American Gods is good at gore and even better at grief

(Image credit: Starz)

published 4 May 2017

American Gods — Starz's lush adaptation of Neil Gaiman's epic novel of the same name — manages to be faithful to its darkly funny, depressive, and twisty source text while adding some layers of its own. That's quite an achievement; Gaiman's novel doesn't exactly lend itself to television, nor is it a text in need of expansion. The book is a spiky, playful, mystical mess, the kind of project that rejects the constants and constraints that make a TV adaptation thinkable. It shuffles historical periods and locations and mythologies. It covers prophetic visions and petty annoyances. It sprouts characters without explaining their connections, anatomizes technology and television and America, and psychologizes an ex-con. It tells an epic story through mundane settings: This is the Iliad narrated through barfights and wheat fields and walk-ups. Despite those cosmic trappings, it also precisely renders varieties of pain that are personal — that is, contemporary and decidedly un-allegorical.

What unifies all those elements is the confidence of Gaiman's writerly voice, which authorizes those outrageous leaps and pushes you (like Shadow Moon, the book's reluctant protagonist) to believe in unlikely things. The other great unifier is Gaiman's gift for reconciling the sublime with the mundane, for making supernatural gore resonate with private grief.

The show, which stars Ricky Whittle as Shadow and Ian McShane as his employer, the puckish Mr. Wednesday, lends all the authority and license that made the novel work to the camera. McShane brings Mr. Wednesday to life by telling Shadow he has "one astoundingly improbable name." The same can be said of the American Gods pilot, which is as implausibly eclectic a visual buffet as you're likely to find. It includes the following shots, none of which look like they belong to the same genre, let alone the same show:

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As aesthetics go, that's an ambitious spectrum. Now, we're living in a moment that happens to be saturated with beautiful and creative camera-work. Legion, Better Call Saul, Westworld, Mr. Robot, and The Americans all boast gorgeous and sometimes innovative cinematography. Bryan Fuller's fits into that tradition, and his sensibility (familiar to fans of Pushing Daisies and Hannibal) is on full display here: This is a camera that likes to play. What sets this show apart from several of the others (Westworld, Mr. Robot, and Legion particularly) is that it plays with a purpose. Too often these days, exquisite cinematography becomes a kind of crutch for an underwritten story. Not so here. In American Gods, the writing is more than adequate, so there's no need to desperately plant Easter eggs. That frees up the camerawork, which comes to be a joyful complement, an element that unifies these crazily disparate styles into a kind of harmonic sense.

Shadow's curse is that he's a skeptic with a sixth sense. He doesn't believe in things he can't see, but he's uneasy anyway. He's getting out soon, but something feels wrong. He calls his wife Laura to find out whether everything is okay. It is! Then she dies. He's released early to attend her funeral. Bereaved, lonely, the weird result is that everyone he encounters thereafter — Mr. Wednesday, Mad Sweeney, Audrey — seems to find his grief a little bit funny.

You might notice that Shadow is depicted in a pretty shallow depth of field there; only a narrow slice of that scene is in focus. I don't know if that's a riff on the dimensions Shadow can't see yet, but what is clear is that the camera (and the show) prod him out of that slice by pelting him with inconveniences and indignities: The janitor nearly vacuums his feet. A self-proclaimed leprechaun attacks him. His wife's casket gets stuck going into the ground and has to be jerked free. He finds out how his wife died (giving his best friend a blowjob), and her best friend Audrey offers him a blowjob in revenge.

That graveyard confrontation between Audrey and Shadow shows, by the way, what the sober side of American Gods can do. The cinematography there is comparatively restrained, and the acting takes that scene to an unexpectedly high plane. Betty Gilpin deserves an Emmy for her turn as Ativan-drunk, grief-stricken Audrey; she lends that scene a heavy psychological realism that manages to be even more mordant and funny than the show's puckish camera. It's a bravura performance, one that helps anchor a show that could easily billow out into abstract nonsense. Her wild grief gives expression to Shadow's repressed agony. (It's a credit to Neil Gaiman that he put his foot down when the series creators, Fuller and Green, wanted to make that aborted blowjob happen).

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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