Tales of the City: Compton’s Cafeteria

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20th Century America, Anna Madrigal, Homosexuality, Netflix, San Francisco, Tales of the City, The 1960s

My favorite part of the new Netflix season of Tales of the City (2019, based on the novels of Armistead Maupin) is episode 8. Unlike the rest of the show, episode 8 is not an ensemble piece but rather a stand-alone episode that focuses on the history of Anna Madrigal, the free-spirited transwoman who is the landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. It looks at Anna’s arrival in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and the climax of the episode is the riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, an important but not well-known moment in the history of San Francisco’s LGBT community.

Spoiler Alert: This post discusses episode 8, which reveals a critical plot point for the season, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you might want to put off reading this post.

 

San Francisco in the 1960s

San Francisco began to develop into the gay mecca we think of today at the end of WWII. The US Navy used San Francisco as one of its most important West Coast bases. At the end of the war, it began a crackdown on homosexuals in the Navy, many of whom wound up dishonorably discharged at San Francisco. Because being homosexual was socially unacceptable in the post-War period (when American culture was entering an aggressively heterosexual phase that permitted only one normative version of male identity), many of these men chose to remain in San Francisco rather than return home and have to face their families.

However while the LGBT community began to grow, it met with little acceptance. Police raids on the few bars that catered to gays and lesbians were a regular feature of the 1950s and 60s. Things were particularly tough for the city’s community of transwomen, who in the parlance of the time were referred to as cross-dressers, transvestites, or ‘drags’. ‘Queen’ included both modern drag queens and modern transwomen, since the concept of a distinct transwoman identity barely existed at the time.

There was some room for female impersonators, who performed cabaret acts professionally, but for the transwomen among these performers, the stage was a brief and limited opportunity to express their gender identity, since performers were expected arrive and leave in men’s clothing, and the only ones who could practically pursue this occupation were those capable of ‘passing’, meaning they were sufficiently feminine that they could appear to be women by post-War standards. Female impersonal also required some degree of talent as a singer and dancer.

 

It was illegal for those considered men to appear in public in women’s clothing apart from professional female impersonation; the basic legal rule at the time was that a man had to be wearing at least three items of male apparel in order to be legal. Suspected transvestites could be detained by any police offer and forced to undergo humiliating inspections. Even wearing a shirt that buttoned up on the wrong side was enough to justify being stopped by a cop. “Female impersonation” was a crime, so cross-dressing was an offense that could easily land a queen in jail, in some cases for a couple of months, where they were likely to be subjected to humiliating treatment such as forced head-shaving.

Transwomen who wished to live as women had other problems as well. Their identity documents all used their male identity, so they struggled to find living space in respectable neighborhoods, since they were viewed as deviants. As a result, many had to live in cheap hotels in the seedier parts of the city. Most also struggled to find employment, for the same reasons. Those who tried to live as men struggled to find and keep jobs because they were often perceived as being too effeminate. Because of that, large numbers of transwomen were forced to resort to prostitution to support themselves. (This is still true today; about 19% of transwomen report having done some form of sex work because of a lack of social acceptance; for black transwomen the figure is 47%.)

Although at least some gay bars in 1960s New York were willing to admit at least a few transwomen and drags, the same does not seem to be true in San Francisco. Gay bars in the city seem to have been unwilling to admit them because their presence made police raids more likely. One of the few places of relative acceptance of transwomen and drags in the city was the Tenderloin, a downtown district that had a lot of cheap, single-occupant housing (mostly cheap hotels), gay bars, strip clubs and porn theaters, cheap liquor stores, and other disreputable businesses. It was frequented by gay men, lesbians, transwomen, prostitutes, and drug addicts, and in this district there were more establishments willing to allow such people in.

Prostitute queens tended to ply their trade in the Tenderloin because the police were willing to partially tolerate it there. This unofficial policy meant that the prostitutes were less likely to work in other parts of the city but it also made skimming money off the sex trade easy to organize. Policemen often used their power to detain and inspect suspected transvestites and prostitutes to shake down the queens for money. Those who refused to pay up were likely to taken to jail, or simply roughed up or forced to provide a quick blow job.

Violence was a common feature in the lives of the Tenderloin queens. In addition to the problems of living in a neighborhood frequented by drugs addicts and other criminals, clients of trans prostitutes sometimes became angry and violent if they felt they had been fooled by “men disguised as women”. In the 1960s, there was also a apparently unrecognized serial killer who targeted transwomen, slitting their throats and mutilating their genitals before dumping their bodies. Smart transwomen learned to fight, often carrying bricks or bottles in their handbags to use as a weapon. And the police sometimes used violence to keep them intimidated and compliant.

In the absence of a welcoming business community, many queens frequented Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a chain restaurant with a location in the Tenderloin. Unlike other businesses, Compton’s was open 24 hours, which meant that transwomen prostitutes could congregate there late at night after turning tricks. “Compton’s Cafeteria was the center of the universe for us. It was a place where we could make sure that we had lived through the night…Compton’s was a place where you could go and you could see whether some girls had stayed, some girls had left, some people had been killed, raped, put in jail,” says Felicia Elizondo, who was part of San Francisco’s trans community in the 1960s. The food was cheap, which was another plus for the struggling queens.

The management at Compton’s did not appreciate being the gathering spot for transwomen. They worried that the presence of transwomen might drive away more desirable customers. So they frequently harassed the women, called the police, and imposed a service charge on queens.

 

The Riots

In 1965, a nearby church, Glide Memorial Methodist Church, began trying to close the gap between the LGBT community in the Tenderloin and the Christian community. It was led by Rev. Cecil Williams, a black minister who had come to the Tenderloin from the Civil Rights struggle in the South, and he brought with him the idea of organizing the transwomen for their rights. He helped organize a group of LGBT youth, many of them homeless, into an organization known as Vanguard. Vanguard met regularly at Compton’s, much to the management’s frustration. As a result of harassment from the staff at Compton’s, Vanguard organized an unsuccessful picket of the Cafeteria on July 18^th, 1966, to express their anger and frustration. The picket failed, but it was one of the first examples of the LGBT community actively conducting a protest.

On a weekend in August of 1966, just a few weeks after the failed picket, the management of Compton’s called the police because the queens were making a scene. One of the policemen attempted to arrest one of the queens (whether a drag queen or a transwoman is unclear—she’s never been identified), but she threw a cup of coffee in his face. That touched off a riot. The transwomen and drags began fighting back, throwing cutlery and sugar shakers at the officers, flipping over tables, and smashing the glass doors and windows of the Cafeteria. The queens used their handbags as weapons as well.

The police retreated to the sidewalk and called for back-up. But about 60 patrons of the Cafeteria poured outside and continued the fight, brawling with the officers who showed up and tried to detain the women in a paddy wagon. A police squad car had all its windows smashed, and a nearby newsstand was lit on fire. A large number of the women wound up being taken to jail.

SF Queens protesting

 

The next night, there was another picket mounted against the Cafeteria, which had replaced its doors and windows and re-opened. The management refused to admit the queens. As the protest escalated, the windows of the Cafeteria were smashed again, but the second night of the riot appears to have been smaller in scale than the first night. It’s unclear to what extent the riot was orchestrated by Vanguard and to what extent it was simply a spontaneous uprising of frustrated transwomen, drags, and street youth.

While Vanguard had orchestrated one protest prior to the riot, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in many ways marks the start of genuine organizing for the Bay Area trans community, which began to form some degree of genuine institutional awareness after the riot. It has been called the first act of LGBT resistance to police violence in American history although the 1959 Cooper Do-Nuts Riot in Los Angeles probably deserves that honor. (The 1961 Black Nite Brawl in Milwaukee also occurred prior to Compton’s, although that was a fight between patrons of a gay bar and civilians, not police.)

Although Vanguard broke up in 1967, a network of organizations and concerned individuals had begun to address the needs of the trans community and in 1968 the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first-ever peer-run support group for trans people was established. The SF police department began to look at trans people as citizens rather than criminals and gradually reduced their harassment of the queens. They appointed Officer Elliot Blackstone as a liaison with the gay and trans community. As a result, transwomen were able to begin living more openly and move about the city with less fear of harassment.

So if the Compton’s Riot happened in 1966, why is it that Pride commemorates the more famous Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969 instead? The Compton’s Riot was largely forgotten until the mid-1990s, when Susan Stryker, a trans historian, ran across an article about it in a 1970s-era gay newspaper. As she conducted research, she discovered that the local newspapers had not reported on the riot because it was comparatively small, perhaps about 50-60 rioters. The police records from the 1960s no longer survive, making oral history the only route for learning about it. Because transwomen were so vulnerable to violence and because San Francisco was an epicenter of the AIDS Crisis, many of the participants in the riot were already dead by the time Stryker began researching it. (One of the most-commonly cited sources about the riot in online articles is Felicia Elizondo, who wasn’t actually in San Francisco when the riot occurred, only returning to the city the year after the riot happened.)

In contrast, the New York LGBT community made a point of actively commemorating the Stonewall Riots the next year; Craig Rodwell, an early activist realized that there was political value in conducting a parade in 1970 to memorialize the riots. Additionally, there are numerous surviving documents about the riot, including newspaper accounts and police records. Rodwell, who knew a number of journalists, actively encouraged them to cover the later nights of the riot, thereby raising its profile significantly. In other words, activists like Rodwell recognized the value of Stonewall as a moment to build a movement around, whereas no one in San Francisco saw the Compton’s Cafeteria incident that way. That’s why Pride events take place primarily in June instead of August.

 

The Riot in Tales of the City

Episode 8 is a flashback in which Anna Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis) recounts her early experiences in San Francisco. She arrives in 1965 as a middle-aged transwoman (played wonderfully by Jen Richards) and quickly finds a job in the City Lights bookstore. She is first confronted by and then becomes friends with Ysela (Daniela Vega), a young Latina transwoman who teaches Anna the rules of life in a transphobic city and helps Anna begin to recognize her passing privilege. As Ysela explains, she wants to know Anna’s secrets because she realizes that passing effectively is a survival skill; San Francisco queens die young. But Anna passes easily; straight people perceive her as a woman and not as a transvestite. So she doesn’t realize that an act as simple as shopping for a new scarf can be challenging because businesses routinely throw out queens who can’t pass. Ysela shows Anna how most transwomen have to resort to prostitution and explains how the police harass the queens and extort money from them. She emphasizes that interacting with straight men is dangerous because they are liable to turn violent.

But the romantic and naïve Anna meets Tommy (Luke Kirby) and strikes up a romance with him. Then she’s stunned to discover that Tommy is a police officer. Fearful of what that could mean, she breaks things off with him, but he persists in courting her despite realizing that she’s a transwoman and promises to rescue her and give her the life of heterosexual romance and respectability that she dreams of. Tommy successfully presents Anna to his co-workers as his girlfriend and moves her into his apartment. But the price of this is Anna severing contact with the queens she’s come to see as her friends.

Then one night in August, the police harass Ysela and other queens at Compton’s, and Ysela throws her coffee in a policeman’s face. As the riot escalates, an off-duty Tommy is called in, and he warns Anna not to leave the apartment. But Anna wants to help and protect her friends, so she hurries down to Compton’s, where she is promptly arrested with the other queens. Tommy bails her out, but he is threatened with firing because being in a relationship with a transwoman means that he’s no longer seen as straight. He tearfully breaks up with Anna but gives her a parting gift, a stash of money that he’s been saving up to pay for her genital conversion surgery. Anna protests that she can’t accept the money because it was extorted from her friends, but Tommy insists that this is her only chance to escape the harsh life ahead of her. Anna chooses to use the money to purchase 28 Barbary Lane and then go to Denmark for her surgery.

Richards as a Young Anna Madrigal

 

The whole episode beautifully explores the struggles transwomen experienced in the 1960s, and for me it’s the best part of the whole season. It captures the moment of pre-Stonewall America in both its potential and its harshness and it shines a spotlight on a segment of the LGBT community that is only just now beginning to be understood by wider society. It introduces the viewer to the Compton’s story in a way that makes it clear why the riot happened, although it leaves out Vanguard and the preceding picket, preferring to concentrate on the human story instead of the political one. This is Anna’s story, so the episode doesn’t position the riot as the seminal moment in trans history that it is.

And yet as wonderful as episode 8 is, it doesn’t quite work for me. It doesn’t really fit in with Anna Madrigal’s character as we know it from earlier seasons of the show. In the first three seasons, Anna is very much a care-free Bohemian hedonist, although she worries about revealing her “secret” to the characters in the first two seasons. But episode 8 frames Anna’s story as involving a growing awareness of her passing privilege and the violent consequences for those who don’t have it. At the end of the episode she makes the choice to take the tainted money and have her operation. If Anna has learned to recognize her passing privilege, why is still fearful about outing herself to her Bohemian tenants and worldly lover in season 1? Why has she apparently severed all her ties to her former trans friends if she’s had her awakening? Why isn’t she renting the rooms at 28 Barbary Lane to them so they don’t have to live in the Tenderloin? And if Anna is so venal that she would accept what the show explicitly frames as blood money, how has she become the care-free woman of season 1 while still harboring the guilt for the choice she’s made? And if she’s cut herself off from the trans community, how did she build Barbary Lane in the “legendary” queer space it’s become in the Netflix season without addressing her past actions?

It also feels rather pat that Tommy has the money to pay for Anna’s surgery. It’s a LOT of money, stacks and stacks of bills. Tommy seems to be fairly young, in his late 20s. In order for him to have extorted that much money from the queens during his short career, he has to have been bleeding them dry every chance he gets, which just seems implausible, especially since he and Anna can’t have been dating for more than a year at most.

It feels very much as if the writers of the Netflix season took a look at Maupin’s oeuvre and noticed that Anna is the only trans character and decided to correct Maupin’s omission by revealing that Anna is actually estranged from the whole trans community because of a corrupt decision she made in the 1960s. In other words, instead of organically integrating the new season with the facts and tone of the previous seasons, the writers chose to critique the previous seasons by suggesting that the tone of the earlier series was rooted in privilege instead of seeing it as a response to the oppression of the gay community in the 1970s. The original Anna enabled her tenants to discover and live their authentic lives, so making Anna a victimizer of her own community who must atone for her sins is a fundamental betrayal of her essential character. Instead of simply continuing the story told in Tales of the City, Lauren Morelli and her writing room have re-interpreted the story for a new generation at the expense of the original. It seems that Anna isn’t the only one who victimized her community.

 

Want to Know More?

The current season of Tales of the Cityis available on Netflix. The first season(the 1993) is available through Amazon. The second and third seasons can be found on Youtube. The novels are delightful and justly loved by many readers. You can get the first three collected as 28 Barbary Lane.

There isn’t much written on the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot beyond internet articles. The best thing is Screaming Queens, a 2005 documentary made by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. You can find it here, at the bottom of the page. It’s definitely worth watching.

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Babylon Berlin: Commies!

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20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Babylon Berlin, Berlin, Bloody May, Communism, Leon Trotsky, Netflix, Volker Kutscher, Weimar Republic

In the first season of Babylon Berlin (which on Netflix is just the first 8 episodes), Communists play a fairly prominent role, so I thought I’d spend a post sorting through the complex tangle of Communists, Trotskyites, and White Russians. Understanding Soviet politics isn’t really necessary to enjoy the story, but I think it does help.

Spoiler Alert:If you haven’t watched the first season and intend to, this post is going to give away a couple important plot twists.

 

Who Was Trotsky?

 In October 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of Petrograd and established a Soviet, a committee of factory workers and soldiers for the running of the city. Although Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin was not actually in Russia at the time. The coup was substantially orchestrated by Leon Trotsky, one of Lenin’s closest allies. He immediately turned to arranging peace with the Germans and in February of 1918 he finalized the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took the young Soviet Union out of the Great War, thereby breaking the stalemate that had dominated the war for the past three years. Trotsky was reluctant to actually conclude the Treaty, since he hoped to see a Communist uprising in Germany, but bowed to Lenin’s decision to accept the Treaty. He then took charge of efforts to establish a more functional Red Army.

Leon Trotsky

 

By 1918, Russia was already embroiled in a civil war. The Soviet Red Army was fighting to establish Lenin’s vision of a fully-Communist Russia. They were opposed by the White Russians, a loose coalition of factions opposed to the Soviets. This group was broadly nationalistic, fighting for a patriotic Russian identity (as opposed to the Soviets, who rejected nationalism as ideology and saw Communism as a literally international movement). They included aristocratic monarchists who wanted a re-establishment of the tsarist government, bourgeois liberals who wanted to establish a democratic republic of some sort, and Karenskyite socialists who wanted a less aggressive form of social democracy. A third faction, the Green Army, represented peasants who advocated for agrarian socialism and resented Bolshevik efforts to requisition supplies but were otherwise non-ideological. This war continued for 4 years, but ultimately Trotsky’s Red Army won the field. He listened to the advice of military specialists, established both concentration camps and compulsory labor camps, and aggressively worked to suppress property owners, all of which contributed to the Soviet triumph. Many Russian aristocrats and intellectuals fled the country by the end of the war.

However, just as the Soviets were achieving dominance, Lenin suffered a series of strokes that left him barealy able to communicate by March of 1922. That created a power vacuum within the Communist Party. Trotsky was the obvious man to succeed Lenin, having engineered both the success of the October Revolution and the victory in the Civil War. However, Josef Stalin used his position as chairman of the Communist Party to pack the party with his own supporters and he built alliances with two other key Bolshevik leaders, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, persuading them that Trotsky was a threat to them. Whereas Trotsky was a revolutionary of burning fervor, Stalin was essentially a pragmatist and therefore a less threatening figure to others in the Party. While Trotsky was eager to export communism to other countries, Stalin was essentially content to use Communism to establish his own power in the Soviet Union. (Such, at least, is the traditional reading of Stalin. I understand that some historians are beginning to reassess that picture of him, but I’m not familiar enough with the scholarship on the issue, so I’m going to go with the traditional picture.) As a result, opposition to Stalin, known as the Left Opposition, congealed around Trotsky (among others).

By the time Lenin died in January of 1924, Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev had largely undermined his support within the Party. Zinoviev and Kamenev orchestrated Trotsky’s removal as head of the Red Army a year later. By 1926, Zinoviev and Kamenev had broken with Stalin and sided with Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but by that point Stalin was ascendant. In October of 1927, Stalin expelled Zinoviev and Trotsky from the Communist Party; two months later Kamenev and most of Stalin’s other opponents were evicted as well. Kamenev and Zinoviev submitted to Stalin, but Trotsky refused and was sent into exile in Kazakhstan in 1928. In February of 1929, he was exiled to Turkey, where he remained until 1933, when France agreed to grant him asylum. In 1935, he was forced to relocate to Norway. A year later, Stalin put Zinoviev and Kamenev on trial, along with Trotsky in absentia, and found them all guilty of plotting to kill him. Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed, but Trotsky remained a thorn in Stalin’s side, writing copiously against him even after being forced to relocate to Mexico City. Stalin made at least three attempts to have Trotsky killed. The third attempt finally succeeded when Spanish Communist Ramón Mercader wounded him severely with an ice axe (not an ice pick, as is commonly reported).

Trotsky and Kamenev at Brest-Litovsk

 

By 1930, Trotsky had founded the International Left Opposition to oppose Stalin within the Communist Party, but by 1933, it had become clear that Stalin had complete control over the Party, so the ILO evolved into an organization that operated outside the Soviet Union. In 1938, its members founded the Fourth International in Paris to foment what they considered true Communist revolution.

 

Babylon Berlin’s Trotskyites

The first episode shows a conspiracy to smuggle of a trainload of phosgene gas from the Soviet Union into Germany. Unbeknownst to the people who smuggling the gas, a group of Trotskyite rebels in the Soviet Union have attached a single train-car filled with gold bars to that train. The Trotskyite leader in Berlin, Alexei Kardakhov (Ivan Shvedoff) wants to get his hand on that gold to send it to Istanbul to help fund Leon Trotsky’s struggle against Josef Stalin. That gold is the fortune of a dead White Russian whose daughter, Countess Svetlana Sorokina (Severija Janusauskaité), is working with Kardakhov. He thinks she’s a loyal Trotskyite, but actually, she’s just using the Trotskyites to get the gold out of Russia for her own purposes. The phosgene and the gold act as MacGuffins throughout the first two seasons.

The treacherous Svetlana

 

As soon as the train arrives in Berlin, Svetlana contacts the Soviet ambassador and rats out the Trotskyites. The ambassador sends a couple of thugs to their hideout, where they are running an underground printing press, and massacres everyone except Kardakhov, who survives by hiding in a latrine. He spends the rest of the season on the run, desperately trying to find a safe hiding place, not realizing that Svetlana has sold him out until it’s too late.

The show makes little effort to delve into the quarrel between Stalin and Lenin. That’s fair, since the gold is simply a MacGuffin and not really a key issue in the show’s plot, and even the Trotskyites other than Kardakhov are gone after the third episode. But as this blog points out, the show’s depiction of the Trotskyites and the Communists in general is rather backward. The only hint of their ideology is Kardakhov’s statement that he wants to save his country. So the show seems to think that Trotskyism is about the Soviet Union. But as we’ve seen, Trotsky was deeply concerned about fostering Communist revolution across Europe, whereas Stalin was largely disinterested in spreading communism outside the Soviet Union.

One of Stalin’s strategies for sidelining the original Bolshevik true believers in the later 1920s was to appoint them as ambassadors to other countries. That got them out of the Soviet Union, which reduced their ability to influence developments in the key Soviet institutions (like the Communist Party). For much of the 1920s, the Soviet ambassador to Germany was Nikolay Krestinsky, who was one of Trotsky’s supporters until 1927. I’m not clear whether he was still in that post in 1929, when the first season occurs. In the show, the ambassador is the fictitious Col. Trochin (Denis Burgazliev), who appears to be a loyal Stalinist. It seems a bit improbable that the Communists could have pulled off a bigger slaughter than the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago and then smuggle all the corpses out of the city without anyone noticing.

The soon-to-be-liquidated Trotskyites

 

In fairness to the show, the Trotskyites are trying to foster a revolution in Berlin with their underground pamphlets. They are printing pamphlets encouraging Berlin workers to support a Communist rally on May 1^stin favor of the Fourth International. Since the Fourth International isn’t even a concept in 1929, the show’s gotten its timeline wrong.

 

The Bloody May Incident

The show does a better job with its depiction of what became known as Blutmai, the Bloody May Incident. Leftist thought in Germany in the 1920s was broadly represented by two different political parties. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had formed in the 1860s was a Socialist party focused on the rights of factory workers. The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was an explicitly Communist party founded in December of 1918 after the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. Its founders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, had split from the SPD, which they came to regard as their archenemy. The SPD enjoyed considerable electoral success during the 1920s and was able to implement a range of legislation including welfare laws, veterans’ assistance, and regulation of working conditions. In Berlin, the SPD controlled the police force because one of their members, Karl Zörgiebel, was the police chief.

In contrast, the KDP was by the mid-1920s a pro-Stalinist organization and advocated for Communism fairly effectively. It too performed well at the polls, generally getting about 10% of votes. It maintained a paramilitary organization, the Rotfront, to protect KPD meetings from violence by the police and the Nazi Sturm Abteilung (the infamous SA or ‘brown shirts’). But because of its rivalry with the SPD, the two left-leaning parties were generally unable to organize a common opposition to the emerging Nazi Party.

In 1928, Zörgiebel banned public demonstrations in Berlin as a threat to public safety, since political demonstrations were usually accompanied by violence on the part of the Rotfront, the SA, or both. However, the KPD perceived this ban as an attempt by Zörgiebel to weaken the KPD, which was making electoral gains in the city. The KPD’s two major leaders, Walter Ulbrich and Ernst Thälmann, called for a major protest on May Day, the international Socialist/Communist holiday. They informed the police of their intended parade routes and rallying points, perhaps hoping for a confrontation that would give them grounds to push for a repeal of the ban on demonstrations.

A KDP poster promoting the protest

 

However, when May 1^st rolled around, most of the unions opted for demonstrations and rallies within their factories. Zörgiebel’s police kept an eye on the protestors, but comparatively little happened beyond the dispersal of a few parades until late in the day when the factory workers left the factories. The police, eager for a fight, waded in with truncheons and brawls broke out. The police retaliated with water cannons.

The conflict escalated on May 2^nd as workers erected barricades and the police began going door-to-door in working-class neighborhoods, arresting supposed troublemakers. The police responded to the barricades by sending in men with machine guns and armored vehicles, and running gun-battles ensued. When the smoke finally cleared on the 3^rd, 33 people were dead (none of them police) and 200 injured. Zörgiebel sought to depict the workers as the cause of the violence, but the evidence points to the police as the ones who brought most of the guns. The government banned the Rotfront and the rift between the SPD and the KPD became permanent. The violence, which was perceived to be between the two left-wing parties, give Hitler fuel for his argument that the Communists were a threat to social order.

People fleeing the violence during the riot

 

In the show, the police are prepared for the protest with a speech by Zörgiebel (I think) about the need to prevent anarchy. The protest takes the form of an enormous parade complete with Soviet flags and chants of “Berlin stays red!” The police are armed with truncheons. As the police march toward the parade, one of the protestors throws a rock and a large riot ensues in which the police are shown as being the real aggressors. Gereon (Volker Bruch) and his partner Bruno (Peter Kurth) are assigned to search nearby apartments for illegal firearms. They are shown breaking into apartments and tossing them indiscriminately for weapons, finding only one 18^thcentury musket.

The protest in the show

 

But then they stumble across barricades and are forced to take cover in a doorway as an armored car drives down the street firing indiscriminately. A group of protestors unfurl a large red flag from a third floor balcony and the police accidentally shoot two women standing on the second floor balcony just below it. Gereon rushes into the women’s apartment and after finding the women badly wounded, he goes to find a doctor, Dr Völcker (Jördis Triebel), who turns out to be a fiery Communist agitator. But it’s too late to save the women, both of whom die from their wounds. In later episodes, Dr Völcker leads protests about the violence, depicting the women as martyrs of police brutality and accusing the police of orchestrating a cover-up.

The police, desperate to point the finger at the protestors, find a police office who happens to have been accidentally shot in a completely unrelated incident and put him forward as proof that the protestors were seeking to kill police. Gereon eventually realizes this is untrue.

Just before the violence begins

 

The show’s depiction of the Bloody May Incident is essentially true, although it collapses three days of protests into a single day. I’m unsure whether the incident with the two women actually happened, and Dr Völcker is fictitious. I also don’t know if the details about the fake police victim of violence is true. But the show is correct that the worst violence came from the police, that they were indiscriminately searching apartments but failed to find much evidence of an armed plot, and that they were widely perceived as the aggressors and as covering up what actually happened.

In general, the show does a fair job of trying to capture the instability, tension, and violence that was coming to characterize Berlin in the late 20s. The Communists are a clear presence in the series and ever-present poverty helps the viewer understand why Communism was a popular ideology at the time. But the show makes only token efforts to explain actual Socialist and Communist ideology, assuming that the viewer will either understand the essential ideas or else not care about them too much. The Communists are generally presented sympathetically, especially Dr Völcker, who is one of the few characters who doesn’t seem to have a hidden agenda.

The show only provides glimpses at the bigger political picture around the events. There is no mention of the SDP at all, so the police appear to be representatives not of the Socialist movement but of the capitalist establishment. More seriously, the Nazis don’t appear until late in the second season and the viewer would be forgiven for thinking that Hitler hadn’t yet emerged as a political force in German politics. In reality, Hitler was a rising force by 1928 and the SA were a major factor in the street violence of the period.

 

 

Want to Know More?

Babylon Berlin is available on Amazon if you want to own it, and by streaming on Netflix. The novels by Volker Kutscher are also available: Babylon Berlin, The Silent Death, and Goldstein.

Troy: Fall of a City: Meh

Tags

Ancient Greece, BBC, Bronze Age, Greek Mythology, Homer, Netflix, The Iliad, Trojan War, Troy, Troy: Fall of a City

In my previous post, I talked about whether Troy was a real place and whether the Trojan War was a real event. Regardless of whether it was or not, the Trojan War played a central role in the two greatest works of Greek literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and if you were a well-educated Greek, you knew these stories as well as modern people know Shakespeare’s plays. The two Homeric epics have stood the test of time and both tell profound, powerful stories. It’s surprising that modern cinema hasn’t drawn off these well-known classics more than it has.

So I was sort of excited to see the BBC/Netflix series and how it would treat the Trojan War. Sadly, the series is pretty disappointing. The show’s pacing is simultaneously fast-paced and dull, an impressive accomplishment, but probably not one it was aiming for. The acting is nothing to write home about, the dialog feels limp, and the show offers little insight into these ancient characters nor anything to make the story feel relevant to the modern world. The scenery, with South Africa standing in for Asia Minor, is pretty though, and the show’s approach to the Greek gods is sort of interesting, albeit in a rather unsatisfying way. I want to like the show, but I just don’t.

Unlike the 2004 film version of Troy, Troy: Fall of a City makes some real effort to be faithful to the original material. It follows the broad outline of the Iliad: the taking of Chriseis by Agamemnon (Johnny Harris) triggers a plague sent by Apollo that forces him to return the girl. He soothes his wounded pride by taking Briseis (Amy Louise Wilson) from Achilles (David Gyasi), who furiously withdraws from the war effort, and so on.

And it tries to fit in as much of the back story to the Iliad as it can. At the start of the series, Paris Alexander (Louis Hunter) discovers that he’s not some rough commoner but member of the royal house of Troy, which is basically true to the myths, in which Hecuba and Priam are given prophecies that their son will destroy Troy so they order the baby killed, but the kind-hearted servant instead spares the boy. And then the gods ask Paris to decide which goddess is most beautiful. Aphrodite (Lex King) bribes him with the promise of the most beautiful woman in the world, and the show’s plot is set in motion.

Francis O’Connor as Hecuba

After he is reunited with his family, Paris is sent on a simple mission to Sparta to give him some experience at diplomacy but he falls in love with Helen (Bella Dayne), who basically Fed Exs herself to Troy, much to Priam’s (David Threlfall) consternation.

When the Greeks want to set sail, they discover that Artemis is angry and will not let them sail until Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphegenia to her. So throughout the show there are nods to actual Greek myths both large and small, instead of just focusing on the Iliad, which after all only covers one period 9 years into the war without either the beginning or the end. Sticking to just that material would have made a rather awkward story by modern standards.

Unlike the 2004 Troy, which tried to tell the story of Troy without the gods or anything else supernatural, this Troy does include the gods. Throughout the show, the gods intervene in small ways. For example, when Paris first sees Helen, Aphrodite slowly walks through the room.

But at the same time, the show also wants to modernize the story by making the characters more psychological and smoothing over some elements of the story that don’t play well for a modern audience. The show takes an essentially race-blind approach to casting, so that the Greeks and Trojans are played by various black or white actors; Achilles and Patroclus are both black, as is Zeus.

Gyasi (left) as Achilles, talking to Patroclus

As it happens, Chriseis bares a strong resemblance to Iphegnia, so Agamemnon’s reluctance to give her up is more about his emotional trauma from having to sacrifice his own daughter. That’s not a bad twist on the material. But things work less well with Briseis. The show doesn’t want her to just be a slave girl, so Achilles insists that he’s interested in her as a person, and he and Patroclus have a bisexual three-way with her. As a result, Achilles’ anger isn’t over his wounded pride; it’s because Agamemnon has stolen his girlfriend. The reason that’s a problem is that in the Iliad, Achilles’ rage is about his own inability to empathize with anyone else, and the poem ends when Achilles is finally able to achieve a moment of empathy with his enemy Priam. Here, not so much.

Similarly, Andromache (Chloe Pirrie) is having trouble conceiving until Helen tells her about a fertility remedy she knows. That’s sort of a nice idea, given the pathos around what will eventually happen to the baby after the city is captured. (Spoiler: in the myths, baby Astynax gets thrown off the walls of Troy so that he can’t grow up to avenge his father’s death.)

But the show feels a need to insert a variety of boring sub-plots because it doesn’t find enough in the Iliad to make the mid-part of the story interesting. After a year of being sieged, the Trojans decide to dig a tunnel that will connect to one of their allied communities. But Paris and Hector (Tom Weston-Jones) have to *yawn* make a daring ride overland past the Greeks to get to that community and then the Greeks figure out what’s up and just after the tunnel gets opened the Greeks slaughter the allies and the Trojans have to close the tunnel. And then it turns out the Odysseus has a spy inside Troy   *yawn* and then Achilles sneaks in and sees his old girlfriend Helen who persuades him to leave but then one of the servants sees and starts to suspect her *yawn*, and then just as the Trojans are about the attack the Greeks, the spy releases all the Trojans’ horses, and…

Yeah. Having decided to tell the story of the Trojan War, the screenwriters immediately decided that they didn’t have enough story to tell and had to come up with something else.

Paris (Louis Hunter) deciding which goddess he’s not going to piss off

Likewise, although the gods are characters in the show, they don’t actually do very much. For example, in the Iliad, Menelaus and Paris have a duel to settle the war once and for all. But when Menelaus is about to kill Paris, Aphrodite intervenes to magically carry him back to Troy, where he can be safe and have sex with Helen (she’s the goddess of love and sex, so the mortals she patronizes get to have a lot of sex). But in the show, all Aphrodite does is briefly distract everyone long enough for Paris to throw sand in Menelaus’ eyes and then run off into the wilderness where he spends an episode wondering why his parents didn’t love him.

At a different point, Hera accuses Zeus of having orchestrated the whole thing, but Zeus denies it, saying that he gave Paris free will to see what he would do with it. But that rests rather awkwardly with the fact that Aphrodite got everything going by bribing Paris with Helen’s love. It also doesn’t really fit with the prophecy that Paris is going to be the cause of the destruction of Troy, or with the fact that Cassandra can see the future. In Greek literature, prophecy is a rich source of irony. Priam, like Oedipus’ father, tries to avoid the prophecy but can’t, while poor Cassandra knows the future but can’t persuade anyone to listen to her.

The Iliad was written before the Greeks had really begun to wrestle with the whole tension between divine will and human free will. The gods are constantly causing things to happen. Athena and Hera want to see Troy destroyed because they are mad at Paris for giving the golden apple to Aphrodite instead. Zeus orders all the gods to keep their hands off Troy, but Hera intentionally distracts him so the other gods can sneak down and interfere. Athena actively suckers Hector into standing and fighting Achilles precisely because she knows that Achilles can kill Hector. So the gods are often ‘Homer’s’ way of giving characters some degree of psychological interiority. Instead of characters making complex emotional decisions, the gods whisper to them to get them to do things. So the whole story is about humans trapped by divine causality because the gods are angry about things. It’s a problematic dynamic, and one that later Greek authors like Sophocles would challenge by articulating notions of free will and human responsibility for their own mistakes.

The show’s approach to costuming is not exactly faithful to Bronze Age Greece

So the show is compromising. It wants the gods to be figures in the show because they’re important to the Iliad, but it also wants the characters to be fully responsible for their own decisions and have complex interior lives because that’s how modern cinema operates. The result is muddy theology and gods that drift around getting dramatic camera shots but not really doing anything. It’s an unsatisfying solution.

So the show isn’t really that good. But if you’re looking for something that tries to tell the stories of the Greek myths, you don’t have a lot of other options, unfortunately.

Want to Know More?

There are lots of translations of the Iliad. The one that’s most commonly used in classrooms is probably Richard Lattimore‘s. I’m pretty partial to that one. There are also tons of books on the Iliad. If you want a really interesting and very readable analysis that views it as exploring the horrors of war, try Caroline Alexander’s The War that Killed Achilles.

Daredevil: Putting the Hell Back in Hell’s Kitchen

Tags

Charlie Cox, Daredevil, Hell's Kitchen, Matt Murdock, Netflix, New York City, Superheroes

So I watched the first season of Netflix’ new Daredevil, and there was something history-related that I kept thinking about as the season went on. Obviously the series is set in the present day; the characters all have current cell phones, Matt Murdock has assistive technology to help him use a computer, and everything else about the context seems to speak to 2015. So on the surface it would seem to have nothing to do with my blog. But let’s look at the context of the original source material.

Daredevil #1 debuted in 1964. It tells Daredevil’s origin story. In that version of events, Matt Murdock is blinded as a child, trains to fight once he realizes that his other senses have been heightened, and goes to law school. While he is in law school, his father ‘Battling Jack’ experiences a career revival that leads to pressure from the villainous Fixer to throw his fight; when he refuses to throw the fight, he wins, and the Fixer has him murdered. His funeral is followed almost immediately by Matt’s graduation from law school. He decides to become Daredevil and tracks down the Fixer, who dies from a heart attack while fleeing him.

Daredevil, issue 1. ‘Nuff said.

Matt must be in his mid-20s when he graduates law school; let’s say he’s 24, assuming he went directly from his undergraduate degree to law school. Since the story is pretty clearly set in 1964 (most Marvel comics of the period sought to be contemporary, even if generally they avoided explicit dating), that would put Matt as being born around 1940 and being blinded around 1949. Obviously there might be a little wiggle room here, but it’s pretty clear that Matt was a child of the 1940s and 50s. Jack Murdock’s career would have flourished in the 40s and perhaps early 50s.

The story is set very explicitly in Hell’s Kitchen, which at the time was primarily inhabited by blue-collar families of Irish immigrants, although large numbers of Puerto Ricans began to move in during the 1940s . Many of the residents worked as longshoremen based around the West Side docks and warehouses (many of which were used as illegal breweries during Prohibition). Hell’s Kitchen was an extremely violent area, nicknamed “the most violent area on the American continent.” Irish gangs were prevalent, and there was an Irish mafia as well. However, by the end of the 1950s, Hell’s Kitchen was in decline economically. Developments in the shipping industry led to the decline of the West Side docks and a consequent rise in unemployment in the area, with the result that the later 60s and 70s saw the area drop into poverty, squalor, and many of the associated social ills that come with poverty. West Side Story, which debuted on Broadway in 1957, was inspired by Hells Kitchen and its gangs, although the story’s exact location is not specified.

Jack Murdock makes perfect sense in that context. As an uneducated Irish man, he would have had few opportunities other than manual labor, and being a prize fighter might have been a way to make extra money or earn more money than being a longshoreman. By the 1950s, African American boxers were coming to predominate in the sport, but there were still a number of high-profile boxers of European extraction. In particular, it seems plausible that Jack Murdock might have been inspired by Jake LaMotta, a boxer of Italian descent who was a major figure in the 1940s but retired in the early 1950s; in 1960, LaMotta alleged before a Senate committee that he had been paid to throw a fight against Billy Fox in 1947. It seems plausible to me that that claim might have been in Stan Lee’s mind a few years later as he was dreaming up Matt Murdock. Since Jack Murdock is washed up by the later 1950s, he would still make sense as a white boxer in a sport that by the 1960s had few big name white fighters. And Matt’s childhood in the violent, poverty-stricken Hell’s Kitchen makes sense as well.

But Charlie Cox’ Matt Murdock didn’t grow up in the 1940s and 50s. As a mid- to late-20s guy who just graduated from law school and opened his practice in 2015, he must have been born sometime around 1990, give or take a year or two, and must have had his blinding accident around 2000 or so.

Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock

But Hell’s Kitchen in the 1990s was a far cry from Hell’s Kitchen in the 1940s and 50s. Gentrification set in during the 1980s. The blue-collar Irish American and Latino families were mostly displaced by a more affluent group of residents living in new or refurbished apartments. By 2000, the average household income in the district was around $72,000, nearly twice what it had been in 1990. After 9/11, new zoning laws allowed high rises to replace most of the strip clubs. The most notorious gang in the district, the Westies, was broken up in 1986. Today, the residents of Hell’s Kitchen are ethnically quite mixed, and mostly young professionals. There’s a growing gay community there as well. The Daily Show and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore tape there, as did The Colbert Report. And three subway lines service the eastern side of the area (which might explain why Ben Urich didn’t want to do a story about whether Hell’s Kitchen could get a subway line).

The gritty hell-hole that is Hell’s Kitchen today

Yet somehow, despite all of this, the Hell’s Kitchen that Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson grew up in was a still a gritty hell-hole of poor working class families. Matt used to listen to all the police sirens and try to imagine the story behind each one. Elena’s apartment building is shabby and at least some of the residents are junkies. Jack Murdock, who apparently died sometime in the early 1990s, is still a white prizefighter despite a distinct lack of big name white boxers in the sport during the period. In other words, despite the accoutrements of 2015, the story is still set in the 1960s.

In a television series as well-written as Daredevil, I found the constant anachronism of the setting to be just a little jarring. Every time Jack Murdock appeared or Matt or Foggy made a reference to how rough their childhood was, I found myself knocked out of the moment by a momentary awareness that these characters didn’t quite make sense in 2015. But Daredevil as a character is integrally tied to Hell’s Kitchen. It’s part of his mythology in much the same way that Batman is inexorably linked to Gotham and Superman to Metropolis. Despite his special senses, he’s really just an ordinary guy from a poor district of New York fighting to make his slice of the city a more livable place for the other little people around him. He’s basically a blue-collar Batman, and his blue-collar nature is a big part of his initial success as a character. So the show couldn’t take Daredevil out of Hell’s Kitchen; instead, they just had to hope the audience wouldn’t notice that the Hell had been taken out of Hell’s Kitchen.

Update: 

A few commenters on a different site have said that this post is just nit-picking. I suppose from one perspective that’s true. The show’s depiction of Hell’s Kitchen is a small issue. But I want to point out a couple things.

1) I haven’t said this is a bad show. I’ve said it was well-written, but that I found its approach to Hell’s Kitchen to be slightly jarring. To me, true nit-picking is saying that something isn’t good because it’s got a minor flaw. What I’m saying is that this is a generally intelligent, well-written show that has a small issue. And to be clear, I like the show. I enjoyed most of the performances. I thought that the show’s take on Wilson Fisk was an intriguing one, and I found Charlie Cox to be a good Matt Murdock. I would have liked another episode or two in which Murdock deals with the Japanese side of the problem (dispatching Nobu so quickly seemed a bit abrupt). Madame Gao was a bit too ‘Wise Asian Elder’ for my tastes, but having her serve as the spiritual advisor to the bad guy was an interesting take on the trope. However, since my blog is about history, I usually assume that my readers aren’t really interested in my general opinions about that sort of thing, so I usually keep such comments to a minimum unless they’re somehow relevant to my larger point. Unless the film or show sucks. Then I can’t contain myself.

2) My blog explores the various ways that history and film/tv intersect. Often I look at the way a film or show mischaracterizes historical events. But in this show, what I noticed is that the history of the comic book character was creating a discordance with the show because the show came out 50 years after the comic started. So what I find interesting here is the way that the comic’s historical context can’t be completely replicated in the show because in a different context, some details just don’t quite make sense. So I’m showing you what one specialist trained in history is seeing that someone less knowledgable about history might not notice. It’s the same thing as asking a physicist what she thinks about the latest Star Trek film or an entomologist what he thinks about that Ant-Man trailer. What does the specialist see that the non-specialist might not? If you think my comments are worthwhile, great–you’ve learned something. If you think I’m too fussy, great–you’re free to form your own opinion and you’re welcome to discuss that with me.

3) If you read the comments on this post, you’ll notice that a native New Yorker noticed the same issue I saw, and actually was a little bit harsher about it than I was.

Want to Know More?

I got nothin’. It’s not even available on Amazon, although the 2004 Ben Affleck Daredevil is.

Marco Polo: West Meets East

Tags

Benedict Wong, Kublai Khan, Lorenzo Richelmy, Marco Polo, Mongol China, Netflix, The Mongols

In Dec of 2014, Netflix premiered its new historical drama Marco Polo to considerable fanfare. The reaction to the series has not been particularly positive. One reviewer termed it “The Most Gorgeous Thing You’ll Ever Fall Asleep To,” while another called it “practically binge-proof.” Rotten Tomatoes sums up the criticism as “an all-around disappointment.” The show has also been criticized for its reliance of Orientalizing stereotypes and flat characterizations. There are enough naked concubines to populate a porn film or ten, and half the characters know kung fu, including a few of the aforesaid concubines.And who knew that archery was a standard element in the education of Chinese women?

Despite these not-undeserved complaints, I kind of like the show. The sets, costumes, and scenery are uniformly gorgeous. It’s refreshing to see a western television show that allows so many Asian and Middle Eastern actors to play major roles; there’s only one white main character. And I have to cheer a show that tries to bring a relatively unknown (to American audiences at least) culture to life; it’s sort of refreshing that the white guy isn’t the interesting part of the show (although given that he’s the main character, there’s definitely a problem from a story-telling perspective). What so many critics deride as a slow pace can also be seen as trusting the audience to let the story unfold. So while the show has some major faults (like its rather bland main character), it also has enough virtues to make it worth watching. And it’s better than Reign, which has to be worth something.

I’ve hesitated to tackle Marco Polo for the simple reason that it’s a very long way outside my knowledge base. As an undergraduate, I took one course on ancient Chinese history, and apart from a little side reading from time to time, that’s as much formal instruction on China as I’ve ever gotten. I lack the background to comment intelligently on the physical culture of the show; the costumes and sets look gorgeous, but I simply don’t know how historically accurate they are.

Nevertheless, the show is in the public eye at the moment, so I’ll venture to critique some of the basic facts of the series.

Marco Polo and His Travels

Marco Polo (1254-1324) was a Venetian merchant of the later 14^th century. His father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo had traveled along the Silk Road to China in 1260 and then returned to Venice in 1269. Two years later, they set out for China again, taking the 17-year-old Marco with them, finally arriving in China around 1275. Marco returned, quite wealthy, to Venice in 1295, only to find his home city at war with Genoa. Marco used his wealth to outfit a ship for the Venetian navy, only to get captured by the Genoese.

Marco Polo

While in prison, Marco dictated his memoires to another inmate, who added various other stories and details to Polo’s recollections. The result was a book known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo, something of a medieval best-seller. While Polo is the source of much of the material, he is not truly its author in a modern sense; nor was there a fixed text for the book, since it went through various revisions.

Scholars have long debated the historical reliability of the text. Polo claims that he, his father, and his uncle all became important officials in the court of Kublai Khan, but there is no mention of him (at least under that name) in the Chinese records of the period (records which mention a large number of foreigners). Some of his stories are clearly wild exaggerations, such as birds large enough to pick up elephants, and he makes several mentions of the legendary Christian king Prester John. Despite being a skilled linguist, he gives no sign of having learned Chinese. Some scholars claim that Polo never made it to China and instead cribbed his knowledge of the region from Arabic sources, while other scholars have argued that his work shows enough knowledge of the details of the Chinese economy to demonstrate its reliability. So the final verdict of the veracity of Polo’s tales has yet to be delivered, but Polo himself is a solidly historical character and he certainly claimed to have spent a long time in China.

Marco Polo in the Series

The series is, I think, unintentionally the beneficiary of the ambiguous historicity of Polo’s Travels. Although the show does not attempt to stick to Polo’s actual text but simply mines it for interesting material, the show can be understood more as a tall tale by Marco Polo than as a strict retelling of history (which is a good thing, because the series gets a lot of the history badly wrong). That way the show’s wire-fu stunts and lurid sexuality can be read more as Polo’s fantasies than as fact. Of course, if they had really wanted the show to be read this way, they would have added a voice-over narration.

The show opens with Marco Polo (Lorenzo Richelmy) sitting on a roof in Venice (in what might be a nod to Assassin’s Creed fans) when his father’s ship sails into harbor. Marco loves drawing on paper, apparently have free access to what is literally cutting-edge technology, since the first known paper mill in Italy wasn’t established until the mid-1270s. Marco meets Niccolo (Pierfrancesco Favino) for the first time, which is accurate.

Richelmy as Tyrion Lannister Marco Polo

The show glosses over Polo’s journey from Venice to Khanbalik (modern Beijing) in a few minutes, saying that the journey took about 3 years, when in fact it took about 5, but I suppose we can’t complain that they wanted to get to the Mongols right away. Niccolo literally gives Marco to Kublai Khan (Benedict Wong) to curry favor with him because the khan is angry that instead of bringing back Christian priests, the Polos have only brought a bottle of oil from the Holy Sepulchre. (That’s kinda sorta what actually happened. The khan had ordered the Pope to send 100 priests and a bottle of oil from the Holy Sepulchre, but he only got the bottle of oil. But the bit about Niccolo giving him Marco is made up.)

Wong as Kublai

Kublai decides, apparently because he knows that Marco is the main character of the show, to make sure he gets a good education, and orders him trained in riding, falconry, calligraphy, archery, and martial arts. The series’ time-frame is unclear, but Polo seemingly becomes moderately proficient in all of these things (except falconry) in the space of a few months. This is pretty improbable; apart from the near impossibility of anyone acquiring those skills so quickly, Polo probably already knew how to ride a horse (he had just spent years journeying along the Silk Road, after all), and almost certainly wouldn’t be able to master Chinese calligraphy, a highly complex art-form, when he didn’t even know Chinese. Nor is there any evidence that Polo fought at all. But let’s just chalk all that up to the need to have the hero actually be able to do action-y stuff in an action series. (And, in all fairness, he actually does fairly poorly in most of his fight scenes, so I suppose the show is acknowledging the improbability to Polo becoming a great fighter after a few fighting lessons.)

Polo’s father and uncle get caught trying to smuggle silk worms out of China hidden in a hollow staff, and this gives Marco probably his most interesting plot-line, in which he is given permission to decide their punishment for himself. This is a remarkably silly story-line. In 551 AD, a pair of Christian monks actually did smuggle silk worms out of China, eventually getting to the Byzantine Empire, where a thriving silk industry sprung up, forming a major feature of Byzantine diplomacy until the 1140s, when King Roger II of Sicily attacked the Byzantines and literally stole the entire silk industry from them, bringing it back to Sicily, where it quickly spread to the rest of Italy. If the Polos thought they could get rich smuggling silk worms from China to Italy in the 1270s, they had a rather defective business plan, since it would be the equivalent of trying to make a killing by smuggling cars into Detroit.

Fun with Siege Weaponry

Toward the end of the season, Polo helps the Mongols conquer Xiangyang, the last remaining holdout city of the Song dynasty (I’ll tackle the problem with that in the next post). He teaches the Mongols how to build counterweight trebuchets. While this detail has been mocked in a few reviews I’ve read, it’s not quite as wrong as it might seem. While Song and Yuan China enjoyed some impressive technological developments in comparison to 13^th century Europe, one place that it lagged behind  was in the development of siege warfare, in part because China had fewer major fortresses than Europe. In the Travels, Polo claims that his father and uncle had provided the designs for trebuchets at the siege of Xiangyang; this is highly unlikely, since they were not engineers and were not in fact in China during the siege. (Most scholars think the khan got Persian engineers to build them.) So the show is getting two things wrong; Polo never claims that he personally designed the trebuchets, and it’s unlikely any of the Polos gave the idea to the Mongols. However, given that Marco does actually claim that his family gave the Mongols trebuchets, it’s a small modification to make Marco the one who did it.

Polo’s trebuchets with the mandatory flaming clichés

A more serious problem happens with the trebuchets, however. Marco actually calibrates the range of the trebuchets, and figures out that they need a longer firing arm to reach the distances he wants. Such a feat was impossible for him. The range of a trebuchet is highly variable based on three factors: the length of the firing arm, the weight of the stone being fired and the weight of the counter-weight driving the firing arm. While modern engineering students, armed with a knowledge of Newtonian physics, can do a reasonable job calculating the range of a trebuchet, despite its rather counter-intuitive arc of fire, medieval engineers, lacking this knowledge, could not reliably calibrate a trebuchet, nor is it likely that they clearly understood the relationship between the length of the level arm and the range. Medieval trebuchets required a great deal of trial and error after they were set up, and hitting the same spot of wall repeatedly was virtually impossible. I’m also skeptical that trebuchets would actually be able to break through the walls of Xiangyang, given how thick the walls are in the show, but maybe that’s why I’m an historian going to the movies and not an engineer going to the movies (which, come to think of it, would be a cool blog too.)

Finally, the Mongols assemble the trebuchets near Khanbalik apparently and then drag them the roughly 650 miles to Xiangyang, instead of doing the sensible thing and carrying them disassembled, which would be much easier. But I suppose if you’re Kublai Khan, you can afford to show off your power by being an asshole to your troops that way.

Incidentally, here’s a little fun raw footage of the trebuchet scene