In 2019, the new streaming service Apple TV + launched a trailer for “Dickinson”, which framed the story of the enigmatic 19th-century American poet as a contemporary young adult melodrama, complete with powerful ballad soundtrack and conspicuous employment of the honorific “ Dude. ”The series looked ridiculous. Naturally, I had to watch.
In the first season, Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) takes a bus ride with Death (played by rapper Wiz Khalifa), curses out the pompous Henry David Thoreau (John Mulaney) and dances with the hallucination of a giant bee (Jason Mantzoukas) while drinking opium. Yes, I realized, this is ridiculous. Ridiculously bright.
The first major Apple TV + series, created by Alena Smith, faces the challenge of many high school English teachers: trying to convince a new generation that a name for serious American literature programs was a carnal person with such urgent passions as ours, living in an undisciplined time of cultural ferment and political upheaval.
This kind of effort inevitably risks making you sound like the instructor pulling a chair back and saying to the children, “Let’s rap.” But Smith and company produced a work that, like poetry itself, risks risibility to produce something stunning – the story of the origin of a literary superhero who is intoxicating, funny and full of feeling, deadly serious about her subject, but little serious about herself.
“Dickinson” introduces the poet novice in her twenties – a Millennial from another millennium – drunk on words and irritated by a bourgeois family from Amherst who doesn’t know what to do with her. She is in love with Death (“He is a gentleman. Sexy as hell”) and with his brother’s bride, Sue (Ella Hunt), whom the poet wrote with devotion in real life.
The series takes you to an 1850s version in a tone so deliberately anachronistic that you can expect someone to take an iPhone out of the folds of your dress. Hip-hop bumps on the soundtrack; the characters drink from “Bleak House” as if it were a Netflix series. (“I’m an Esther!”, Says Emily’s sister Lavinia, played by Anna Baryshnikov.)
Everything oscillates on the verge of the autoparodia of “História da Bêbada”. (The cast of Jane Krakowski as Emily’s mother briefly makes “Dickinson” look like something that her character Jenna Maroney would have starred in as a cutting joke in “30 Rock.”)
But it works, thanks to an exuberant voice, the playfulness of the half-hour episodes and the passion for the protagonist’s verses, which appear on the screen as if written in fire. Steinfeld plays Emily as a sarcastic rebel possessed by forces that she only partially understands; is a literary biography in the form of a supernatural dramatic comedy by WB.
During the first season, the poet gathers her powers and learns about the challenges for women in the 19th century literary world through a series of meetings, including a Christmas dinner with the ambitious Louisa May Alcott (Zosia Mamet), who small talk Nathaniel Hawthorne, loves running (“This is a real fact about me”) and brainstorms the storyline for “Little Women”, looking for someone to “make money”
The second season, whose first three episodes arrive on Friday, deals more directly with the real-life mystery at the heart of the series. The real Emily Dickinson, as a pilot’s prologue tells us, published only a few poems and spent much of her life alone in her room. Why would a brilliant and obstinate poet resist fame?
The season begins in 1859 with the arrival of the 1850s fame machine – a newspaper, the Springfield Republican – that arrives in Amherst as the arrival of the internet, its pages full of politics, commerce and gossip.
The newspaper also transforms the idea of literary fame; a print run and your words are in front of thousands. Its arrogant and sloppy editor, Samuel Holmes (Finn Jones), is interested in publishing Emily’s work.
For viewers of the influential generation, for whom attention is an accepted asset, the fact that it did not end in a happy forever for literary celebrity suggests that something must have gone wrong – Emily must have withheld.
And yes, she still has to deal with the type of ophthalmologist she visits because of eye strain (James Urbaniak), who laughs when she says she is a writer: “You may want to stop doing so much of it!” (On the other hand, his lawyer and political father, a playfully clogged Toby Huss, gradually comes to appreciate, if he doesn’t understand, his daughter’s word addiction.)
But the season suggests that Emily’s retreat was also an inside job. She begins to have visions of a ghostly young man, who presents himself as “Nobody”, the personification of perhaps his most famous poem, a rejection of advertising. “Fame is not genuine,” he says. “It will use you. This will destroy you. “
Is she hearing her own voice here or the outside world? All those dashes in your verses – do they represent a breathless rush to be heard? – or a longing for the silences that fall between words? Emily seems to have more doubts about herself as a person, while becoming more confident as an artist; doubt, suggests “Dickinson”, may be inseparable from his art.
The running device of the appearance of Nobody makes the second season, although still extremely funny, a more serious and scary ride. The same is true with the advancement of real-life history as the Civil War approaches.
Emily’s poetry seems more and more like a seance, as if her intense images (all those divided larks and looks of agony) were exploring wild forces that will soon be launched in the country. The season also uses the war approach to build its black abolitionist characters, although their stories still seem peripheral among the privileged whites of New England.
Viewers and scholars can, of course, argue about “Dickinson’s” accuracy. (Let’s assume the giant bee is fictitious.) But I am more interested in your ideas of history, of freedom, of creativity as a wild gift and a kind of drug. In addition, as “Dickinson” himself says at the opening of season 2, there is little solid documentation from that period in the poet’s life.
All of this frees this show to have a poetic license – to tell its version of the truth, but to tell it strangely, deliciously inclined.