Spoiler alert: this blog is for people watching American Gods on Starz in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK. Don’t read on unless you have watched episode three.
Nativism is having a moment in the United States of America. That American Gods is airing at such a time is largely by chance, but it is a drama at pains to articulate a contrary idea; that the country is a patchwork of peoples, and not only that, of beliefs. Yes there may be a hop skip and a jump required to make the gods of ancient Egypt pertain to 21st-century America, but this drama is trying. And at the very least, its tableau of heterogeneity keeps things interesting.
Deity digest
While Shadow Moon and Wednesday largely meandered this week (of that more later), attention was drawn instead to the introductions of two new old gods in cameos that were both supernatural and human, mysterious and touching.
Let’s address the second first, because it was the most moving. Last week we saw Wednesday meeting a mysterious bearded man in a diner – a man with flames where there should have been eyes. This week the man rematerialises as a cab driver in New York, picking up a forlorn salesman called Salim who has just been stiffed at a meeting. The driver reveals himself to be an Arab, like his ride, and claims to come from Ubar, the “lost city of towers”. He then falls asleep at the wheel as the car sits in traffic. Salim reaches forward to try and wake him, but in a beautiful moment, that waking shrug transforms into a timid caress. The driver awakes and reveals the fire in his eyes.
At that point it’s not certain which is a greater revelation between the two men; that they are both gay or that one of them is a Djinn. “There are angels,” says Salim by way of explanation, “there are men who Allah made from mud and then there are the people of the fire”.
It turns out that even those of the fire have needs that are for men, and the tenderness intimated in Salim’s single touch is explored at length in a downtown hotel room. The viewer is treated to a slow, lingering scene, with more male genitalia on display (not really a thing but worth mentioning given how rare it is to see on TV, and how keen this show is to buck that convention) and passionate sex between two men who, one might plausibly assume, are not encouraged to pursue their desires in their native culture. At the point of climax, the men appear to share Djinn juice after transcending to a literally higher plain; a heavenly desert in the sky.
When Salim wakes the next morning, the Djinn is gone. During their encounter the fiery one kept insisting that the great preconception about his people, that they grant wishes, is wrong. But when Salim searches the Djinn’s abandoned trousers he finds a driving and a taxi licence in the pocket. Salim appropriates them and, wearing the Djinn’s jumper and sunglasses, starts a new life as a cabbie. It may not have been what he wished for, but it might have been what he needed.
The second new old god of the week is Anubis, the ancient Egyptian deity who acted as bouncer to the afterlife. He appears unbidden in the kitchen of a dead woman. She doesn’t realise she’s dead at this point – she thinks she successfully retrieved a jar from the top shelf of her kitchen. But no, her stool toppled, she fell to the floor and she died at the age of 68, “not much for America but more than my Kita ever prayed for.”
Thanks to an ostensibly tenuous connection, an Egyptian nanny, the woman is cognisant enough of the ancient belief system of which Anubis was part that he can escort her up an eternal fire escape into the heavens. Again this higher plane is a desert (and again the stars are like those in which Wednesday’s dandelions explode). With the woman sitting comfortably, Anubis casually tears out her heart and weighs it against a feather, as is consistent with established procedure. The heart is light enough and the woman is thus invited to choose one of five doorways through which she can enter the underworld. She asks Anubis to choose any as long as she can avoid encountering her father. The choice is made and the woman walks on, followed at a distance by a sphinx cat.
Somewhere in America
Those two sections were the best of this week to my mind. Elsewhere, we had the return of Mad Sweeney who experienced the luck of the Irish in avoiding decapitation by scaffolding pole, before going on the hunt for his missing coin. We also saw Shadow escape a hammering simply by asking for another game of checkers, before he and Wednesday changed the weather and conducted the most gentle of bank robberies. (Oh and Shadow’s wife also came back from the dead, but I guess we’ll talk more about that next week.)
In between their feats, Wednesday continued to prod at Shadow’s difficulty with the supernatural in ways that felt reheated from last week. The question of whether Shadow had actually made it snow just by thinking about it mattered less, said Wednesday, than whether he believed he had. I am sure there is some philosophical profundity to this statement but I’m inclined to suggest that such a belief would only get Shadow so far. If he was actually incapable of making it snow and invited all his friends to Eagle Point for a spontaneous ski trip, those friends might end up disappointed.
In questions of faith however, and faith is obviously a theme central to American Gods, it is only belief that matters. And so perhaps it is the case that belief is less important to Shadow than to Wednesday, who declares this week: “The only thing that scares me is being forgotten. I can survive most things but not that.” It also might explain why a Djinn goes all the way to New York to spare a shit salesman and Anubis will conduct someone to the underworld who has only a passing knowledge of his work. It’s hard out there for a god.
Divine lines
“I was using that!” The recently deceased woman to Anubis, regarding her recently removed heart.
“I want knowledge over comfort over all things, always.” Wednesday continues to articulate his world view, and we know how much he likes comfort.
“This cunt has my coin. Cunt give me my coin.” Mad Sweeney revelling in his own ineloquence. Also one of the many examples of this show’s revelling in its ability to swear.
“I believe the shit out of love.” Shadow sounding like an Instagram caption. But maybe it was enough to bring his Laura back?
