lisa_goldstein | Entries tagged with penny dreadful: city of angels

We’re watching Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. At first it seemed practically written for me, just full of things I like. For one thing, it’s about Los Angeles in 1938, showing what the city looked like just a decade and a half before I was born, with all the beautiful Art Deco buildings and old buses and palm trees — though everything looks cleaner than it probably was. There’s a murder, and two police detective partners working to solve the mystery, one Latino and one Jewish. There’s a (fictional) history of how the first freeways were built, and I think some of this could be fantasy, or at least we’re shown a group of Nazis urging the city to run the freeways through some places and not others. The idea of occult freeways sounds great, though occult Nazis have gone beyond cliche at this point.

The Nazis are adamant that the freeway pass through a Hispanic community, and the inclusion of Latinx characters was another thing I liked, party because I thought I could learn some Spanish. Unfortunately these characters speak almost entirely in English, maybe because the filmmakers assumed no estadounidense would have the patience for a foreign language.

But what first drew me to the show was Santa Muerte, a supernatural character who takes away the souls of the dead. With her gold crown and white lace veil and dead-white face, and her disinterest when talking to a mere human, she’s the best depiction of Death since Neil Gaiman portrayed her in the Sandman comics. She also has a sister, named Magda, who incites violence and death. Magda, unlike her sister, takes part in human events, and this requires the actor, Natalie Dormer, to play four separate roles. I’ve only seen her as royalty, in The Tudors and Game of Thrones, so I had no idea that she’s that versatile.

There’s more going on than just building a freeway. Four people are murdered, dressed like figures from the Day of the Dead, and placed in the Los Angeles River. (In practice this means putting them on the asphalt river bottom, because the thing about the Los Angeles River is that for most of the year there isn’t one.) The investigation leads to an Amy Semple McPherson type, who falls for one of the detectives. A man who at first seems like a kindly doctor turns out to march in a Nazi uniform on his lunch breaks. Policemen harass the Hispanic community, and some of them fight back. Nazi spies are slinking around Caltech, trying to get help building V-2 rockets.

I started to wonder how authentic it all was, especially the parts about Latinx folklore, and I fell into a maze of Internet articles. One in particular points out that the filmmakers followed a sort of mix-and-match approach, taking some things, leaving others, and creating wholly new mythology to fit their story. It turns out, in fact, that Santa Muerte came into existence a good deal later than this period, in the 1950s. She’s considered the patron saint (not officially — the Catholic Church doesn’t recognize her) of marginalized people, LGBT people especially, and her symbols are bats and owls and scythes. None of this is shown in City of Angels, where her function is simply to take souls. Her sister isn’t mentioned anywhere.

I finally realized what was bothering me in the third episode, where the Jewish detective tears his clothes while mourning the deaths of his friends. This is a Jewish custom at funerals, and pretty specialized knowledge; I don’t think most people watching understood what he was doing. But when it comes to the Hispanic community we are shown very little of their traditions. A woman with a rosary prays to Mary when someone is near death, and later also prays to Santa Muerte. Rebellious young people dance to swing music and wear zoot suits. (The zoot suit, says Wikipedia, was popular in Harlem and Chicago and Detroit in the 1930s, but only reached other communities in the forties. I could just about believe that zoot suits existed, unrecorded, in Los Angeles in 1938, but put this together with Santa Muerte being from the fifties…) And that’s pretty much it. It’s not cultural appropriation — cultural appropriation might even be a step up for this show, because it would show an actual culture. I don’t know what you’d call it. Laziness, maybe.

I guess I wanted more. More about Hispanic history and language and customs and religion, more about things I didn’t know rather than things I did. I’m still watching the show, though, still enjoying parts of it and hoping they’ll fill in some of the blanks I mentioned. Maybe I’ll even learn some Spanish.