The Revolutionary Crappiness of Darren Aronofsky’s On This Day … 1776 |
The Revolutionary Crappiness of Darren Aronofsky’s On This Day … 1776
The generative AI series is tailored to a viewer with radically lowered expectations.
I’m a big fan of Tom Hooper’s 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams. Perhaps it’s because I’m a dad. Its genre is very much that of Dad Cinema classics like Master and Commander, in that it offers a granular, somewhat sentimental depiction of military history, an emphasis on neat, easily repeatable historical fun facts, and a wide-ranging account of the exploits of Great Men. And sea battles! It has a sea battle! It’s also based on David McCullough’s biography of the founding father, a very popular book in the genre of Dad History—or Airport Nonfiction, as Anne Trubek calls it. Imagine the experience of falling asleep with your bedside lamp still on, having read six pages of a 750-page work of popular history that lies heavily on your rising and falling belly. They made a TV show of that!
But I also like to think that I admire John Adams for other reasons. The best way I can describe this show, if you haven’t seen it, is that it is very, very gross. Hooper—famous for his Oscar-winning snot-drenched close-ups of Anne Hathaway in his film adaptation of Les Miz—loves reminding us how nasty the eighteenth century was, and how gnarly and smelly and damp life in the new republic could be. His frame is full of intimate images of rotting teeth and sweaty wigs and shit-smeared boots and bloody streets. In this show, we see a man tarred and feathered, the gruesome process of a family being inoculated against smallpox, a sailor have his leg amputated, a young woman undergo a mastectomy, John Adams nearly die of fever in Holland, and George Washington lose a tooth at dinner. The ideas are important to Hooper, and so are the historical narratives (true and false), but what’s most important is the bodies.
These choices make John Adams aggressively, and appealingly, a story about how the foundations of American democracy were laid by a group of extremely physically vulnerable human beings. They were vulnerable to violence, to illness, to infection, to weather. It was just as easy to die as it was to stay alive in New England in the 1770s. And while much of the show is grisly, it can also be quite moving. To think that this nation was built by such fragile creatures.
As a fan of John Adams and its pungent, provocative physicality, I was dismayed to watch the new Revolutionary War documentary miniseries, On This Day … 1776. Commissioned by Time magazine, produced by Darren Aronofsky, and airing in serial installments on YouTube, On This Day is one of the highest-profile TV projects yet to be produced with generative AI tools. On This Day is a predictably, but still shockingly, disembodied affair. Watching the episodes that have aired thus far is a surreal experience, a work of national memory that feels more like hallucination than history. If John Adams’s vulgar bodiliness told a story of how vulnerable the revolutionaries were, this new series inadvertently tells a story about how very vulnerable we all still are.
It’s surprising that Darren Aronofsky is involved with this. From Pi to Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream to The Wrestler, Aronofsky has made great and gory films of varying quality, but their uniting factor is their obsession with bodies. I remember so many moments from his filmography, and I’m........