I am SO glad you watched the English because it rewrote my brain chemistry when I watched it earlier this year. If you have any thoughts about the series I would love to hear them!
Creeps up on you. First half is beautiful in a stylistic way and the narrative is engrossing. Then the last two episodes… moved me, levelled me, sent me reeling. For the true beauty of it!! True true beauty, which is so rare. This is what the form of the epic is for! Sublime beauty! Not just of the love between Eli and Cornelia which - forgive me for being Chris Carter core - is elevated by it’s forced chastity to a spiritual journey eventually culminating in the consummation of two alien souls, but also the beauty of indigenous American culture, their beliefs, their song, their land, a beauty that was torn to shreds by violent colonisation which killed them with massacres and vicious disease. Watching this while my heart is raw from the ongoing genocide in Palestine was difficult and also a release. The scene where the sound of the machine gun is slow and ceaseless made me sick. But ultimately it is a show about love which, instead of being based on possession, flowers out of exchange and surrender. Cornelia did what a coloniser should do: leave. No one is spared the violence of colonisation, not even her; the force that killed the women of Cheyenne slowly ate away at her life - literally ate her flesh and bones - even from the safety of her English home where she benefitted in blissful ignorance from their massacre. It poisoned her child, who would have been the inheritor of colonisation. What saved her was learning to cherish the people whose lives and fates were not secondary or separate to hers as she had been privileged to believe, but equal and intertwined. To be faced with Eli, his humanity, his history, his knowledge, his beauty, and to cherish him….“Cherish” is such a beautiful word instead of love. Cherish is to hold something dear, protect it, remember it while you’re alive.
