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.

"Everything Is Free" - Ben Sollee (mp3)

The new album of covers from Ben Sollee is entitled The Hollow Sessions. You can find it here.