In Which We Operate A Spy Ring At Our Leisure

Desperate Uncertainty

by RACHEL WILLIAMS

Turn
creator Craig Silverstein

It has been six years since the Emmy award-winning miniseries John Adams aired on HBO. Based on David McCullough’s acclaimed biography of America’s second president, the series stripped away the veneer of mythology that swirls around the events of the Revolutionary War, humanising the Founding figures who dominate cultural depictions of the conflict, and injecting a dose of grime and cynicism into an all-too-often sanitised and triumphal narrative.

AMC’s new Sunday night offering, Turn, based on Alexander Rose’s book Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, does even more to disrupt the Founding Father narrative, focusing on places, people, and actions that have, until now, lurked on the periphery of the popular imagination.

Turn tells the story of the Culper Spy Ring, established at George Washington’s command to operate in the heart of British territory at a time when conventional methods of warfare were failing to break the empire’s stranglehold. From the outset, this is an unconventional Revolutionary War tale; we start, not with the Boston Massacre of 1770, nor with boxes of tea cast over gunwales in 1773, but months into the war – months after the heady rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence has given way to the bloody, protracted reality of securing permanent separation from the Crown.

The scrawled text which opens the series is loaded with language that underlines how doomed this project seems – Washington’s forces are in retreat everywhere, and the men and women who will eventually call themselves Americans are dismissed as “insurgents,” “rebels,” “sympathisers.”

The geographical locus of the series is unusual, too; far from Philadelphia and the high political wranglings of the Continental Congress, this war plays out in the fields and woodlands surrounding the tiny community of Setauket, Long Island. Here is fledgling America at its most untameable: the action takes place, not in the stately buildings and hushed council chambers of John Adams, but along boggy coastlines and in ancient forests. New York City, the main counterpoint to the wilderness of Setauket, is a bawdy, corrupt place filled with licentious theatres, shadowed corners, and dank jails.

The people of isolated, inconsequential Setauket, then, react to the continuing British occupation with varying degrees of disgruntlement. Among them, struggling to get through the war unscathed, is Abe Woodhull (Jamie Bell), a young farmer with a family to feed and a maggoty crop of cabbages to tend.

Abe is no idealistic hero – he is more concerned with the debts against his name than with the lofty aims of independence, yet he finds himself drawn against his will back into the orbit of his old friends, bluecoated Connecticut Dragoon Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich) and scruffy smuggler Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall). Tallmadge and Brewster, their bridges in Setauket burned through public declaration of their Patriotism, and aware that the dastardly British have a mole in the Continental army, single out their old friend to turn spy for the rebels.

Even before he is recruited, Abe’s efforts to keep the marks and taints of war from his door are increasingly futile; there are British regulars billeted in his house, their red coats a violent and ominous disruption to the grubby, autumnal palette of his farm. Even his little son is a political battleground – his wife, Mary, warns against teaching the boy to walk (“the sooner he can walk, the sooner he can march”) only days before Abe’s father brings a soldier toy fit for a future Loyalist.

No matter how hard Abe tries to hold onto the structures and traditions that have shaped his life, he can see them crumbling before his eyes. There is a naivety to his conviction that life will revert to its old rhythms once the war is over. Legacies, his father warns, have been sullied forever and irreparable rifts are opening in the community. Lovers are torn apart by politics, church pews are ripped out and replaced with officers’ desks, and the respect and obedience once considered a parent’s due are no longer foregone conclusions.

The simmering tensions and ambiguous loyalties at play in Setauket are symptomatic of the larger crises of social, moral, and political authority that made the Revolution possible. Major Hewlett (Burn Gorman, in excellent pursed-lipped form), the local commander, loudly heralds the primacy of the law from the safety of his garrison, even as, outside, villagers re-enact the most mythologised of anti-establishment stories - Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot - with a gusto that makes it difficult to discern where their sympathies lie.

It is all too easy to forget how distinct the colonies were from each other in 1776, and the vast, perilous distances people, goods, and information had to traverse. The task of building a nation from insular, isolated localities was immense, haphazard – we forget, too, how unlikely a Patriot victory was at almost every stage of the war. It was almost inconceivable that the British crown would be defeated by these upstart provincial rebels, especially when so many were cut from the same cloth as Abe Woodhull; politicised accidentally and against their will, seeking nothing more than a quiet life.

This is what Turn does best; it explodes the myth of inevitability, and reminds us that America’s future was far from secure in 1776, by flipping the triumphalist, teleological motifs of previous cultural incarnations of the Revolution on their head. There is plenty that is familiar here – cold, plum-voiced British officers, plucky tavern wenches, gruff Scotsmen – but there is much more that is new, or different, or troubling.

This is a grimier, messier Revolutionary War than we usually see, one where vicious scout groups wage amoral, opportunistic guerrilla warfare in the undergrowth, and where political allegiance is based as much on pragmatism as principle. "They picked the wrong side," Abe’s father, Richard, says of Patriot families forced to flee the town, urging his son to break all ties with dangerous sympathisers. Even if we know that, eventually, he will be proved wrong, Turn captures the desperate uncertainty of the Revolutionary era, and in so doing, renders the actions of the rebels – especially the reluctant among them – more remarkable and more extraordinary. There is a sweet and knowing irony to Major Hewlett’s smug quotation from Henry IV, Part II, when, relaxing after a fine meal, safe in the knowledge of the might of the British army, he declares, "O God! that one might read the book of fate,/ And see the revolution of the times/ Make mountains level, and the continent,/ Weary of solid firmness, melt itself/ into the sea!"

Rachel Williams is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Sleepy Hollow. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find her twitter here.

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In Which We Continue To Be Excited By New Moral Standards

Historical Revisionism

by RACHEL WILLIAMS

Sleepy Hollow
creators Phillip Iscove, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Len Wiseman

Ichabod Crane has a lot of adjusting to do. Suddenly and inexplicably resurrected in a damp and inhospitable cave, the trappings of the twenty-first century would be headache enough for Ichabod Crane without the ghosts, witches, and demons  currently flocking to Sleepy Hollow. 

This deceptively peaceful, white-picket-fence town of Sleepy Hollow is a far cry from the cannonfire and chaos of the Hudson Valley battlefield where he died 250 years ago at the hands of a masked, axe-wielding horseman. There are yellow lines all over the thoroughfares, for a start, and the face of his old commander, George Washington, is all over the money. Machines can tell when he’s lying, guns can fire more than one shot without having to reload, and worst of all, there’s a scandalous ten percent levy on baked goods.

Sleepy Hollow, playing very fast and loose with Washington Irving’s short story, is an unapologetically ludicrous blend of Supernatural, Elementary, and National Treasure. The arch-villain of the piece is the headless horseman of Irving’s Legend and the action takes place, as you might expect, in misty graveyards, sterile mental institutions, gnarled forests and spooky tunnels. In this incarnation the horseman turns out to be a harbinger of the Apocalypse straight out of the Book of Revelation.

The newly resurrected Crane (Tom Mison), along with his reluctant twenty-first century partner, local cop Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie), finds himself charged not only with figuring out how coffee machines and showers work, but with waging weekly battle against the various demons that follow in the Horseman’s wake and, ultimately, averting the Apocalypse, presumably just in time for the season finale.

There is plenty of mileage in watching Crane react to hair dryers, remote controls, and energy drinks, and there are some truly frightening monsters to drive the action. However, the show’s central tension is the contrast between Mills’ cheerful, no-nonsense cop and Crane’s prim and spiky professor-turned-soldier. The two rub grudgingly along together, with moments of real vulnerability and affection, like Lucy Liu and Johnny Lee Miller’s odd-couple in Elementary’s contemporary revamp of Sherlock Holmes. But unlike the meticulously plotted Elementary, the plot holes gape widely. Sleepy Hollow has few qualms about butchering the Book of Revelation or ripping up the orthodox history of the Revolutionary War.

Yet while the material realities of modern life may baffle Crane, the morals and attitudes that pervade the society prove altogether less daunting. He is more concerned that all the buildings he remembers from the 1780s are now branches of Starbucks than that Abbie is African American, female, and authorised to carry and use a gun.

If Crane mildly offends Abbie by asking whether she’s been emancipated, or suggests they catch one monster-of-the-week with the help of the local Mohawk shaman, that’s all the cultural insensitivity and political incorrectness the show permits him. Because he’s a Good Man (if rather tetchy and opinionated), a character for whom we’re supposed to cheer, Crane arrives in 2013 fully endowed with a suspiciously liberal worldview. Mangling the tired old myths of the Founding Fathers is one thing; but there’s another sort of historical revisionism going on here, one that threatens to undermine the tension at the heart of Abbie and Ichabod’s partnership and to render the fish-out-of-water narrative less potent and complex than it has the potential to be. 

That is to say, Crane has been given the eighteenth century views most palatable to us today. He was part of the transatlantic abolition movement, for instance, and, as part of the Patriot army, fought alongside Native American spies he clearly respected. Yet those eighteenth century views have been doctored and simplified by the show runners in order to absolve Crane of any vestiges of prejudice. Even the most radical abolitionists used language that perpetuated negative stereotypes of African American ignorance, dependence and innocence.

Crane, on the other hand, has very little difficulty accepting that both Abbie and her African American boss, Frank Irving, are fully deserving of their positions of authority. Nor does he express the same sentiments of racial inferiority employed against Native Americans by most eighteenth century white Americans; he reacts with sorrow and rage at the population collapse and systematic persecution that faced indigenous people in the centuries since his death. Even though Sleepy Hollow acknowledges the potential for cultural dislocation, to a point, inflecting Crane’s Revolutionary-era activism with twenty-first century moral standards threatens to erase the complexities and contradictions of eighteenth century views.

This is similarly true of Ichabod’s reaction to the revelation that his wife, Katrina, was a witch, one of a powerful, good coven charged with preventing the Horseman from catalysing the Apocalypse. Her having been burned at the stake in 1782 is already stretching the limits of historical credulity (American “witches” were usually hanged, and the last execution took place in Salem in 1692, nearly a century before Katrina’s apparently impermanent demise), but Ichabod’s placid reaction to the news is even less likely. While it would be overly simplistic to attribute the scale and ferocity of the witch-hunts that swept Europe and North America in the early modern period to the misogyny of the patriarchal societies that persecuted occult practices (they might just as easily be traced back to the religious realignments of the Reformation, the disorienting effects of the commercial revolution on isolated communities, or the desire of elites to shore up bureaucratic control and impose cultural conformity), the overwhelmingly female list of convictions – up to 85% of witchcraft trials in North America involved women – hints at the suspicion with which men viewed female sexuality, fertility, and intelligence.

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Crane would view his wife as his intellectual and emotional equal – you only have to glance at the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams for a contemporaneous example of a marriage based on mutual respect – but the witchcraft revelation could be expected to have upset that particular apple-cart, especially for a man whose Christian convictions seem unshaken by his 250-year nap.

Three episodes into Sleepy Hollow, Katrina, stuck in a limbo state populated by spooky white trees and indistinct, shadowy monsters, has had nothing much to do except gasp out tremulous, vague warnings to her increasingly baffled husband. We do not have much insight into exactly how hurt Crane is by her double life, or whether he condemns all witchcraft as devil worship and female sorcery. We do know, however, that Crane defers willingly to the women in his life – Abbie and Katrina – because of the knowledge they possess about the world in which he’s found himself, and because of their particular skill-sets as law enforcement officer and Apocalypse-preventer respectively. This willingness, arguably, paints him with a feminist streak that sits rather awkwardly and unconvincingly alongside the gender norms to which he could be expected to subscribe.

Sleepy Hollow is a well-paced, atmospheric blend of humour, horror, and historical tinkering with a refreshingly diverse cast and a knowing and critical approach to its subject matter. But the show already uses its supernatural premise to question how history is written and how myths are made; it shouldn’t be frightened to colour its central character with the same complexity and ambiguity.

Giving Crane views and standards that truly reflect his time would make it harder for us to like and understand him. But then, we might begin to understand the difficulties he faces in assimilating and to critique the eighteenth century prejudices and inequalities that still endure.

Rachel Williams is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find her twitter here.

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