Recently I binge watched the whole first series of The Sandman, a dark fantasy-horror with tinges of psychological drama, actually quite a hard television program to generically classify, and in this post I wish to compare it to the source material, the comic book that was published between 1989 and 1996. I love the comic book and have written about it before in four posts – in my critique of it I shall be comparing the adaption to the original comics. However, first I wish to discuss my life and clear up some small errors in the previous post. In actuality some of the things I wish to say about my life are quite important to the life story I have been revealing in bis and pieces. Those readers who are interested in The Sandman should skim the first part of this essay; those who are interested in my life should focus on the first part. It is doubtful whether the various parts of this essay will at all cohere.
As people who read my blog will know, I am diagnosed schizophrenic and have been under a Compulsory Treatment Order since early 2014. If I were to tell people that I am under the Mental Health Act (I don't usually), they might assume that I was put under the Act because I was a danger to myself or to others, one of the two limbs legally required for being put under the Act. In fact, the main reason I was put under the Act was because I refused to take antipsychotic medication. There are possibly other reasons which I shall come back to in a moment. It is important to state, for the record, that I wasn't a danger to anyone in 2014 or at any time before or after. As someone subject to the Mental Health Act, I have certain rights. One right is that I am entitled to Independent Reviews, a process in which a solicitor, layperson, and psychiatrist from another DHB, in the presence of the patient, his or her psychiatrist, key worker, lawyer, and other family members (if they wish to attend) assess if the patient is 'fit to be released from the Mental Health Act'. The assessment is made based on a report written by the psychiatrist and on the testimony of the patient and the others who are present. I have had four Independent Reviews, the last being in 2018; after that last review and after my dosage was increased from (I believe) 300mgs a month to 300mgs a fortnight I gave up on requesting Independent Reviews because, rather than improving my situation, they just seemed to be getting me deeper into the hole, forcing the shrinks to double down on their diagnosis. Independent Reviews, rather than providing protection for the patient, seem to me to be just window dressing – the panelists are usually reluctant to admit that the other psychiatrists have made a mistake. Another right I have is that I am entitled to see a copy of my record. In 2015, I requested a copy and, after some time, was given a stack of paper about the size of the Bible. Notes about every interaction I'd ever had with my psychiatrist and key worker were included in the record. I only read the very beginning of the record because it was too dispiriting to read the whole thing, although I looked up and used the notes about a particular consultation, the consultation in early 2012 in which my dosage of Olanzapine was decreased from 10mgs a day to 7.5mgs a day, at the review I had later in 2015.
I have seen seven different psychiatrists since 2007. What I have come to realise is the obvious fact that they lack the time or motivation to read all my notes. Presumably there is a short summary of my life or personality or situation which they read before they see me, a summary that I myself have never seen. I recall a worker at the Taylor Centre talking about 'citations' last year– presumably when an interaction is considered significant enough, it goes in this summary, is 'cited'. Back in 2009, I remember mentioning to my then Key Worker that I thought my stepmother didn't like me; she said something about it being common for people to dislike their stepparents. What I realise now, and sensed inchoately at the time, is that Kate had decided that it was not important to record the fact that I had a bad relationship with my stepmother in my notes, even though it should have gone not just in my notes but in the summary that I conjecture existed. If the important information about me was contained in this short summary, it should have been the summary that I was given in 2015, not the enormous tome of notes. The Taylor Centre might have broken the law.
I cannot be sure what is contained in this summary but I can speculate with some confidence. First, I suspect that the summary contained the 'fact' that I am supposedly gay but don't want people such as my family to know. I don't know whether Fernando wrote down that I had 'come out' to him, perhaps at the beginning of 2009, or if he had some other supposed evidence. Second, I suspect that the summary contained the supposed 'fact' that I dislike my mother. (In the previous post I described when and how this error was made.) Third, I think it contained the 'fact' that I am a drug user. All of these supposed 'facts' are incorrect. Finally, it must contain details about how much medication I was on, when I was 'ill' and when I wasn't, and my attitude towards medication at various times, details that I also believe must have been wrong. I suspect that the main reason I was put under the Mental Health Act is because the way I presented myself to the psychiatrist I started seeing in 2013, Jennifer Murphy, did not conform with the picture she had of me from the summary. I was put under the Act because I said I was straight. I have said in previous posts that I believe I was somehow 'outed' in 2013; I conjecture now that it was this brief summary that was somehow leaked. There is one last anecdote I will share because it may be relevant. Over the summer of 2017 ad 2018, I undertook a research paper through the University of Auckland on narrative theory with Professor Brian Boyd (for which I received a B). At this time, my Key Worker was a woman called Debbie Smith. Debbie expressed an interest in reading the essay I had written but, mainly because I didn't think she would particularly enjoy a fairly abstruse discussion of the book The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh, I never gave it to her. Somehow my failure to show her a copy of this essay went into my notes as another mark against me. My feeling is that because of the summary, or perhaps as a result of the general attitude psychiatrists have towards their patients, I was regarded as stupid. Now, I'm not a genius but I'm certainly not stupid.
I have felt for a long time as if I was under a curse, a curse cast on me by the psychiatrists and by the Mental Health System generally. One effect of this 'curse' is that I sometimes make small errors in this blog, errors I sometimes only notice later. I recently reread the previous post and noticed some mistakes; one solution would be to go back to this previous post and correct them but I feel that the previous post has already been presented to the world and so I need to correct them in the next. There is one grammatical mistake that I picked up on. More importantly I implied some things that are not true. I implied that George W. Bush was one of my imaginary friends but, in truth I only conversed with him twice, once in January 2009 and once in January 2010. I do not want people to think I support Bush. I consider myself a leftist: for many election cycles I have voted Green and, if I was American, would be in the progressive wing of the Democrat Party (although I now disagree with some ideas pushed by the LGBT community). I may also have implied that I believe in God. In truth I have gone backwards and forwards about God, mainly because I thought that my soul was in danger and thought that perhaps converting to some denomination of Christianity might somehow magically save me. However, today, although I believe that there is a mystical dimension to the world, I do not subscribe to any kind of Christianity. Another error is that the synopsis of the film I presented is perhaps ever so slightly distorted, ironically because I'm the writer; there were other events in the film that I perhaps should have mentioned but didn't. Of course, the screenplay is available on the Internet so you can read the film rather than rely on the synopsis. Incidentally, it has occurred to me that a simpler explanation for why the film failed is that Jess lacked a character arc. I realised this weakness in the film when I wrote it but simply had no idea how, in a film about a young woman who suffers a psychotic episode and then recovers, I could provide such a character arc. People don't follow neat character arcs in real life. This thought, that The Hounds of Heaven failed because its protagonist lacked a character arc, was inspired by watching the most recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.
There is one last error in the previous post that I wish to correct. In October or November 2009 I had a conversation with Jon Stewart in my head, a conversation I described in the previous post. The conversation ran as follows. I was walking home from somewhere when I heard a voice say, "You're long-sighted" I replied, "No, I'm short-sighted". The voice said again, "You're long-sighted". I repeated myself saying, "No, I'm short-sighted – I see well at short distances!" The voice laughed and I realised that I was talking to Jon. He said, "There's no hope for you." In the previous post I somehow put down "help" instead of "hope". The point of the exchange was that Jon was making a joke, being ironic. He was saying that there was hope for me, that I wasn't gay, never had been gay, and never would be gay. Perhaps this small error I made in the previous post of accidentally substituting "help" for "hope" is trivial but it seems important to get these things right.
At this point in the post I wish to change topics. I wish to compare the television adaptation of The Sandman with its source material.
As I said, I binge watched the whole series a couple of nights ago. Since then I have been obsessively combing the internet for reviews and reactions. Some reviewers have thought it was wonderful while others have hated it. The best reviews are the mixed reviews that can be found on Youtube. Some reviewers are familiar with the source material and some are not; there is no clear preference to be found among either group as to whether the TV series is good or bad. I myself am very familiar with the source material and know the comics inside-out. When I watched the series, I was mainly looking to see how well the adaption followed the plots, details, and themes of the original – when it didn't I phased out a little. I intend to discuss this first season. The series adapts the main story-lines of the first two collections, Preludes and Nocturnes and The Dolls' House. I have neither collection here with me in my apartment but believe I can remember them well enough to make some remarks comparing the adaption with the original series. In the following discussion, I shall assume the reader has seen the TV series but is unfamiliar with the comic.
It is necessary first to point out the obvious fact that the original stories were comic books, and comic books can depict characters, events, settings, and atmospheres in a way that only a very high budget film, like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaption, can. Although Netflex invested a lot of money in The Sandman, and although many reviewers praised its design with words like 'beautiful' and 'lavish', the TV series simply can't do as good a job. By adapting the comic book for TV, the focus has naturally shifted from fantastical visuals to character interactions and development, an example being the reimagining of John D, played brilliantly by David Thewliss, who in the original was simply evil embodied, as befits a TV program that is in most respects an episodic TV drama. A second important difference between the source material and the TV series is that there is far more horror in the original comic books. Neil Gaiman has always been good at writing creepy stories and is still writing them today. This claim, that the original comic book had more of a horror vibe than the TV series, may surprise viewers who were on the edge of their seats during the episode "24/7" but I shall back up this assertion in a moment. Another important thing to remember is that the comic books were released monthly between 1989 and 1996 and Neil Gaiman was basically making it up as he went along. For instance, I suspect that the fact that Morpheus claims Lyta Hall's child as his by right (an event that occurs in both the TV series and comic book) was thrown into the mix by Gaiman without him knowing precisely where it would lead in the future. Eventually, it becomes vitally important. The TV adaptation has both the advantage and disadvantage of knowing the conclusion that the comic book will eventually reach.
I turn now to the character of Morpheus himself. In the TV series, Morpheus is played, brilliantly, by Tom Sturridge, an actor who has both the voice and the presence to play the Dreamking. In the comics Dream always has an otherworldly quality (he sometimes has stars for eyes) but Gaiman and the other creators of the TV series realised early on that if they incorporated Dream's otherworldly quality into the program, his interactions with humans in the waking world would seem unbelievable. I can understand why it was necessary to make this change to how Dream was depicted. However, there are other real problems with the depiction of Morpheus, problems that do not arise from Sturridge's performance but from the writing itself, that I think are unfortunate. I shall single out two errors of aesthetic judgement. The first is that in the original comic book Morpheus is often scary. For instance, at the end of the first issue Dream condemns Alex Burgess, to "eternal waking" – the form this curse takes is that Alex is plunged into nightmares, awaking from each nightmare briefly believing that he has escaped only to find he is in another nightmare. In the comic, this "eternal waking" lasts some seven years. When I was watching the first episode, I was anticipating this moment and was disappointed when Morpheus condemns Alex instead to "eternal sleep", a punishment not nearly so nasty. Another example of Dream's vindictiveness (an example that does somehow make it into the TV series) is that thousands of years ago he had condemned a lover who had rejected him, Nada, to eternal hell. A third example that shows Dream's sinister side is the scene in which Morpheus confronts Lyta, the only scene in which they are both present, telling her that because her child was conceived in the Dreaming, it is his and one day he will come to claim it; if I recall correctly, Lyta calls him "a monster". The fact that Lyta both hates and fears Morpheus becomes very important later – I might be wrong about this but I didn't think the TV series at all conveys Lyta's antipathy towards Dream even though it is a vital ingredient of the final collection, The Kindly Ones. So why did the creators of the TV series downplay the dark side of Dream? It is possible that they didn't include the sequence of Alex's "eternal waking" because of budgetary constraints. However, I think the main reason that they didn't include Dream's more terrifying side is because they kowtowed to the conventional wisdom that TV show protagonists should be sympathetic and felt that if they included Dream's more monstrous actions and behaviours, audiences wouldn't like and identify with him. I think this decision condescends to audiences. We might consider Tony Soprano as an example of a morally dubious character that audiences like, or Dexter. After all, The Sandman TV show is R18 and so it has the latitude to present evil, whether that evil be in the form of horror scenes or in the characterisation of a show's protagonist.
The second major error related to Dream's character is that the creators of the show fail to emphasise Dream's most important quality – his inflexibility. Dream is absolutely committed to the duties and responsibilities associated with his realm. The overarching theme of the whole comic is that sometimes people have to either change or die – this is the main theme in a nutshell. A closely related error is that in the comic Dream is absolute monarch of his domain but, presumably to up the emotional stakes, the drama, in the TV series Lucien is presented as Dream's lieutenant and sometimes argues with him or partly arrogates his power. The humanising of Dream in the TV series, the weakening of both his power and obduracy, creates a little confusion about his personality. In a ferociously negative review in USA Today, a critic said that in the series Morpheus lacks any kind of character arc. This reviewer obviously hadn't read the comic book because Morpheus does have a character arc – it just takes seven years to play out. Some reviewers have asked why spending (in the TV series) over a century in captivity hasn't changed him. In the comic the trauma has changed him, slightly, and the comic presents, usually in a subtle and nuanced way, the trajectory that leads him at last to his final conversation with Death. In the TV series the issue of presenting his inflexibility and the slight changes that have occurred as the result of his imprisonment are handled poorly – some reviewers have accused the writers of inconsistency. Sometimes Morpheus is good and sometimes he is bad and there seems neither rhyme nor reason as to why he is sometimes compassionate and at other times malevolently unforgiving. This, to reiterate, is not Sturridge's fault but the fault of the writers.
The first Sandman collection I bought was The Dolls' House, a book I read and reread obsessively when I was about fifteen. In the TV series, this storyline plays out over the second half of the season. Most reviewers I have read or viewed regard the second half of the season as weaker than the first. In the next couple of paragraphs I wish to compare The Dolls' House as it is presented in the TV series and as it presented in the comic and suggest some reasons why the adaption didn't work. I will first consider the plot line concerning Jeb, Lyta Hall and Hector Hall. In the comic Hector is a dead superhero, who calls himself the Sandman, who lives with Lyta (who is alive) in Jeb's subconscious mind, assisted by two renegade nightmares called Brute and Glob. In his real life Jeb spends his time in the basement to which he has been confined by his venal foster parents. Unfortunately I can't remember this plot-line perfectly and do not trust the Wikipedia summary enough to use it as a source but I will make an attempt at a summary. Somehow Morpheus tracks down Brute and Glob, who are returned to the Dreaming; he disincorporates Hector and tells Lyta that the child she has carried for many years in Jeb's dreams is his. In the TV series, however, the plot-line involving Hector and Lyta is separated from the plot-line involving Jeb, the only connection being that Lyta is a friend of Rose Walker, who is searching for Jeb. Hector is not a superhero but only the ghost of her former husband. The plot line involving Lyta, Hector and their unborn child in the TV series is very weak. Lyta is uninteresting and flat, and her dream life is different from the waking world only in that it contains a very nice modernist house. Lyta seems unsurprised that a god of dreams exists and seems pretty much unfazed when she becomes pregnant in real life. In the comics, in a world of superheroes, the problem of how real people react to magic or the supernatural, how they react to beings and things that are not of this world, is somehow evaded, but the TV series can't escape this dilemma. Lyta doesn't work and her reaction to the supernatural doesn't work. The plotline involving Jeb also doesn't work. In the TV series, in his dreams, Jeb imagines himself to be the Sandman, an illusion created by a nightmare called Gault who is protecting Jeb from the brutal reality of his life. Gault is trying to reform, to be a good dream rather than a nightmare; nevertheless she too is disincorporated by Morpheus. Obviously the writers of the series are trying to anticipate the most important theme in The Sandman, the possibility of change. But Gault strikes me as a clumsy sentimental addition to the story, another way in which the writers are condescending to their audience by oversimplifying things, by imposing on the story pathetic (in the old sense of that word) simplistic narrative arcs because that is what they imagine audiences want. Rather than present pure evil, the TV series gives all its characters understandable rationales for their actions. In the TV series, Gault is redeemed, as John D is redeemed. Even the Corinthian is somewhat redeemed as I shall discuss in the next paragraph.
In the comic books, the Corinthian is introduced in the third issue of The Dolls' House. In the TV series, he is introduced in the first episode. I don't have a problem with this early introduction: Preludes and Nocturnes was aways the weakest volume in the Sandman library, the issues where Gaiman was still searching for his theme and voice. The importance of the Corinthian to the TV series is that Morpheus needs an adversary, an arch-nemesis, to give the whole first season some coherent shape. In the comic book, there is no way that the Corinthian can beat Morpheus but in the TV series he actively assists Roderick Burgess in keeping Dream confined and then later actively seeks out Rose Walker because he thinks that, because she is a vortex, he can somehow use her to destroy Dream. This means that in the episode "The Collectors" and in the immediately preceding episode we know that Dream wants to kill Rose while the Corinthian wants to keep her alive. This muddies the waters about who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. One of the reviewers I saw, for instance, said that she could sympathise with the Corinthian. If the TV series presents the Corinthian as being at all sympathetic it has well and truly failed to capture the character presented in the comic book because, in the comic book, he is the essence of evil. In the comic, the Corinthian has no idea that Rose is a vortex and he comes across Jeb more or less by chance. (Of course, because Rose is a vortex she attracts dreams to her willy-nilly.) There is also no question, in the comic book, that the Corinthian would kill Rose if he could. These subtle changes alter the complexion of the story.
One of my favourite issues of the Sandman is "The Collectors", the issue set at a convention of serial killers. Again the TV series gets it wrong. This issue of the comic is dark and menacing whereas the episode is, as one reviewer put it, twee. One reason for this, as I've mentioned, is the medium: the comic was able to create a frightening atmosphere, an atmosphere evoked by the illustrations, that the brightly lit convention centre in the TV episode couldn't replicate. Another reason is the fact that we're in 2022 and the original comic book would have been released in 1990: back then serial killers were a fixture of the collective imagination whereas today and for many years, we never hear about serial killers. The archetype of the serial killer was salient then as it isn't today. This is why Gilbert says, in the TV series, that the Corinthian has created a cult-like following; in the original comic the Corinthian is just one serial killer among many, although an especially respected one. In the comic, the various serial killers ask each other, "What's your score?" and receive answers like, "Forty-two". This is absent from the TV episode, as far as I can recall. Other moments in the episode also fall flat, such as the monologue by the serial killer explaining how he found his vocation. In the comic, this serial killer is a young man with whom we can identify, creating an uncomfortable feeling of sympathy with a monster. In the episode, the performance is such that we regard him as just a fucked up individual; the scene feels unnecessary, tacked on. In the comic, Gilbert tells Rose the original version of the Red Riding Hood story, which deepens the menacing atmosphere: I wish they had left this scene in. Also, in the comic Funland, after he tries to attack Rose, I believe, is rendered unconscious by Morpheus and given a dream by Morpheus that directly quotes "The Selfish Giant" by Oscar Wilde. In the episode, Funland is killed by the Corinthian. I wish that Stephen Fry, who plays Gilbert, had pushed for the original version. It is well known that Oscar Wilde is a pivotal figure in Fry's life.
Perhaps the most important way in which the adaptation fails is in its presentation of dreams. In The Dolls' House, in I think the final issue, we are shown the dreams of the various residents of the house in which Rose is living. Each dream is stylistically very different from the others and each dream is also very different from the dreamer's real life. For instance, we have the couple Barbie and Ken who are so simpatico in real life that they can finish each other's sentences. Ken's dream is a maelstrom of sex, money and power whereas, in Barbie's dream, she is a princess in a magical land embarked upon a quest. As Rose's influence expands, the barriers break down between the different dreams, leading to havoc. All of this is much easer to represent though comic book illustrations than through a live-action drama. This is not to say that the makers of the TV series didn't try: the depiction of Barbie's dream contain a CGI version of the creature Martin Ten-Bones that is very similar to the way it was drawn in the comic. But, on a whole, this portion of the TV series fails and this is simply the result of the difficulty in translating a story from one medium to another. Even if Netflix had thrown a lot more money into the production, they couldn't have represented Ken's dream on a TV screen.
There are two other ways in which the adaption fails: it often lacks the surprise factor of the original comic and often lacks the humour of the original comic. To take two examples – in the original comic, it comes as a surprise when we find out that the Sandman has to kill Rose. In the TV series, this is well telegraphed in advance. Similarly, in the comic, we don't find out that Gilbert is Fiddler's Green until the final issue when Rose is in the Dreaming. In the TV series, Gilbert voluntarily returns to the Dreaming to tell Morpheus about the Corinthian before then. Surprise is an important rhetorical device in story telling and Gaiman, who is a master of story telling and was involved in the production, should have remembered this, the devices that made the original work so original and compelling. Additionally the TV adaption lacks the black comedy of the original. In "The Collectors" there is a scene in which a panel of female serial killers discuss the politics of women who have their particular pastime. I can't remember this bit exactly and so will make up something roughly approximate to the original. A female serial killer with a name like Nightjay says, "I'm sick of women in our profession being typecast as either black widows or killer nurses." Sitting to her left is a woman who is quite clearly a black widow and, to her right, a woman who is quite clearly a killer nurse. This little scene is at once a Feminist statement and a satire on Feminism and is quite funny. In the TV episode, however, this scene becomes a woman giving a short diatribe on Feminism that could come directly out of an essay by a first-year student of Women's Studies, a spiel that has, in my view, no relation to where women are at today, at least in the Western world. The satire is excised.
In this essay I have been quite critical of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman. However it is still very good in many ways and I shall watch future seasons– I have been critical of it mainly because it doesn't measure up to the original. Of course, no TV adaptation could match the comic books which were masterpieces.
I shall now summarise what I have said so far. There are three major weaknesses in the adaptation when compared to the original. First, it often does not go far enough in the horror direction, particularly in its depiction of Dream and in the episode "The Collectors". Second, a TV series simply cannot capture the striking visuals of a comic book or its method of story telling, unless it has Peter Jackson's budget. The Sandman was a groundbreaking work that pushed the boundaries of what comic books could do and no pretty-much live action TV series could reproduce the original. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the creators of the TV series have made narrative and dramatic decisions based on cliches and conventions of TV drama, cliches and conventions I presume they think will make the work more appealing and easily digestible for the 'average' viewer. One example is their decision to iron out the problematic aspects of Dream's personality. Another is their decision to give the Corinthian the motivation of wanting to destroy Dream. I'll give one last example of this, an example that really bothered me at the time. In the comic, Rose is walking home and is suddenly beset by a group of men; Gilbert appears and saves her. This is the first time we meet Gilbert. In the TV adaptation, when she is attacked, Rose successfully fights off a number of the men with Gilbert's assistance and Steven Fry says something like, "It seems you didn't need my help!" The implication is that Rose is a feisty independent self-sufficient women who can single-handedly fight off a number of men much bigger than she is; a further implication is that audiences wouldn't identify with Rose unless she was capable of single-handedly fighting off a group of men much bigger than she is. But for me, the TV version of the scene simply didn't ring true, the original was better. For one thing, it said something important about Gilbert. I don't know whether the creators of the TV series are condescending to their audience or if they simply don't know how to tell a good story. This is all the more perplexing when we remember that Gaiman himself was involved in the production.
I'll turn now to another aspect of the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman – its politics. Much has been made of the fact that a number of black actors have been cast to play characters who were white in the original comic. A number of characters who were male in the original are played by females in the TV series. And, although the original comic already contained a lot of gay and transexual characters, the TV show has upped the ante by, for instance, making the Corinthian gay; the Corinthian's sexuality never comes up in the comic book. I'll discuss the issue of race first. When I was watching the TV series, the first character I noticed who'd had her race changed was Unity Kinkaid. The second was Lucien. In the original Lucien was a very tall white man. In the adaptation Lucien is a black woman shorter than Morpheus. When I watched the scene in which Lucien was introduced, I thought, "They'll probably make Death black as well." Sure enough, in the episode "The Sound of Her Wings" in which they introduce Death, she was played by Kirby-Howell Baptiste. Baptiste is a fine actor and, when I watched this episode, an episode partly based on perhaps the single most important issue in the whole run, I just accepted it because I knew that it was inevitable that changes would be made, that the TV series couldn't be completely faithful to the original. But then, lying in bed the night after I watched it, I asked myself, "Does it bother me that they made Death black? And, if so, does that make me racist?" And then I decided, "No". The character Death, like the character Delirium, really appealed to me when I was a teenager, and it was not because she was white but because she was a foxy teenage Goth girl in a black t-shirt with an ankh around her neck. I guess, when I heard that they were finally adapting The Sandman for TV, I worried that the adaption would replace or spoil the original. But even though the TV version is different I believe now that the original is untouched.
The casting of black actors to play characters who were originally white in The Sandman touches on a wider issue. Race swapping, casting black actors to play characters we would expect to be white, is common these days – examples of shows that do this include Bridgerton and Hamilton. However, there seems to be a tension in our culture today, a conflict between two different ways of looking at race. I enjoy watching Roy Wood Jr and one of the subjects he often tackles is the nature of black identity. Identity politics is very important these days and it seems to me that many black people are strongly attached to their black identities. The prominence of identity politics in modern Hollywood was tackled by Bill Maher a fortnight ago: in his piece, he talks about how actors now feel that they must 'stay in their lanes', that is, gay characters should be played by gay actors, transgender characters should be played by transgender actors, black characters should be played by black actors, latino characters should be played by latino actors, and so on. All this raises the question: is race (and more generally group identity) unimportant now as The Sandman adaptation seems to suggest? Or is race and group identity everything? It is this issue that Paul Beatty tackled in The Sellout. It seems that the only way we can attempt to reconcile the colour-blind ethics of a show like The Sandman and identity politics is to have a world in which it is acceptable and even encouraged for black actors to play white characters and unacceptable and even racist for white characters to play black characters. In film and other fictions, a kind of reverse-racism would be at work. (In arguing this way, I am aware that I sound like Douglas Murray.) For instance, a film like Tropic Thunder, released as recently as 2008, a film in which Robert Downey Jr dyes his skin so he can more realistically play a black man, would be unacceptable today, even though this was intended to be comedic.
The issue of gender is very important both to the original comic and to the adaptation. I have little to say about the gender swapping in the TV series. The substitution of Joanna Constantine for John Constantine does not bother me much: he only appeared in one issue right near the beginning. Gwendoline Christie, who plays Lucifer, is a fine actor but bears little resemblance to the character Lucifer in the comics, either in appearance or behaviour. Apparently Gaiman has said that he imagined Lucifer as resembling David Bowie but, in the comics, Lucifer is definitely a man and might have stepped out of a Renaissance era Italian fresco. Other fans of the comic may have more articulate criticisms of the portrayal of Lucifer in the comics and TV show but all I want to say here is that, once again, the comic was better.
I turn now to the issue of homosexuality and transsexuality. Although the comics often feature gay and trans people, the series, as I said, ups the ante. I want to start this discussion by considering the dream Hal, Rose's gay drag-performing landlord, a character in both the comic and TV series, has toward the end of The Dolls' House. Once again, I do not remember these couple of frames exactly and so shall provide an approximation. In the comic book Judy Garland as Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ rips off her face to reveal a man; this man then rips of his face to reveal the Wicked Witch of the West; the Witch then rips of her face to reveal Dorothy again. At the end of this brief sequence, Dorothy asks Hal if he can hold some of the faces for her because she is running out of hands. This nightmare can be interpreted as concerning a crisis or disintegration of personal identity, or, perhaps more accurately, as being a nightmare about the impossibility of maintaining multiple personalities simultaneously or concurrently. I suspect Gaiman and the artists who co-created the work in 1990 saw homosexuality and transsexuality in terms of a split or schism in personal identity; they did not as we do today regard the homosexual or transsexual identity as something complete and unified in its own right and as being present from birth. The short scene in the TV episode plays out rather differently. Hal, as a drag queen, rips off his face to reveal Hal as he normally is, and then rips off his face again to reveal his bones and subcutaneous tissue. Perhaps we could interpret the scene as also concerning the nature of personal identity but, if this is what the creators intended, they are far from successful – this scene seems rather to be a generic, cliched, and ultimately unsuccessful stab at the macabre. Another obvious difference between the comic and TV show versions of this scene is that the former references The Wizard of Oz while the latter does not. In the same way that in 1990 serial killers were a fixture in the popular imagination but no longer are today, in 1990 gay men were all stereotypically supposed to love The Wizard of Oz but no longer are today in 2022. This discussion leads to two provisional conclusions. First The Sandman deals in stereotypes, archetypes, myths, and tropes found in the collective imagination or unconscious and some of these stereotypes and tropes, particularly those surrounding homosexuality and transsexuality, have changed dramatically in the last thirty years. The TV series finds nothing adequate to replace them with. Second, for Gaiman, homosexuality and transsexuality present a problem, a problem requiring a solution.
We now must deal with one of the greatest ambiguities in The Sandman, its general attitude towards gender and sexuality. Gaiman is certainly not a male chauvinist, nor does he believe in the idea of gender complementarity, but there is a feeling in the comic that the men are men and the women women. The Sandman in part deals with archetypes of masculinity and femininity; characters who are ambiguous in gender or sexuality often tend to be coded as either villains or victims. The obvious example of this is Dream's transsexual sister Desire who is constantly conspiring to destroy Dream. I have discussed this aspect of The Sandman before, in 2017, in the posts "A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman" and in three posts interpreting the collection "A Game of You", each interpretation being better than the last. In "A Game of You" Gaiman seems to be suggesting that the foundations of sexual and gender identity are laid during childhood through the stories we tell ourselves; because in the world of The Sandman dreams and stories are as real as the waking world, this is an idea that Gaiman at once presents and rejects. One of the foundational ambiguities in this collection is the apparent opposition between fantasy and reality. Another concerns politics. In the end, as I argued in those posts, the conservative right-wing ideology prevails – and this is what makes the story a tragedy. Gaiman's message in this collection seems to be that homosexuality and transsexuality are not innate or congenital and because of this he received some pushback from his LGBT and progressive fans – this is why, I think, in the later collection "The Time of Your Life", a collection starring Death, Gaiman has the character Foxglove, a successful pop star who is keeping her homosexuality secret from the public, say, "I'm a dyke. I've always been a dyke." Nevertheless, if "The Sound of Her Wings" should be regarded as the single most important issue in the whole run, "A Game of You" should be regarded as the most important storyline, a story that should be read and studied even by those who are not inclined to read the other collections. It is precisely Gaiman's ambivalence towards homosexuality and transsexuality that makes the comic, at least for me, so invaluable.
Is this ambivalence retained in the TV adaptation? I'm not sure. My feeling is that the TV show has gone Woke on this issue as it has on race. But it would be impossible today, in 2022, for a TV show to present homosexuality and transsexuality in the way Gaiman and his artists did in the 'nineties. With respect to this thematic, as with other thematics, the TV adaptation seems to vitiate the original, to take something subtle, evocative, and occasionally profound, and sap it of its complexity. This is not to say that the TV adaptation does not have its merits but, as I said above, it does not touch the original.
In the introduction to this post, I said that the various parts of this post might not cohere. There is though a possible common thread. People may wonder if there is a connection between my love of The Sandman when I was a teenager and my becoming 'mentally ill' at the age of twenty-seven. When I was young I knew adults who thought playing too much Dungeons and Dragons would cause kids to go nuts and kill people. Obviously this is ridiculous. But the reader may wonder if the recurring theme of homosexuality in the comic book may have partly led to me later deciding that the world was full of closet homosexuals. However I believe that my stumbling upon The Sandman when I was about fifteen helped me. David Foster Wallace once said that "Good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable," although he may not have been the first to say this. Perhaps I wasn't disturbed but neither was I happy. The Sandman has always been one of the truly positive things in my life.
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