I’ve forgotten a lot about the Series of Unfortunate Events books in the many years since I’ve read them, but there was always one bit that stuck with me because of how powerful, frustrating, and insightful it was.
It’s the part in The Carnivorous Carnival where the “Freak Show” is explaining why they’re freaks, and one of them is upset because he’s ambidextrous. Now, ambidexterity was something that I’d known about for ages (eventually we found out that one of my younger siblings is semi-ambidextrous), and I was surprised that the character considered it freakish. I felt (wrongly) that it was just Mr. Snicket being too outlandish again, and presenting something frustratingly simple as strange, but I quickly realized that this was the point.
Yes, being ambidextrous is useful. It’s practically a superpower. No one will notice and no one will care, you never hear about someone being ostracized for being ambidextrous…but in this book, this is precisely why he feels like he doesn’t belong. The same goes for the contortionist. And, of course, to the man with the hunchback.
And there’s the connection.
Anyone who has watched a Disney movie knows the whole “ostracized hunchback” story, it’s happened time and time again, people feel weird when they see someone with a twisted spine, they shove them into freakshows, it becomes a deformity. But by putting that on the exact same level as being ambidextrous or double-jointed, Snicket casts a harsh light on these judgments and prejudices. Then he proceeds to take it one step further: the posse of bizarre and frightening individuals that had been wandering around with Olaf from the beginning–a man with hook hands, creepy twins, a person who looks like neither a man nor a woman, and the bald giant–all make fun of these “freaks”…and then accept them into their group.
And it’s here where you realize that this group of criminals and miscreants is not composed of people too strange and bizarre to join up with “normal” “decent” “civilization”: they’ve come here because there’s nowhere else that will accept them. The criminal Olaf doesn’t care what they look like (actually, he does, he’s very wicked) as long as he can use them and abuse them. He’s tricked them into thinking that he is the only one who will accept them, and he’s used society’s hideous faults of prejudice as evidence that this is true. It’s here where we see that a man with hooks for hands is really no less “normal” than a man who can use his right hand as easily as his left. Does it matter if you have two good hands or two working heads? How is one person worth more or less than any other? If you’re going to ostracize a person for refusing to conform to gender norms, shouldn’t you also ostracize someone whose left and right eyes don’t match?
And you, reader, or viewer, or however you’ve chosen to consume this particular piece of media…what were you doing, judging Count Olaf’s band of freaks from the start of the series? Did you never stop to consider that these weirdos and monsters might have had their own stories, their own motivations, their own troubles in life? Lemony Snicket reaches a point where he turns and looks the audience dead in their eyes and says “Are you a person who puts out fires, a person who starts fires, or a person who just lets the fires burn?”
It’s a fantastic payoff to a long setup that made many people uncomfortable…and it was good that it made them uncomfortable, because that shows that they already understand. And while, yes, the members of the sideshow choose wickedness and the lives of criminals, we see that this is because they believe it’s a good path for them. They have a choice. The orphans have a choice. The books are all about choice and morality, but Carnivorous Carnival is the point where the story reveals that sometimes choices are more difficult for certain people not because of their own character, but because of the expectations from society.
It’s a brilliant subversion, and I’m excited to see the continuation in the next season.
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