Kaos shows why we might think twice before inviting the old gods back

The illusory glamour of Olympian gods titillates us once more.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles. He previously studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge, and afterwards worked in international law.

A mock classical ceiling painting depicts modern version of the classical gods.

Ye gods above.

Netflix.

The old gods are making a comeback all across Western culture. This is a conclusion increasingly reached by a spectrum of culture-watchers; some religious, some not at all. But, if true, the boldest and brashest example of this comeback may well be the new Netflix series KAOS, starring Jeff Goldblum, released last month.

Kaos is a genre-busting mythological dark comedy-drama. One might say a modern re-summoning of the pagan gods.

Charlie Covell, the writer and mastermind behind the show, and a self-confessed mythology geek, has created a colourful, high production, and often funny depiction of what the world might be like if the gods of Olympus still ruled over us. The plot follows several different strands taken from Greek mythology - most obviously Orpheus’s journey into the Underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice - and weaves them together into a larger narrative, retelling the downfall of the gods.

As the show opens, Zeus reigns as king of the gods from his fantastically kitsch mansion atop of Mount Olympus. So long as the sacrifices and adulation of humankind keep rolling in, he is happy. But when he wakes one day to discover a new wrinkle on his forehead, this triggers not only a kind of mid-life crisis, but also possibly - so he fears - the end of the world as he knows it.

Goldblum plays Zeus as, well, Jeff Goldblum: quirky, nervy, paranoid, and not a little menacing in an understated way. In other words, perhaps more “Jeff Goldblum” than you’ve ever seen him on screen before. It is certainly a compelling and sometimes hilarious portrayal.

“A line appears, the order wanes, the family falls, and Kaos reigns.”

This is the prophecy that has haunted Zeus for aeons. What he doesn’t know is that he shares this personalised prophesy with three other mortals in the story - Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), Caneus (Misia Butler), and Ariadne (Leila Farzad) - all of whom will play an unwitting role in bringing about the overthrow of the world order under the Olympian gods (hence: KAOS). The early episodes establish who these mortals are and begin to draw their disparate stories together.

Counterpoint to Zeus is his brother, Hades, ruler of a literally black-and-white underworld, with David Thewlis brilliantly cast in the role as the world-weary and ailing keeper of the realm of the dead. Something is amiss down there which threatens the whole system of human souls and what happens to them. When he tries to warn his brother, Zeus’s disdain for Hades and his problems only makes matters worse. Also in the frame of this dysfunctional family are Hera (Janet McTeer) and Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) - brother and sister (and wife in Hera’s case) to Zeus, as well as being lovers behind his back, who are poised to put into effect their own betrayals, if Zeus goes too far off the rails.

Last, but not least, since he proves the bridge between the gods and humans is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), one of Zeus’s many children. (But the only one who comes to visit.) A hedonistic agent of chaos from the outset, Dionysus seems to be the only one of the gods with any genuine interest or admiration for humans. Impressed by rock-star Orpheus’s passionate love for his wife, Eurydice (“Riddy”), it is Dionysus who helps Orpheus break into the Underworld to get her back when she dies, thus triggering the series of events that could let to the fulfilment of the prophesy.

The illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same.

Smart, stylish, twisty and certainly original - (the entrance to the Underworld is through a dumpster bin around the back of a bar) - Kaos is an ambitious multi-stranded epic about power, fate, love, and family. But perhaps above all, it is saying something about the relationship between humanity and the divine. At one point, one mortal tells another that the only good things in life are human. This feels like a statement of underlying intent. And the way the gods (especially Zeus) become more capricious, more sadistic, more vengeful as the story unfolds, the more it feels like we’re encouraged to agree. Defiance of the gods is the real mark of virtue here. Rebellion against the gods, the natural outworking of that defiance.

The irony is that whatever distaste which Kaos succeeds in cultivating in us, the viewer, for pagan forms of the divine may help explain why, historically, Christianity swept aside all the pantheons of pagan worship of the first millennium in the wholesale way that it did. Jesus Christ literally incarnates that bridge between the divine and the human. And what’s more, the message he preached claimed that, far from disdaining humanity, God loves them so much that he was willing to be the sacrifice for their good. And not the other way round, demanding incessant and capricious sacrifice by humans instead.

Now, centuries later, in Western culture, familiarity seems to have bred contempt with that far more hopeful story. Instead, the illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same. And storytellers like Charlie Covell are only too willing to give the public what they want. If the old gods are indeed trying to make a comeback, Kaos shows us why we might think twice before inviting them in.

Does Kaos succeed? It certainly makes a valiant attempt to marshal a large number of plot lines involving a huge cast of characters, unfortunately not all of whom are interesting enough to keep you coming back for more. And an awful lot is riding on there being a Season 2 - that is, if the threads we have followed so far are to lead on into a satisfying and meaningful conclusion.

Without that, I’m afraid the whole thing may be left standing alone as a work of, well… chaos.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

8 March 2024

4 min read

The Zone of Interest’s peripheral vision of evil

Director Jonathan Glazer bests Spielberg thanks to a quality of attention.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is assistant priest at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, London.

in an immaculate garden a family play in and around a small swimming pool. Beyond the garden wall, a barracks is visble with crematorium smoke rising beyond it.

The Höss family at play at their Auschwitz home.

This has been a tremendously difficult review to write. I’ve written and re-written this review for two weeks now. You will see why.

The Zone of Interest begins idyllically. A family is picnicking by a lake. The men swim, the women pick berries in the woods. It's a gorgeous sunny day. The family happily drive home down an evocatively headlamp-lit country road. The father walks through their palatial house, turning off every light. The next morning the family are gathered outside to give the father his birthday present: a canoe. Two boys lead their blindfolded father gently down the steps from the house to the garden. The garden is magnificent: filled with flowers and immaculately kempt.

The father is wearing an SS uniform. The camera pans round the garden. Behind the garden wall you see glimpses of barbed wire, belching chimneys, rows of dormitories. You hear shouts, moans, cries, gunshots. This is no ordinary house, no ordinary garden, no ordinary family. This is the home of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their five children. This is Auschwitz. Höss runs it. Hedwig runs their beautiful home. The children run around. That is the next 100 minutes of film. It's a realist family drama from the 1940s. The children are children, the wife is house-proud to a fault, and the husband is hard-working, ambitious, and keen to do a good job. I don’t want to say much more. You simply need to go and see the film.

When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil it was controversial. Many commentators misunderstood or misrepresented her point. Evil acts - especially an evil act as totemic as the Holocaust - are not ‘banal’. The people who commit evil on such a scale often can be. A genocidal machine of such scale and complexity needs a tremendous number of cogs… they can’t all be murderous sociopaths. Eichmann was banal in himself - he was of average intelligence, uncreative in his thinking, a follower of fads and joiner of organisations.

This is exactly how Rudolf and Hedwig are presented. Christian Friedel plays Höss with an almost continual ambience of low-level boredom. Pillow-talk with his wife, reading to his children, a discussion about the most efficient way to incinerate the Jews in his camp, is all spoken with roughly the same expression and tone. He clearly wants to do well in his work, but it doesn’t matter what the work is. Sandra Hüller gives Hedwig a marvelous, slightly nervous energy. She always seems to be keeping a combination of grasping envy and slimy smugness just barely contained beneath the surface of her features. She can’t think of much beyond the order of her house, the beauty of her garden, and her status among other SS wives. Their quality of attention is essentially absent.

Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it.

Why the Prime Minister should swear this new oath

Yaroslav Walker

A proposed new constitutional instrument is a hopeful recognition of the human condition.

09 July 2024

6 min read

Not to be flippant, but they would be dreadful dinner-party guests, and not just because they are Nazis: they seemingly have no capacity for a thought that goes beyond themselves, and their immediate environment, and their immediate needs and wants. They are banal.

Between them Jonathan Glazer (director), Łukasz Żal (cinematographer), and Mica Levi (musician) give a remarkable demonstration of the power of restraint. The camerawork is naturalistic and almost never showy. The performers look like they were given the latitude simply to be in the scene: no over-direction. The soundscape is hauntingly bare. There is little music or sound beyond the ambient. The mood is, of course, set by the fact that the ambient sounds are roaring furnaces, gunshots, and desperate screaming. The film does not attempt to make a point or demand a response; Glazer simply gives you a slice of domestic life that just happens to be located next door to a death-camp.

Steven Spielberg has suggested this is the best film tackling the dreadful subject of the Holocaust since Schindler's List. He is wrong. The Zone of Interest is a far superior film. I love Spielberg, but Schindler's List is offensively bad. It takes a subject of such abject depravity and then tries to emotionally manipulate you into feeling bad: the music, the speeches, the more-is-more approach to showing you the pinnacle of human cruelty. Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it. As Augustine says, evil is nothing in itself. Evil is the corruption and annihilation of what is good and lovely. Evil isn’t some great monster that forever battles with God. God is good…no…God is Good. So evil is literally nothing - goodness in decay to nothingness.

Glazer, whether intentionally or not, recognises this theological truth. Looking at the full abyssal nothingness of evil is beyond human comprehension. But if you see it in the periphery, then you see it. When you hear the screams of the innocent and at the same time see a woman cheerfully ignore them while she plays in a flowerbed with her infant daughter, then you recognise the potential for human depravity. You can’t truly encounter the nothingness of evil, and the dangers of letting its parasitical and destructive hunger spread, until you’ve watched others ignore it without missing a beat. I’ve never cried while watching Schindler's List. I cried while watching The Zone of Interest. Twice.

Glazer et al have done the world a great service with this film. They’ve reminded us that the weapon against evil is the rejection of empty banality. Banality is loving yourself. To reject banality is to embrace a quality of attention that is truly outward looking. Rejecting banality is loving your neighbour as yourself.