Dec 23: Alison Deming, On Binge-Watching

 

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On Binge-Watching

Alison Deming

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If you spliced together all the footage of Ross Poldark galloping along the seaside cliffs of Cornwall, great coat flying over his stallion’s flanks, you could fill at least one of the forty-three hours that the series commands. There may have been only one or two such sequences shot, copy-and-paste as needed. As with the clip of the stagecoach wheel dipping into a rain-filled pothole, a telling close-up that makes the viewer feel the passengers inside the coach jostle. That’s a keeper. No need to reshoot for the next stagecoach ride. To see the technique is to break the spell of the story, to imagine the cinematographer, the editor, the gaff and best boy, to appreciate the gears and wheels and scaffolds of the made thing.

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I don’t know why I binge watch. I grew up in the fifties. Television was new and most kids in my elementary school had TVs before our family did. I remember in third grade kids coming to class on Monday all excited about “the toast of the town.” I had no idea what kind of toast they were talking about. Certainly not raisin bread. How long was it before I learned that was the title of the Ed Sullivan show? When we finally got a TV, it was stuck in a corner of the dark basement, a cot and chair for the renegade who dared enter. The parental attitude was one of disdain. Like the Sumerians who hated the invention of writing because it would ruin human memory. I braved the dark on Saturday mornings to watch Fury: The Story of a Horse and the Boy Who Loved Him. The American West, an untamable black stallion, played by the horse who had starred in Black Beauty. An orphaned boy adopted by a widowed California rancher. Opening shot: Fury leads a herd of wild horses through rocky hills and passes of the open range. He is magnificent and haughty and aware of his beauty. No one can tame him. Except the boy, who calls him by name, asks him to kneel, climbs on his bare gleaming back and rides off into an adventure. The horse becomes a hero, saving visitors to the ranch who get in trouble. He’s a little bit like Lassie, but a lot sexier. I don’t remember the storylines, but I remember feeling taken away by beauty.
     I always felt guilty watching television. That sense it is somehow a wrong thing got stuck in me at an early age. I think now that my parents’ antipathy came because television ruined my father’s career. He’d be a successful and beloved radio personality. He and my mother wrote scripts for radio dramas like The Shadow and sometimes played all the parts including sound effects in live performances. Hands slapping knees for hoofbeats, rattling sheet metal for thunder. But television was the new thing, everyone everywhere listening to same program at the same time was over. Visual spectacle had won, and my father’s work on the fringes of TV never had the same luster. But to binge. Now that’s the new thing. Watch whatever you want whenever you want for a long as you want. It’s hard to stop.

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When Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall from America where he has fought for three years against the revolutionaries, he finds that his father has died, his inheritance shot, the family’s tin mines failing, their servants now wastrels allowing rats and goats to take over the house, and the woman he loved marrying his cousin. He had left for war as a Redcoat to escape hanging for brawling and free trading and fraud. He had fought so bravely in Virginia, as to become promoted to Captain. But he returns to England as a loser on all fronts. Nevertheless, he is magnificent and haughty and aware of his beauty. Given to brooding at the seaside, anchored by his tri-corn hat and gazing into the stormy distance.
     The first episode sets up enough tensions—elastic bands stretched between characters-- so that you have to follow to see if the band snaps, breaks, or slingshots one or another character into oblivion. There’s the unmitigated desire, thick as tar, between Ross and Elizabeth, his porcelain beauty of a jilting sweetheart, who turns out to be something of an empty vessel. There’s the enmity between Ross and Francis, the insipid but moneyed cousin married to his beloved, making it impossible for him to walk away. There are the starving tenant laborers on Ross Poldark’s mortgaged land, bringing the tensions of class struggle to bear. There is George Warleggan, the arrogant greed-mongering profiteer, who is repulsed by Poldark as he grows into being a man of principle and labors beside his tenants, working to benefit the poor and enslaved. George marries Elizabeth after Francis dies in the tin mine, giving Poldark sufficient reason to uphold his side of their mutual enmity. Desire never dies ever after Ross realizes he is better off with a woman who can skin rabbits and chop wood than with a fine lady in silk.
     And then there is Demelza, my favorite character in the series. The one who can skin rabbits and chop wood. She first appears as a street urchin in the market, her dog snatched and thrown into a dog fight, a circle of men lusting for blood. She’s dressed in burlap rags, hair bunched under a loose cap, face showing the bruises of her father’s daily beatings. She is a scrambling panicked mess, screaming to get back her dog. Ross saves them both. She grows to become Ross’s true love and mate, never shedding the fire and grit it took her to survive her childhood. It’s a scandalous marriage to the class-conscious Brits, Ross a gentleman of moneyed stock, if now struggling, and Demelza, daughter of a brutal miner with no stature other than her character and intelligence. They are both pleasantly complicated. Ross is principled but impulsive, a risk-taker, a man who moves easily among the working class and aristocracy, loyal but given to jealousy, eager and willing to name hypocrisy and fight for a moral truth, willing to lie to anyone and everyone for the sake of espionage on behalf on his nation. He becomes an eloquent spokesman for both free trade and the abolition of slavery. Demelza grows from illiterate urchin to a woman who can run household and a mine, in her husband’s absence. She is the one who hands out bread to the poor, who welcomes her brothers into their home when they too seek a better way than their father’s hard reign. And, yes, she chops the wood and skins the rabbits without complaint, when that is what’s called for. She is capable of heeding her passion, both in loyalty and folly, but finding her footing again and again in a sense of agency of which she was deprived as a child. And once her long red hair is unfurled, it too commands an audience as it blows in the wind when she stands gazing from the clifftop at the sea. The landscape here works to reinforce that it is a time of change and everyone is on the edge of that, no one is secure despite their sense of belonging in the place.
     I should mention the color palette of the series, because after all this is a visual spectacle that reveals itself through image and color. The poor are dressed in the color of bare, dry dirt. Buff, burlap, and rough. Even market day is a buff-colored spectacle of the poor milling about the street where vendors hawk salted fish and sacks of grain. There is no color other than the gowns and top hats of the gentry who float above the crowd even when their feet touch it. The homes of the poor are beige, their clothes are beige, their meals are beige, their tools and weapons are beige. But the gentry… well, just imagine the visual pleasure and envy of seeing those gowns and the roasted goose at Christmas and the spread of fruits and meats and oysters and flowers on the banquet table at the ball. When a tenant laborer picks a bouquet of wildflowers, that is a statement.

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I am unlikely to read any of the twelve Poldark novels upon which the BBC series is based. British novelist Winston Graham lived in Cornwall for over three decades. The character of Demelza is based on his wife, who was native to the region. The last of these novels was published in 2002 just a year before his death. He also wrote an additional thirty novels, plus books of short stories and nonfiction, and four plays. It’s the kind of career that is so effusive it’s daunting to take on any one book. The historical novels are well-researched and take the fictional liberties one would expect for sake for dramatic interests. And drama there is. Turns and swerves and twists of action and intrigue, both political and romantic. And I’ve only mentioned the primary characters. The secondary and tertiary ones are strung into the weave with a tension that is hard to relieve, except by clicking on to the next episode. I love history presented as visual spectacle and character study. I love seeing emotion play quietly over an actor’s face. So much is said without words--and juxtaposed to history’s panoramic context. How will these people meet the challenges of their time? It’s the question we are all asking of ourselves in the darkening of the American prospect. Yes, we are all standing on a perilous cliff. 

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My favorite moment in the forty-three episodes is in the last one. Ross’s espionage caper against the French has turned on him. In a stand-off with his adversaries, he is about to meet his end when two gunshots blast. Ross is stunned as he looks at his rescuer. More stunned is George Warleggan, his avowed adversary, who stands holding two dueling pistols with a look on his face that seems weirdly innocent, as if self-knowledge is utterly foreign to him. Throughout the series he has held his chin upward, a constant imagistic reinforcement of his arrogance. Here he is stunned at his own action in saving Ross. They drink a reluctant toast in the denouement. George, regaining the chin slant of his arrogance, tells Ross he did it not for him but for his nation. Ross, always ready with the right words and wry smile, says, “Well, then, shall we revert to our usual animosity?” George replies in the sneering tone of faux superiority we have come to know and detest in him, “With pleasure.” How crisp is the British enunciation. It’s an auditory image, wit and bite wrapped up in two perfect words.

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Alison Deming is the author of many books of poetry and nonfiction, most recently the poetry collection BLUE FLAX & YELLOW MUSTARD FLOWER. She has a new nonfiction manuscript MOBIUS: A MEDITATION ON ART & SCIENCE currently out there looking for a publisher. She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.