawn Taylor: Based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country is a television milestone in so many ways. It’s the first horror tv show starring an almost all Black cast that is focused on multiple Black characters, each of the characters have some agency, some stake in the story and all of it wrapped in a prestige television format. This alone should be enough to put it in the running for GOAT status.

But why Lovecraft? How could a virulent racist’s work be used to tell the story of Black folks in the height of the 1950s Jim Crow era United States? While I’m fully on board with the program, there isn’t too much “Lovecraftian Horror” in Lovecraft Country. To be Black in the US, especially before the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, was to be afraid most of the time. You go to the wrong town, the wrong restaurant, the wrong store and you could be assaulted, assaulted and jailed, or killed. No help would be available. You were completely and utterly on your own. The universe didn’t give one shit about you. I guess the whole ‘uncaring, disinterested universe’ is a Lovecraftian trope. I’ll concede this point. 

The cosmic horror of the Lovecraftian Mythos cannot even hold a candle to the cloak of fear Black folks wore, say, driving from down south up to Chicago, or from Chicago to New England. The quintessentially American activity of the cross-country road trip, something white folks enjoyed as a matter of course, is the starting point of one long episode of hypervigilance, terror, and anxiety for Black folks. So, then, why did Atticus, Letitia, and Uncle George make so many of those trips? Their motivation is why I absolutely fell in love with this show, despite its flaws and glaring plot-holes. 

Running parallel with the horror and magic and swashbuckling adventure that our protagonists were enveloped in were two things rarely afforded Black folks in television and film, especially in the more fantastic genres: intelligence and curiosity. Of course, there have been intelligent Black characters on big and small screen science fiction/horror/fantasy, but rarely are they complete beings. They usually get reduced to being nothing more than exposition drops that spur the main characters to action, or their intelligence is played for comic relief. Lovecraft Country gives us an entirely no presentation of the smart Black character.

I was privy to a preview screening of the first five episodes. After the fifth episode, those in my viewing pod immediately entered into a text conversation about how each and every Black character was smart. Like, really smart. It only got better with the remainder of the series. And it wasn’t like so many other shows where intelligence, especially for Black people, is coded as some kind of disability or impediment (awkward, dispassionate, distant)—or linked to same (See Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation or Dr. Miles Hawkins from M.A.N.T.I.S.). In Lovecraft Country, every Black character, man or woman; gay or straight; old or young; male or female possessed both a keen intelligence and a restless curiosity. And the thing that struck all of us was that there was no explanation for it. 

Unlike Charles Gunn who underwent a procedure to enhance his knowledge of the law and improve how he spoke (aka make him more appealing to white people) in Joss Whedon’s, Angel, the Black venturers of Lovecraft Country were organic intellectuals—we see you Gramsci and Friere. There was no talk of schools or schooling, only literature as an entry point for Atticus, his Uncle George, and his father Montrose; science for Uncle George’s wife, Hippolyta and science and art for their daughter, Diana (not so coincidently the names of Wonder Woman and her mother), and art for Letitia and her sister, Ruby. That they all were able to draw from their respective intellectual bases and curiosities to confront the creeping horror, while engaging in transdisciplinary problem solving, elevated Lovecraft Country above the schlock horror it could have devolved into. 

As a lifelong fan of the fantastic (we see you, Todorov) and the speculative, I have been routinely disappointed by how Black people and Blackness has been portrayed in the genres that fall under these. Blackness is either coded or blatantly offered as evil, or less than, or something that needs to be banished or abolished. What Lovecraft Country does, the reparative work it did, was to give the Black venturers agency in a genre that excludes or dispatches Black people on a regular basis. Not only do the Black protagonists have agency, Black culture, Black folks life is presented not as something other than the norm, but as something loving and mainstream, despite the forces allied against it. 

Lovecraft Country provided us with a Black culture that was tender, affectionate, and a source of strength for the characters. It was a culture that was able to produce intellectuals, curiosity seekers who, through their willingness to engage and utilize knowledge, without bias, were able to save their world and give us ten or so hours of damn fine television. 

Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor History at University of California-Davis, was born in Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages in 1997 from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1996-1997), served a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship, and was nominated and sponsored in the United States by the Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council in 2000. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Treasonous Patriots: Collaboration and the Colonial Modernity in Modern Korean History and Culture.

Shawn Taylor is one of the founders of Nerds of Color and a founding organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival, a festival that highlights and promotes artists on the margins of the mainstream comic book industry. Shawn recently published a white paper, We The Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, as a Senior Fellow for the Pop Culture Collaborative.