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.

Article

Books

Character

Culture

Virtues

3 December 2024

5 min read

In defence of Jane Austen’s unlikeable heroine

Fanny Price: passive and prudish or brave and resilient?

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A 18th century woman sits at a desk, beside a candle and stares out the window.

Frances O'Conner as Fanny in Mansfield Park, 1999.

BBC Films.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody has ever liked Fanny Price. Or is it? Many in Austen’s own family liked the heroine of Mansfield Park. Her sister Cassandra was ‘fond’ of Fanny; her brother Francis called her ‘delightful’. Early critics of Austen’s works, like archbishop Richard Whately, also praised both the novel and its protagonist.

Where does our current dislike towards Fanny Price come from, then? The major literary critics of the last century certainly didn’t help. Lionel Trilling paved the way, announcing confidently in the 1960s that ‘Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park’; Kingsley Amis even called Fanny a ‘monster of complacency and pride’. Two decades later, Tony Tanner agreed: ‘Even sympathetic readers have often found [Fanny] something of a prig…nobody falls in love with [her]’. The list goes on.

But we can’t blame academia alone. Sometime in the twentieth century, we simply stopped liking Fanny. Most Austen readers I know rank her as the worst of her heroines. We don’t like her moralising, her priggishness, and her insistence that she must follow her conscience along with the religious precepts which she holds so dear. To make her appealing to contemporary viewers, both major recent adaptations of the novel (Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation and Iain B. MacDonald’s 2007 TV adaptation) completely butchered her, turning a quiet, timid character into an outspoken Elizabeth Bennet type. The problem is not that we think Fanny is evil, it’s that we find her boring.

Enter Whit Stillman’s brilliant 1990 film Metropolitan, itself a loose adaptation of Austen’s novel. Tom Townsend, one of the film’s young protagonists, recommends the very essay by Lionel Trilling that I’ve cited above to Audrey Rouget, the main character and moral compass of the film. When they later discuss the essay, Audrey is puzzled by Trilling’s dislike of Fanny:

I think [Trilling] is very strange. He says that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park? I like her. Then he goes on and on about how we modern people today with our modern attitudes bitterly resent Mansfield Park because…its heroine is virtuous? What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?

Trilling is at least partly right. Fanny, with her religious principles, offends our modern sensibilities. Our reading culture is one deeply embarrassed by goodness, and Fanny’s piety makes us deeply uncomfortable. But Audrey is right, too. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with ‘a novel having a virtuous heroine’. What if the fault is not with Fanny Price, but with us, the readers? What if we’ve simply lost our taste for goodness?

Fanny is often compared unfavourably to Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet. Mary Crawford, the argument goes, is the Elizabeth Bennet character in Mansfield Park: blunt, stubborn, self-assured. Fanny, on the other hand, is a kind of Charlotte Lucas, quiet, introspective, and concerned with social mores. But following her conscience doesn’t squash Fanny’s individuality, and neither does it make her ‘conventional’. This is only true on a surface level.

Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature.

In fact, these four characters (Elizabeth, Charlotte, Mary, and Fanny) represent examples of real versus false virtues – what philosopher Alasdair Macintyre would call ‘simulacra’ of virtue. While both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford are opinionated, only Elizabeth is truly brave. Mary, though she acts like she doesn’t care about social norms, is all too eager to marry Fanny off to her brother Henry – after he has committed adultery with a married woman – for the sake of keeping appearances. Similarly, although both Charlotte Lucas and Fanny Price are reserved, Fanny’s reserve comes from humility, Charlotte’s from the kind of timidity that is a failure of courage.

I think that’s precisely the challenge that Austen sets for us in Mansfield Park: to discern true from simulated virtue, even when true virtue might be less immediately attractive, less noticeable. When we look below the surface, Fanny emerges not as a passive, prudish character, but rather as brave and resilient. She may not be witty, but she is not a pushover. She rejects Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage even as her uncle Sir Thomas pressures her to accept, on the grounds that he’s not good enough for her.

By going against the will of her uncle Sir Thomas, Fanny finds herself banished from Mansfield Park, the only place she knows as her home. She’s sent off to visit her parents in Portsmouth, not knowing when she’ll be allowed back. What’s more, she is rejecting the prospect of financial security through marriage with a rich man for the sake of her principles. She neither respects nor loves Crawford enough for the commitment of marriage: ‘I—I cannot like him, sir, well enough to marry him’, she confesses to her uncle despite her own shyness. In her confidence about a decision that will affect her future happiness, she can be as headstrong as Elizabeth Bennet is when she turns down Mr. Collins.

Once we acknowledge how brave and resilient Fanny can truly be, we can begin to cherish her other qualities, too. Still, someone might ask, why do we need to force ourselves to appreciate characters like Fanny in the first place? Why can’t we just leave people to have their own taste in literature? To that I answer: if we have come to dislike a character for being virtuous, as Trilling claims, isn’t that in itself pretty compelling evidence that something has gone amiss in our literary taste? Don’t we need to rediscover our lost enjoyment of goodness, if we want our culture to be a flourishing one?

Fortunately, the line connecting Austen to our culture today has not been entirely cut off. ‘Somewhere between us and [Jane Austen], the chasm runs’, wrote C. S. Lewis around the same time that Trilling pronounced Fanny Price to be unlikeable. Perhaps they were both wrong. If literary critics won’t value characters like Fanny, then it’s the common reader’s job to do so. Metropolitan’s Audrey is the fictionalised appreciator of Fanny Price par excellence, a custodian of good taste. But I remain hopeful that there are Audreys in real life, too: readers who are perceptive enough to appreciate Fanny; readers who, instead of judging a character written 200 years ago for not being ‘modern’ enough, choose to let past literature challenge their current assumptions. Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature. Fanny Price, with all of her goodness, is the perfect cure.