I don't know the details of decision making in production of The Sandman on Netflix, obviously, but it feels like some of these good changes were like...
'Hey maybe now that Constantine's ex girlfriend is a queer Black woman, she shouldn't also be a thief and an addict. Let's not fall into that stereotype.'
'And maybe the nonbinary Desire could get, like, quasi-dream-consent from Unity Kinkaid instead of just flat out raping her in her sleep...especially now that Unity is a Black woman. Actually, wouldn't Desire want Unity to...desire...them before fathering the child anyway.'
'And what if The Corinthian fucks a guy and doesn't kill him because, like, maybe let's separate his queerness from the fact that he's a nightmare & serial killer.'
Some folks might claim these kinds of changes are 'sanitizing' the story...and maybe so. But really, it feels like adjusting some of the 'edgy' 'grimdark' remnants from it's 90s origin.
The Hunt: Never Trust the Storyteller, Only Trust the Story
“The Hunt” starts with what looks like a familiar setup: A grandfather tells his impatient, fifteen-year-old MTV-watching (and just over 30 years later, MTV Music is dead in the UK, people) granddaughter Celeste a story from “the old country.” She’s bored, he’s insistent. We’ve seen this trope a thousand times, and we’ve probably heard about “the disconnected modern youth” and “the oldies desperate to pass down their stories” as well (in fact, I used to be the former and now precariously start to sound like the latter 🙈).
But by the time this story ends, you realise the frame has been more than it initially seemed. Because the storyteller in “The Hunt” is hiding something in plain sight (you could say that’s also true for other stories in The Sandman, but here, it’s much more direct)…
Vassily’s Journey: A Fairytale with Teeth
The fairytale seems, on first read/listen, pretty straightforward (I’m doing a slightly more extensive recap here because I think many people in the show fandom probably won’t know “The Hunt”): A young man named Vassily, from a people he calls simply “the People,” encounters a Romani peddler woman who shows him a locket with the portrait of a Duke’s beautiful daughter. And Vassily, being young and impulsive (and apparently very easily influenced by miniature paintings 🤣) is immediately smitten.
His father warns him. “Stay away from outsiders”, he says. Vassily leaves anyway, and on his way, he finds the Romani woman dead in the forest, her throat torn out. He takes her backpack with a few objects from her. In it, he finds a book (among other things).
And the book is what Lucien the Librarian desperately needs back because it’s an unwritten Christopher Marlowe play (which is also our first connection to Shakespeare and hence “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, but more about that later), which is apparently another version of the Doctor Faustus story. Not the tragedy we know, but a comedy with a redemption arc instead. Maybe about a man who bargains with darkness and finds his way back out (oh…)?
But Vassily doesn’t want to trade it for the gold he’s offered. He wants to see the Duke’s daughter in person, and Lucien has to “get back to him on that”…
On the road, a girl of “the People” beats Vassily to a deer during a hunt. She is faster and more skilled (although he won’t admit it and puts it down to “carrying a backpack”. Sure sure…). He is intrigued and stays with her and her kin for a bit, where he meets Baba Yaga. She can take him to the Duke’s palace in exchange for the Emerald Heart of Koschei he also has in his backpack. And if that heart-shaped gem makes you think of the glass heart in “Tales in the Sand”, or of Unity Kinkaid/Rose Walker, or in short DESIRE, you’re probably not wrong 😉
At this point, I also briefly want to mention that the legend of Koschei the Deathless is interesting in the context of the Sandman because Koschei can’t die… but he also totally can. And that his heart is chosen to be emerald in this story… well… 😩
Anyway, Vassily arrives at the castle only to be immediately imprisoned (apparently the Duke isn’t interested in random young men showing up to just stare at his daughter. Can we blame him?).
Lucien intervenes and brings Vassily to Dream’s castle (and tries to sneak past Dream, which of course doesn’t work and ends in a genuine “Merv moment”). After a bit of toing and froing (and the probably creepiest smile we’ll ever get from Morpheus)…
…Dream shows him the Duke’s sleeping daughter. Vassily just hands her the amulet he’s been carrying. And just like that, the obsession that drove the entire plot dissolves.
He then wines and dines in Dream’s throne room only to wake up in a forest. The girl who beat him to the deer is there. They run together. They hunt. They mate. In mixed wolf/human form (if you’re into Omegaverse, this is the story for you 🐺🙈)
The grandfather ends the story simply: “People came from hundreds of leagues around for the wedding.”
And Celeste is sure this is a parable about not dating outside your culture. “Don’t chase girls who aren’t your kind, stay with your own people”, that kind of thing.
But is it?
It’s worth rereading “The Hunt” knowing the reveal, because the visual language is very obvious: The Romani woman’s throat is torn out when Vassily finds her body. You assume wolf or bear, or you assume the “dark forest being dangerous in the way dark forests are in fairytales”. And yet, maybe you initially don’t assume it could have been Vassily or one of his “people”. The innkeeper who tries to kill Vassily dies offscreen after Vassily snuffs out a candle. Vassily’s father warned against outsiders, which implies there’s an “inside” to be protected. Vassily “came out of the old forest,” which (in fairytales) is never just “a place”. When Vassily is trapped, he can’t force the door because it’s “cold iron”. You can even see his fangs sometimes. And the list goes on…
The story tells you exactly what is happening on every page, and it isn’t particularly subtle. So we’re clearly looking at some werewolf fairytale here a grandfather tells his granddaughter, right? Because we’re trusting the frame (the grumpy old man, the traditional fairytale format) more than the story itself. Until…
“She Beat Me to the Deer”: The Reveal Inside the Reveal
When Celeste accuses her grandfather of telling the story to discourage her from dating outside their culture, he somewhat corrects her. Because the story isn’t about her boyfriend but rather about her, and him, and their roots.
“I wish you could have known your grandmother... She never let me forget that she beat me to the deer.”
The grandfather is Vassily. We get hints throughout, e.g. the small deflections when Celeste asks if the identical name is a coincidence. “It’s a common name,” he says, and if you’re trusting the storyteller, you believe him. But if you’re trusting the story, you probably got it much sooner than that.
He’s been living as a human in America for decades (maybe even centuries if we follow the timeline, and Vassily even says he didn’t understand certain things until he was well in his 100s). He looks human and acts human in all the ways that matter (which could also be “looks American and acts American in all the ways that matter”).
But he’s also still of “the People.” And Celeste (who finds these stories boring and is, in every visible way, a completely ordinary American teenager) is descended from them, too. And she knows but at the same time also has no idea…
The revelation reframes the entire grandfather-granddaughter dynamic. His frustration with her isn’t just generational crankiness. He’s grieving because he’s watching something disappear in real time, and he doesn’t have the “real world” words to explain what she’s losing. She thinks it’s just a story, but stories are the truth in The Sandman. What do you do though if someone won’t really listen to the stories? This is where we’re tying in with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” again:
Of course we could also just look at this story on a metaphorical level. In the Sandman Universe, lycanthropy is real, but the story also works as a metaphor for the cultural identity of immigrants. Vassily deeply cares about Celeste, but she’s also becoming something or someone he doesn’t fully recognise. Whether that transformation is loss or growth is a question the story doesn’t really answer. In a way, Vassily only tells her the story, not what to do with it.
Younger Vassily finally looked at the Duke’s beautiful daughter but saw nothing, or at least not something he liked. But he also looked at the girl who beat him to the deer and recognised something. “It was about dreams”. Sometimes, they don’t match reality, like the Duke’s daughter. Other times, you carry them with you and they might lie dormant, but you immediately recognise them once you see them, like the girl of the People.
I don’t think this is a case of, “You should only choose people from your own culture” though. The question the story is asking is rather if Celeste even knows and understands her roots, and quite possibly herself (she’s young, she’s got time). And maybe also if it still matters by the time she does.
Cultural Preservation and Loss
Vassily is carrying something he wishes to pass on, and that’s not just a story but rather identity and most of all a particular way of being in the world that “the People” represent. The Eastern European lore in the story is specific (Baba Yaga, Koschei the Deathless…). “The People” map somewhat onto the indigenous peoples of the Russian northwest (like Karelians and Komi) whose cultural traditions and identities were systematically suppressed over centuries. So one could think that the grandfather’s anxiety about Celeste is that of someone who has seen what erasure actually looks like while he’s watching the “quiet domestic” version of it happen again with his granddaughter.
But the story also talks about the resilience of our roots. Vassily could have stayed with the Duke’s daughter (who could easily be seen as the “dominant” cultures), he was obsessed with her for most of the story after all. And then he saw her, and it meant nothing, because something in him recognised the girl of “the People” as his proverbial home (even after he leaves the actual place behind).
Celeste has been raised farther from “the People” than Vassily and probably grew up with an option to ignore her cultural heritage. The grandfather telling her this story is maybe an attempt to plant a seed that might eventually grow into something. Or she becomes the generation where the stories stop and “the People” truly are (regular) humans who don’t care about their origins.
Dream Is Quietly Facilitating Again…
Dream is barely in “The Hunt.” He appears for a handful of panels, shows Vassily the Duke’s daughter, and that’s essentially it. And yet his role in the story is interesting because of what he doesn’t do.
Lucien wants the Marlowe book back, the unwritten Faustus comedy where the man who bargained with the devil finds his way to redemption. The original is a story about desire, about what you give up to get what you think you want (that old “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”-chestnut again). Vassily refuses to simply hand it over because yup, he wants what he wants. But dreams aren’t the same as desires…
When he ends up imprisoned, Lucien brings him to the Dreaming. And Dream doesn’t judge him or advise him or explains what’s going to happen. He shows Vassily his obsession, and that’s it. Vassily gives her the amulet, eats, drinks and then wakes up in the forest.
The implication, as so often in The Sandman, is that the Dreaming led him back to himself and created the conditions for him to stop running from what he was.
So once again, Dream only creates the space where people can become what they already are, or return to what they were before they started pretending or losing themselves. Vassily just needed something to stop him looking at an image of what he thought he wanted.
The grandfather tells Celeste to trust the story, and maybe Celeste doesn’t get it yet. She’s fifteen, and like many teenagers, she thinks she’s got it all figured it out. But maybe someday she will, and the story will make sense to her.
Or maybe “the People” will truly end with her disinterest, with her relationship choices, with her eye-rolling and her understandable but also somewhat heartbreaking failure to care about the stories her grandfather won’t stop telling.
And I think Vassily knows this, but he tells the story anyway. Because that’s the other thing “The Hunt” is about: telling stories to people who aren’t (yet) ready to hear them…
Playing with dolls: the Corinthian and "this dream people call Human Life" - part I
Written for The Sandman Book Club
Since at The Sandman Book Club we are re-reading The Doll's House, and since the first chapter of this story marks the entry of the Corinthian, I would like to dwell on some of the distinctive traits of this character, how he is the embodiment of one of the great symbols of American and Western pop mythology (the serial killer) and how the netflix adaptation, while excellent, has completely deprived him of precisely those elements that made him so distinctive, while enhancing other important aspects.
Murderer vs. Killer, or when killing is a "work of art"
In The Dreaming, the spin-off series immediately following the canonical Sandman, there is a panel that I think is emblematic in defining what the Corinthian is, even before his being nightmare, black mirror, etc
Judging Cain like he's on Dancing with the Stars
There is a passage in which the Corinthian states that Cain is definitely a murderer, but not a very good killer. This because the word murderer here is linked to a primordial concept of homicide. Yes, Cain is the first murderer, but his act is something instinctual, part of his nature. Cain kills because he cannot do anything else and murder for him is an inevitable act, demonstrating his being part of a story from whose narrative he does not escape.
For the Corinthian, on the other hand, killing theoretically is not in his nature: he is after all a nightmare, which must terrify, unsettle, reflect the deepest fears and secrets of the human subconscious. A means to an end, not the end itself. For the Corinthian, killing is a deliberate act by which he tries to carve out a space of his own within a predetermined story.
The serial killer is a planner: in the Corinthian mind, an artist too. Even the fact that he appears on the scene not already in his nightmare function but primarily in that of being ready to kill a young man leaves no doubt about it: the Corinthian, in the way he perceives himself, is first and foremost a serial killer/artist.
This is not Vogue: comics vs show
In the netflix Sandman, episode one, the Corinthian has sensed that Dream is free. He wipes off the blood from his eyes and stands up, sensually stroking the head of his...victim? It would be better to say a model without eyes. Death here is not horror: there is something glamorous about this scene that irritates me deeply, not least because we are watching it from a spectator's pov, comfortable in our chairs. We are in a hotel room but the space is open, and the screen of the devices from which we are watching the episode gives us
1) an escape route
2) a way to dilute the horror of the scene (there is always hope if there is an escape route)
This Corinthian is elegant and sensual. He could disturbs us, if he wants, but definitely he's not scary.
Let's compare the netflix scene with the comic. First, fundamental change: the reader's pov, which coincides exactly with that of the Corinthian. We do not see the Corinthian in the panels, and we will not see him until after a long time. We look at the scene through his eyes, we read the words through his voice. From this perspective, it's as if behind the glasses, together with him, we were there, an active part of this crime.
Paradoxically, this scene should be less scary than the one in the TV show. There is no blood and the boy still has his eyes. But we perceive his terror, we see him tied up and helpless like a doll. We see his pimply face making ugly grimaces of fear (in the netflix episode the victim's face is perfect). There is no hope for this boy and while he begs for mercy in vain we brandish, together with the Corinthian, the knife that will kill him. There is no sensuality, there is no seduction, there is no sex here (better, sex and death are the same thing but I will return to the relationship between death and sexuality in the second part of this little essay). We are in a room with no escape, the scene in front of us is dirty, not at all glamorous, in which we readers are actively participating. This Corinthian is fucking scary.
The waking world: a big doll's house to play in
This title takes on a different meaning depending on the various characters involved in this Sandman story. From my point of view, I believe that the characters who most of all are linked to the concept of a doll's house are Unity and the Corinthian.
Unity appears near an old doll house, and her clothes are also similar to those of an old doll
Unity was literally a doll for most of her life: her condition was caused by an external event and external people decided about her life, including her motherhood.
The Corinthian doll and the surrealist doll of Hans Bellmer: both obscene and disturbing toys
The Corinthian, on the other hand, is a sort of doll maker and the dolls are the human beings he kills and whose physiognomy he transforms with his knife.
This last thing is perhaps one of the elements that most differentiates the netflix Corinthian from the one in the comic. The Boyd Corinthian is almost a romantic character, a bohémien eager to savor human life in every sense, moved by contrasts and ambiguities that make him decidedly more similar to the Second Corinthian of the comic than to the First. He looks at humanity with a curiosity that is sometimes almost paternalistic: ruthless, but not cruel. He embodies a type of socially well-integrated serial killer, the "unsuspected type", who knows how to contain his impulses when necessary. Most important, with him sex is not always synonymous with death.
The Corinthian of comics, on contrary, never escapes this binomial: in him, sex and death are always intrinsically linked because they are the same thing. He is always cruel and brutal, seeing humans as meat to be cut. Humanity is nothing but fresh clay in his artist's hands: shaped dolls to play with in his new dark stories.
Graphic Depictions of Violence | Dream/Hob | 28K | Mature
Summary:
The universe needs balance, and there's only one man who can provide it.
Dream, better known to the world as The Sandman, is a first class assassin and head of the Dreaming, a company created to identify and eliminate threats to society by any means necessary. When one day he loses control over one of his agents, the Corinthian, he is forced to ask for help to ensure his creation will be stopped.
Hob Gadling, the MI6 agent assigned to find and kill The Sandman, did not imagine he would agree to hunt down a serial killer with the most wanted man on the planet when he woke up that morning.
Fuck, Jo might actually kill him this time.
