WTF is Carnivale all about

[TrogL]

I've seen two episodes and didn't understand a word.

This one seems to have been about the religious right.

Ended with some guy whipping himself for his sins.

[madmax]

1. Same here, haven't a clue.

I don't 'get' "K Street" either. :shrug:

[markses]

2. Seems to me that it is "about"

dreams, magic, memory, the uncanny - AND the various ways we have of segmenting off or segregating "the strange," the pathological, the abnormal.

So, in the one case, we put it on display - the carnival freak. But even the carnival freaks set up their territories of normality. In the other case, we define and sacramentalize it.

Is there really that much difference between the carnival and religious observation? Both are methods for domesticating the uncanny, making it familiar, comfortable (and profitable! - "Every prophet/profit in his place...").

And yet even in those two "homes" of the uncanny ("unheimlich" in German, the uncanny is that which makes us feel not-at-home, unfamiliar to even ourselves), the dreams experienced by the carnival roustabout in Oklahoma and the minister in California are the same - something cuts across those places of the uncanny. (With any luck, it will be itself uncanny, the unsolvable mystery of the First World War memories, the search for such and such a person, always just beyond grasp).

BEST of all, the show is not just ABOUT these things, but it also performs them. Your response to the show (WTF is it about?) IS the response to the uncanny - the show produces the very effects that it aims to deal with. Pretty effing good so far, you ask me.